For Emma, Forever Ago

Justin Vernon's band had broken up. He had contracted mononucleosis followed by a liver infection. His relationship had ended. In November 2006 he drove to his father's hunting cabin in the woods of northwestern Wisconsin, about seventy miles from his hometown of Eau Claire, and spent the next three months there alone through the winter. He split wood, hauled firewood on a tractor, climbed a deer stand at frozen sunrise, and killed and butchered two deer for food. He traded venison to a nearby town to get his guitar repaired. One night a bear came onto the porch, drawn by the smell of cooking stew.

At some point the isolation became productive. He began recording on whatever equipment he had brought with him, twelve-hour sessions at a stretch, building songs from acoustic guitar and layered vocals, no drummer, no band, just Vernon's falsetto stacked over itself into something that sounded like a chorus of people sharing a single feeling. The album was self-released in 2007 in a run of five hundred copies that sold out quickly. It was picked up by Jagjaguwar for wider release in early 2008. The name Bon Iver is a deliberate misspelling of the French "bon hiver," meaning good winter.

The music sounds exactly like where it was made: cold and quiet and vast, with the specific melancholy of being somewhere beautiful and completely alone. "Skinny Love," "re: Stacks," and "Flume" are three songs that arrived in people's lives at the precise moments they needed them, which is the highest thing an album can do.