1. For Emma, Forever Ago / Bon Iver

Everyone has heard the story now. Justin Vernon broke up with his girlfriend. He broke up with his band. He was bedridden for months with a severe case of mononucleosis. So he did what anyone from Wisconsin would do—he sequestered himself in his father’s remote hunting cabin for the winter, where he wrote and recorded most of the songs that would become For Emma, Forever Ago. Vernon lived on stockpiled coffee, homemade soups, and venison from deer he hunted himself. He became Bon Iver.

Bon Iver is a play on bon hiver, French for “good winter.” Vernon said of the experience: “The sound of your thoughts are pretty loud when you don’t open your mouth to say words to anyone for a long time.”

Such biographical information may not affect the way you listen to music. But with the hushed intimacy and remote loneliness of this powerful record, it is hard to separate the artist from the art, the Wisconsin winter from the slow-burning frostbite that ebbs its way into your bones. As one critic noted, this is a record in every sense. Documenting a place, a time, a feeling. So good it hurts.

Vernon’s pain is transmitted to the listener as some kind of private catharsis, the music capturing feelings perhaps unintended and previously unacknowledged. “Flume” is a plaintive, acoustic cry for a mother’s love:

only love is all maroon
gluey feathers on a flume
sky is womb and she’s the moon

I am my mother on the wall, with us all.
I move in water, shore to shore;
nothing’s more.

“The Wolves (Act I and II)” is an epic strummer, a gospel-tinged chronicle of heartache, blame, and loss that rises into a train-track crescendo.

with the wild wolves around you
in the morning, I’ll call you
send it farther on

Solace my game, solace my game,
it stars you,
swing wide your crane, swing wide your crane,
and run me through

and the story’s all over you
in the morning I’ll call you
can’t you find a clue when your eyes are all painted Sinatra blue

what might have been lost—don’t bother me.

In “Blindsided,” maybe the year’s most pitch-perfect example of emotion as music, Vernon copes with crushing realizations:

bike down . . . down to the downtown
down to the lockdown . . . boards, nails, lie around

I crouch like a crow
Contrasting the snow
For the agony, I’d rather know
Cause blinded I am blindsided

Peek in . . . into the peer in . . .
I’m not really like this . . . I’m probably plight-less
I cup the window
I’m crippled and slow
For the agony
I’d rather know
Cause blinded I am blindsided

Would you really rush out for me now?

Bon Iver’s personal excavation is our private window. While listening to this record, we are invited to walk with the artist through naked woods. Feel the snow cracking underfoot. Notice the spent fire. Step up to the pane. Peer into his room. And witness the heartbreaking creation of an American masterpiece.