Hear How Ilsey, Bon Iver Polish Neil Young’s ‘Heart of Gold’
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Ilsey, the singer-songwriter who cowrote “Nothing Breaks Like a Heart,” is now following her own heart on a Neil Young cover with Bon Iver. The musicians covered “Heart of Gold,” taking Young’s folky pining and turning it into a poppy meditation on the original’s lyrics that sometimes veers into the avant-garde with Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon singing the high harmonies in his head voice.
“This song has always spoken to me in a deep, personal way,” Ilsey said in a statement. “There’s something about the plaintive melody and the simple, evocative lyrics that go straight to the heart of what we all feel. The image of a miner searching for a precious metal – searching for love, connection, something true … it’s a difficult, often frustrating process, but the reward is so worth it. I kept coming back to the thought and the song. I listened on repeat one day before meeting up with Justin and BJ [Burton, producer] and it just felt right to see if we could play it in a new way, that felt like us, and would do it justice.”
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Ilsey and Vernon worked together previously on “Mimi,” a track off an album by the latter’s Big Red Machine, a collaborative project with the National’s Aaron Dessner. The album, How Long Do You Think It’s Gonna Last?, came out in the summer of 2021. Ilsey has been busy in recent years, writing songs for Stacey Ryan, Arizona, Olivia Dean, Noah Cyrus, Mø, and James Bay, among others.
Bon Iver will be touring North America this summer, starting with an Aug. date in Duluth, Minnesota, before wrapping later that month at the Beach Road Weekend festival in Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts.
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