× Expand Illustration by James Taylor Bon Iver collage

Heading east on Highway 94 from Minneapolis to Eau Claire through Wisconsin’s glaciated hills might be the least exotic 90-minute drive in America. But it’s pretty in early spring, with familiar hardwoods beginning to quilt the landscape with their narrow palette of green, from sage to shamrock to pickle. I’m in the backseat of Justin Vernon’s Honda SUV, with Vernon behind the wheel and his best friend, Trever Hagen, riding shotgun. Hagen recently moved back to the Midwest after 16 years as a musicology professor in Europe, and Vernon has only been living in Minneapolis for the past few months, moving to the city part-time before releasing Bon Iver’s third album, 22, A Million, last October.

Bon Iver—Vernon’s multi-platinum, Grammy-winning electronic campfire music project—has earned him a near religious global following that could presumably allow him to live wherever he wants, but for now he’s renting an apartment a floor up from Hagen’s in Uptown. They’re both in their mid-thirties, but their apartments are of the classic Uptown variety, with hardwood floors and kitchen built-ins—the same slightly shabby starter units any recent college grad is familiar with.

× Expand Photograph by Cameron Wittig Justin Vernon at his April Base studio outside of Eau Claire Justin Vernon at his April Base studio outside of Eau Claire

Today, the three of us are driving to April Base—the former veterinary hospital that Vernon turned into a recording studio outside of Eau Claire—to meet a cohort of our artist friends to talk over how we can all help each other as we move into the future. Vernon’s immediate future is clear: This summer, Bon Iver is anchoring two of the biggest outdoor shows in the region. The first is Vernon’s own, the third annual Eaux Claires, the “anti-festival” he co-curates with the Hudson Valley-based band The National. The festival will be going down just as this magazine hits newsstands, and for the first time won’t feature a set by Bon Iver, which is instead acting as backup band to legendary troubadour John Prine. And on July 22, Bon Iver will headline Rock the Garden, the Walker and the Current’s big fundraiser at the renovated Minneapolis Sculpture Garden. This is their first time headlining, after serving as a warm up act for Andrew Bird when Bon Iver was first breaking out in 2008.

For years, I’ve joked that my Minneapolis music scene is run by the “Eau Claire Mafia,” a clan of Wisco expats who have remained tight ever since they went off to YMCA’s Camp Manitou together, and who now—with the majority of them in their mid-30s—run a broad swath of Minneapolis’ music scene. It’s hard to categorize the scene they run, because most scenes stick to an actual genre of music—usually it’s the rap scene, or the dance scene, or the jazz scene. These guys seem to have only mischief, play, and a continuous loyalty in common. They support each other at midweek gigs in experimental spaces and weekend gigs headlining First Avenue. And there seems to be real staying power in creating music that is simply sharing what might come out of a Midwestern childhood.

To measure their influence, we can only list some of the most public outlets of the EC Mafia: Eau Claire dudes founded Minneapolis-based indie record label Totally Gross National Product, whose catalog is at 53 releases and counting, encompassing an impressive range of sounds unique to the Twin Cities, from the throwback crooning of Invisible Boy, to the industrial grime of Makr, to the diva sass of Lizzo. One of the first Eau Claire natives I met more than a decade ago was James Buckley, who now books the music program at Icehouse on Nicollet, where it feels like you can see somebody with an EC connection play at least one night a week. And there are Eau Claire ringers in several of Minneapolis’ high-profile bands: Poliça, Aero Flynn, Solid Gold, and Marijuana Deathsquads. Then there’s Vernon himself, a worldly bumpkin who exudes such soul and uncanny Wisconsin authenticity that he’s as dear to your grandma as he is to Kanye West, who once called Vernon his “favorite living artist.”

So what is it about this this little college town 90 minutes to the east? How did a group of guys from Eau Claire end up influencing Minneapolis rather than the other way around? Isn’t that in violation of the natural order of things? Was it because this was the last group of Gen Xers living on a small town island before the Internet took over? Is it because Western Wisconsin has always been Minnesota’s Ibiza, and they were bred to be able to stay up later than us? Was it because one of them hit it big and won a couple of Grammys?

Over a month this spring, I rode back and forth from Minneapolis to the Chippewa Valley with key members of the Eau Claire diaspora, including my fiancée, Maggie Morrison, who, for better and for worse, has been shaped by this clique. She’s spent her entire artistic life singing and playing keys in bands tied to Eau Claire—Kentucky Gag Order, Digitata, Lookbook, Votel. (As a result of my nearly six years with Maggie, my relationships with the other EC Mafia principals have deepened and intensified.) On a handful of car rides along the gentle bend of 94, we talked about new projects and old frustrations, underground punk scenes, and the hallway outside of the jazz room at Memorial High School in Eau Claire. This is the story of the Eau Claire Mafia.

THE JOYNT: WHERE EVERY ARTIST KNOWS YOUR NAME

Eau Claire is the ninth-largest city in Wisconsin, a college town parked on the confluence of the Chippewa and the Eau Claire rivers. Water Street is the town’s historic district, kind of a 19th century main street situation located directly across the Chippewa from UW-Eau Claire. The first year we were dating, Maggie’s 10-year high school reunion was held at an Irish bar on one end of the main drag. On the other end is The Joynt, an old-school bar without air conditioning or light beer on tap. On the wall hang black and white pictures of jazz and folk stars that have come through, including Dizzy Gillespie, Duke Ellington, and Odetta.

It’s owned by Bill Nolte (yes, a distant relative of Nick), a legend among the parents of my Eau Claire musician friends. Evidently sometime in the '70s, Nolte, a recent Dartmouth grad, came up from Chicago and bought the bar, and with his mother’s help, he turned it into a jazz venue that at one point Time Magazine ranked as one of the unlikeliest top 10 jazz venues in the country. Because Eau Claire is located between Minneapolis and Chicago, it would get acts coming or going on Sunday nights a few times a year, but only on Sunday nights.

During the rest of the week, The Joynt was the countercultural ground zero for local poets, artists, and musicians (UW-Eau Claire has a top-flight jazz band program going back to Sarge Boyd in the ’40s). These are the artists that would grow up to parent the Eau Claire Mafia. “My dad met my mom when he was a professor of labor law at Eau Claire,” Vernon says, as we pass Menomonie. “[At the time] my mom was a single mother [to Vernon’s step-sister]—just like a bar rat working at the DNR and hanging out at The Joynt.”

Hagen laughs: “Did you just call your mom a bar rat?”

“She was a bar rat, man! [She met my dad] at The Joynt and, like, my dad invited her back to his place and the very next day they went up to the land, with my sister, where my dad had just bought property up north.”

“Isn’t it where…?”

“It’s where I was conceived,” says Vernon in his unapologetically thick western Wisconsin accent.

“And it’s where For Emma was…?

“Yeah, I lived there for awhile,” Vernon says. He’s referring to his dad’s cabin in Dunn County, where he worked on his first record, 2007’s For Emma, Forever Ago. That cabin bloomed a mythology that captured the music world’s imagination nearly as much as the album’s high lonesome sound (Rolling Stone placed it on its “100 Best Albums of the 2000s” list). I’ve always wondered how austere this cabin actually is—because our collective imagination has forever placed Vernon in a tarpaper shack, chopping his own wood.

THE THIRD WARD: THE SAFETY BUBBLE

In 1905, the Presto small kitchen appliance company was founded in Eau Claire, and as it grew, executive housing appeared on an attractive buckle of land surrounded by a ridge that mirrored the contour of the Chippewa River. A ten-minute walk across the Chippewa from Water Street, the Third Ward is a leafy neighborhood, home to a diverse set of residents, from lawyers, carpenters and professors to artists, students and teachers. Third Ward parents provided a safe space for creativity, encouraging their kids to listen to music and learn how to play instruments, eventually volunteering to drive them to Minneapolis to see the punk, grunge and noise bands their kids would grow up to emulate.“I always wanted to move [to the Third Ward],” Vernon says. After hanging out with the “Third Ward Posse,” he would often cry all the way home to his parents’ house about five miles south of Eau Claire—the house he grew up in with his brother and older sister.

SLED NAPKIN: EAU CLAIRE’S VELVET UNDERGROUND

Photo courtesy of Kristen Harberg Sled Napkin founder Ryan Olson Sled Napkin founder Ryan Olson

One night I drive out to April Base with Maggie (my fiancée) and our friend Amy Speckien, a comedian, writer, and saxophone player who used to play with Vernon and Hagen in jazz band at Memorial High. It’s a stormy night, and as we pierce Wisconsin, Maggie’s ex-boyfriend Ryan Olson comes up. Olson is cofounder of Totally Gross National Product, principal of the Minneapolis noise ensemble Marijuana Deathsquads, and the primary producer of his wife Channy Leaneagh’s band Poliça. Maggie used to be in a band called Digitata with Olson and Eau Claire native Drew Christopherson. Back in the ’90s, Olson played bass in Sled Napkin. Sled Napkin’s lead singer, Kiva Reuter, was the son of Steve Reuter, owner of the now-defunct Water Street record shop TU Trax. (TU Trax closed in 2005, but Reuter pére still owns Trucker’s Union, TU Trax’s sister head shop up the street). Easy access to anarcho-punk records by the likes of Crass and Born Against, weird ska records by Mr. Bungle and avant garde jazz records by John Zorn might be as good an explanation as any for Sled Napkin—a band that many of the Eau Claire weirdos that graduated from Memorial High between 1995-2002. A lot of these weirdos, Vernon included, speak of in hushed tones, as if they were Eau Claire’s Velvet Underground.

“I wasn’t allowed to go to Sled Napkin shows,” Maggie says as we fishtail through black sheets of rain.

“Sled Napkin scared me,” Speckien agrees, pointing out that its sound and appearance were equally deranged. Olson’s haircut alone was disconcerting. It was shaved on the top and sides, with just a crescent of long hair left on top, like a scary clown wearing a backwards fur tiara.

Earlier, when I talked to Joe “Squints” Westerlund, the drummer for one of Vernon’s first rock bands, Mount Vernon, he told me Sled Napkin used to practice in “The Shed” behind his house on Westover Lane, (the space was actually the storage room on top of Steve Reuter’s garage). Westerlund and I imagined these neighborhoods as the setting for the Eau Claire version of Stranger Things, with Olson as the Upside Down monster.

“I remember the first time I met Ryan,” said Westerlund, who’s played for several rock bands over the past 15 years, including DeYarmond Edison and Megafaun. Westerlund recalled walking home with his friend Bill Hogseth when Olson came hurtling around the corner in his red and white ’87 Blazer, trying to run the pair off the road. “He almost hit us,” Westerlund said. “I was like, ‘Who’s that?!’ And Bill says, ‘Oh, that’s Ryan Olson!’ We thought we were so cool.”

× Expand Photo courtesy of Kristen Harberg Sled Napkin drummer Joe Christopherson Sled Napkin drummer Joe Christopherson

Christopherson, the younger brother of Sled Napkin’s drummer, Joe, was at the first Sled Napkin show in 1993. Christopherson was in sixth grade, and he pregamed for the show by cutting his army pants into army shorts and pairing them with a black T-shirt. Drawn in by ubiquitous Sled Napkin stickers—Olson says he plastered the entire town with them before the gig—the floor was packed with 13- and 14-year-olds, many of them concert virgins. During Sled’s set, the kids went nuts, clumping into a multitudinous blob of adolescence, moshing together as one, and accommodating stage dive after stage dive after stage dive. Vernon was at the same show, and when it was over, he knew what he wanted to do with his life.

MEMORIAL HIGH JAZZ ENSEMBLE: A MUSICAL HOOSIERS STORY

× Expand Photo courtesy of Kristen Harberg Vernon performing at Memorial High School in Eau Claire Vernon performing at Memorial High School in Eau Claire

By the time most of the Sled Napkin fans had matriculated to Memorial High, the ones who wanted to get serious about their craft joined the prestigious Memorial High Jazz Band. “I remember thinking, 'I don’t need to try out for jazz band, I’m just going to play in rock bands,'” Westerlund says, “And I said that to [Sled Napkin’s] Joe [Christopherson] and he was like ‘no, man, the jazz thing feeds into the rock band stuff. You gotta do jazz band. It will change the way you play.’”

“Our teacher, Mr. Hering, was a super hard-ass,” Speckien says. He was a stocky, bald guy who sometimes sent kids home crying to their parents. “He was exactly like the Whiplash guy. Well, maybe a little less harsh. But only a little.”

Vernon played guitar in the jazz band, and in 1999, during his senior year, the ensemble made it to the finals of the Essentially Ellington competition held at New York’s Lincoln Center in honor of the Duke’s 100th birthday. They finished runner up to the LaGuardia Fame School. (“We had to raise money to get plane tickets to fly out,” Justin remembers during one of our drives. “It was Hoosiers shit.”) When the competition was over, Wynton Marsalis addressed the band and talked about how every other school there was privately funded and how amazing it was that these little white kids from a public school in Eau Claire had made it that far.

MOUNT VERNON: AN EARLY COMMITMENT TO PROFESSIONALISM

Hagen and Vernon have been in bands together their entire adult lives. They were in jazz band together, and for the last few years they’ve played together in a noise duo called Hrrrbek, screwing around in parks and hotel bathrooms across Europe whenever they both found time to steal away from their day jobs (professor and rock star, respectively). And now, with Vernon’s established prominence, Hagen can do things like play an experimental five-minute speedcore feedback piece on his mouthpiece-less trumpet before Bon Iver’s slot at Coachella 2017.

Between high school and college they played in Mount Vernon, where they learned that being a musician could be more than an extracurricular activity. Vernon had started bands before, most notably a weird trio with James Buckley called Plebe. But Mount Vernon, a nine-piece group influenced by Phish, Bob Marley, and Dave Matthews, was more ambitious in scope, and proved to be more popular, with a jammy, uplifting sound.

“At that time in high school, we were playing reggae music and being all happy,” Hagen remembers. “And the other guys were reading Kerouac and being not happy.”

Vernon corroborates, “We literally had a song called ‘Happy Song.’”

Mount Vernon taught them how to become professional musicians. They started by playing at the big high school shows a handful of times a year: housing benefits and battle of the bands. After graduation, Mount Vernon was playing club shows in Eau Claire every week.

Speckien remembers that there was slight drama around the band’s popularity. “There was a division between them and the rest of the jazz band because they were so popular,” she says. “They got out of school one day to record a record once: Justin’s dad Gil took them to Minneapolis and rented space for them, and, like, took them in a van. There were even rumors they were staying in a hotel.”

THE COOK BROTHERS + SQUINTS: THE RHYTHM SECTION

In 1997, two Deadhead brothers from Chippewa, Brad Cook and his brother Phil, met Vernon at the Shell Lake Jazz Camp. Almost immediately, the two of them ended up joining Mount Vernon. But by 2003, Mount Vernon had broken up, and the entire Eau Claire scene started spinning in three different directions represented by three different bands: Vernon’s new band, DeYarmond Edison; Amateur Love with Josh Scott, a newcomer from Rochester; and Mel Gibson and the Pants, Ryan Olson’s new hip hop fusion band. The Cooks and/or Westerlund (“Squints”) were involved in all three groups to various degrees.

“I felt like for awhile people were territorial about where Phil and I were playing,” says Brad Cook, on the line in Durham, North Carolina. When I ask him if by “people” he means Vernon, Brad laughs and immediately cops to it: “Fuckin’ a, dude, he had to work through some shit to get where he is now. We all did.”

Photograph by Cameron Wittig Josh Scott in a promo shot for Aero Flynn Josh Scott in a promo shot for Aero Flynn

“We were fighting a lot,” Vernon remembers. “Like, I was really jealous of Josh Scott—Amateur Love was this incredible band, and DeYarmond was like the same band and I was just a different lead singer and we weren’t as good.” Vernon became possessive of Brad, Phil, and Squints. “Phil and I are very, very calm friends and very soft, almost sisterly to one another,” says Vernon, “But we almost got in a fistfight. It was bad. Brad had to separate us.”

One day, Vernon met with his rhythm section at a Country Kitchen and convinced them to move with him to North Carolina as a kind of ultimatum. “We basically looked at a map and decided where are we going to move,” says Vernon. “It was 2005, spring break.”

Vernon lasted only 10 months in Raleigh. Later that year, homesick and broken up with his girlfriend, he moved back to Wisconsin, into his dad’s cabin, and started working on the Bon Iver project that had been gestating for a couple of years. The remaining members of DeYarmond Edison—Brad, Phil, and Westerlund—formed psychedelic folk project Megafaun.

“We were like 25 and said, ‘We need to stop playing together,’” Brad says of DeYarmond’s breakup. “Justin knew what he wanted to do with music and he didn’t want to be political anymore with his best friends.”

“BEN IVER”: THE MALAPROP THAT COULDN’T DERAIL SUCCESS

× Expand Photograph by Colin Crowley Maggie Morrison in a promo shot for Digitata Maggie Morrison in a promo shot for Digitata

Back in Minneapolis, the Uptown Bar was begging Digitata, Olson’s electronic band with Christopherson and Maggie, to play a show. Olson agreed, but on the stipulation that he could add his friends in Megafaun and Bon Iver to the bill.

Olson had reconnected with Vernon at the Seventh Street Entry a few months previous, when Justin was the touring guitar player in the in the Raleigh-based Rosebuds. At that point, Vernon had a few Bon Iver songs posted to his MySpace page and Olson had heard the tracks. “I remember [Maggie and I] saw Justin before [the Rosebuds] played at the Entry and I was like ‘Dude, what is up with that fuckin’ Bon Iver shit? Since when did you start writing good music again?’ ‘Cause the first stuff I liked [of Vernon’s] was Plebe, which was this weird rock shit with 14-year-olds that was insane. I saw them in our practice space [the Shed] and thought, you know, ‘This kid is going places.’ The next thing I know he’s doing this fucking just god awful happy Christian lobotomy shit, Rusted Christian Root. I was just not into it, but hearing [Bon Iver], I’m going holy shit.”

But there was a problem when Olson tried to book his old friend’s new band. “The guy [at the Uptown] was like, ‘I don’t know any of these bands, it’s not gonna work,’” says Olson. But at this point—October 2007—Bon Iver was starting to go viral on the strength of national press and a series of packed sets at the high-profile CMJ music convention in New York. Olson convinced the Uptown that his all-Eau Claire lineup would work, and he was right. By 9 o’clock the bar was packed, even though the marquee read, “Ben Iver.” The mangled marquee didn’t prevent Vernon from signing his first record deal in the bar, with indie label Jagjaguwar. Megafaun signed their deal after the show too, with Table of the Elements.

GAYNGS: THE IRONIC MINNEAPOLIS “SUPERGROUP”

× Expand Gayngs on stage at First Avenue Gayngs on stage at First Avenue

The guy who introduced me to the Eau Claire mafia, and who’s ultimately responsible for introducing me to my future wife, is Adam Hurlburt, the bass player for Solid Gold. In 2007, Hurlburt was practicing with Solid Gold’s lead singer, Zach Coulter, when the third member, Matt Locher, told them he couldn’t make it. So Hurlburt and Coulter started screwing around on a soft rock pastiche they were working on with Olson. The songs were inspired by the smooth sounds of 105.7 WCFW-FM, an adult contemporary station out of Chippewa Falls. You might hear Kenny Rogers, Neil Diamond, and George Michael’s “Careless Whisper” back to back to back on a typical playlist. For years, Olson and Hurlburt exchanged mix CDs of the lite FM hits on the station, trying to come up with the perfect WCFW sampler.

“I wrote Gayngs on the wall of our room and I think that’s my first memory of that name,” Hurlburt says. “I think we were just stoned and drunk, and thinking of plays on words, and not really thinking of the meaning and how, like, absurdly adolescent it was of a name.”

“It wasn’t until Gayngs that Justin and I fully bonded,” Olson says. “It’s weird because we seem like the deepest of old friends.” In 2008, Vernon moved into the old veterinary hospital outside of town in Eau Claire and was working on turning it into his own miniature Paisley Park, a place where he could live and record his friends. Olson was hounding the Megafaun guys to come up and play on the Gayngs project—“I wanted to Parent Trap these guys,” he says—and he eventually convinced them to take three days off in the middle of their upcoming tour to record at April Base.

“You know, Gayngs was sort of painful in that I had this really good friend and we had split ways and become a little bit estranged,” says Westerlund. “And [Gayngs] is how we were brought back together—with Ryan making me play 69 beats per minute, all…day…long.”

The group served as a high-school reunion in band form, bringing together Vernon with the Megafaun guys, as well as Olson and Drew Christopherson. “It wasn’t until Gayngs happened that I started hanging out with Drew again,” Vernon says.

Vernon’s involvement launched Gayngs to a different level. “It was getting vastly more press than it would’ve because of Justin’s rising star,” Hurlburt says. At their debut performance at First Avenue in 2010, the band threw a prom-themed concert with black and gold balloons festooning the room. Prince famously walked through the club’s front doors with a guitar strapped around his chest, made his way backstage, and plugged into an amp at the side of the stage. But he ultimately begged off. Over the years, there were rumors that he just wanted to book the club himself that night, and when management wouldn’t cooperate, he went down to check out the band that had blocked him.

APRIL BASE: CENTER OF THE “SCENIUS”

The great English ambient musician Brian Eno coined a term that perfectly encapsulates how an artist like Vernon arose from a college town of 60,000 people to achieve Coachella headliner status. Eno’s term is “scenius,” and it basically means when the scene explains artistic success more than genes. “Genius is individual, scenius is communal,” Eno told The Guardian in 2010.

This isn’t hippie shit: You can actually hear the scenius in Vernon’s music. He’s a big, scruffy Midwestern dude who sings in that famous falsetto croon. There’s a vulnerability and a yearning intrinsic to his tone, a desire to connect. And although the subtext of many of his songs is unrequited love, much of the context is friendship and brotherhood. In the middle of what sounds like a torch song, he’ll retreat to the names of old places and old friends (“Build your tether rain-out from your fragments/Break the sailor table on your sacrum/Fuck the fiercest fables, I’m with Hagen,” is just one lyrical example from “Towers,” off 2011’s Bon Iver, Bon Iver.)

Vernon’s musical magnanimity and generosity translates into collaborations with musicians he’s known for years. Vernon can be a shy frontman, sometimes by accident, as when his singular persona is mistaken for his band’s collective identity (I’ve heard people say, “Bon Iver is on that new Kanye track.” Actually, I’ve said it myself). Other times his reticence is intentional. For his latest album cycle his face is obscured in his press photos. He’s gone on record saying, “Faces are for friends.”

And yet Vernon is undoubtedly a leader. He was the captain of his football team at Memorial High School. “For me, it was all about teamwork,” he says. “I was captain not because I was the best player, but because I was the guy in front of 60 guys getting them pumped up and on the same page.”

And though he’s only lived in Minneapolis this past year, he’s had a profound effect on Minneapolis’ scene for years. In November I wrote a piece for Pitchfork about a musical “happening” that Vernon helped organize in Germany, where a third of the 85 musicians recording and playing at the Funkhaus in East Berlin were from Wisconsin and Minnesota. But this has never been a one-way transaction. Vernon is effusive about the cheerleading skills Olson brought to finishing 22, A Million, for instance (“I almost quit on it, and Ryan slapped me and said uh-uh.”). And Hagen wrote the bio to 22’s liner notes. The credits of the album are chock-full of childhood friends and longtime collaborators.

It’s late afternoon when Vernon, Hagen, and I pull into April Base’s long driveway. Named after a fictional air force base from The X-Files, and a reference to Vernon’s birthday month, the house itself is low-key. It really looks like a split-level single-family home converted to a veterinarian hospital—but it faces a scene of perfect bucolic Wisconsin farm country. It’s an idyllic setting for all of the artists who have come through to record since it opened in 2008, whether they’re familiar with the Midwest, like Low, Volcano Choir, and Happy Apple, or from farther afield, like the Blind Boys from Alabama, Alicia Keys, and, on one memorable week in 2014, Kanye West and his entire crew.

Tonight’s plan is for a “board meeting” with a fully catered spaghetti dinner (the spaghetti is made by April Base’s unofficial chef Andra Chumas, who learned her craft running the kitchen at Camp Manitou). It’s a meeting of about 25 members of Justin’s inner circle, everybody from Bon Iver’s multi-instrumentalist Mike Lewis to Poliça lead singer Channy Leaneagh. Speckien, Christopherson, and Olson are there, of course. The only people missing seem to be the mercurial producer BJ Burton. And Maggie.

People are playing basketball in front of the garage, and throwing a football around April Base’s front yard when the light shifts to that romantic Field of Dreams gold. Vernon gathers everyone around a fire pit as Graceland kind of annoyingly plays in the background. He reads from pages of notes about the springtime. “April 1 is New Year’s Day out here,” he says. “A time to get moving again.” He talks about an idea that came to him last October in Berlin—a “label that isn’t a label,” he says. The non-label will simply be called “PEOPLE.”

Vernon’s vision is to bring the vibes that he experienced in Berlin last autumn to April Base. He wants to carve out a clearer mission for a creative space, where endlessly creative shit would be made, whether music or video or comedy or writing. He wants our input on what April Base should look like, and who should be involved. The primary function would be to motivate artists, with opportunity for space and for funding.

Weeks later, Frenette tells me that he wishes Justin would’ve come to him first, so the night could’ve been set up a little bit tighter and maybe things could’ve been more productive. “But that’s Justin,” says Frenette. “No matter how many times I’ve tried to take the car keys, he always takes them back. He said a moving thing to me the other day. I was talking about our privilege and how lucky we were to be doing this, and he stopped me and said, ‘Yes, but we also have a responsibility to make things happen.’”