Bon Iver's Bonne Année

It’s the most romantic musical backstory of 2008: Justin Vernon in a cabin in the middle of nowhere, singing his lonesome heart out. In the wake up breaking up with his band, DeYarmond Edison, and breaking up with his girlfriend, Justin Vernon, the 27-year-old American who’s found fame as Bon Iver, hightails it back home to Wisconsin.

Setting up shop in a log deer-hunting cabin, built by his father in the Northwestern Wisconsin woods, Vernon set to work: chopping wood by day, playing the blues at night. “It wasn’t this magical time, making a record in a winter wonderland,” warns Vernon, “I went there because I felt like I had nowhere else to go, and because I needed to try and make sense of my life.”

The resulting record, For Emma, Forever Ago —released under a name playing on the French for ‘good winter’ (bon hiver)— is a set of sad, sad songs, born from the bosom of winter. For Emma, Forever Ago is “enshrined with tractor-tires and mud,” Vernon says. “It’s enshrined with a saw mill and stacked logs. It’s enshrined with my father's hands that built the cabin. It’s enshrined by the pines and snowy hills and trails. It’s enshrined by weather, by winter.”

When Vernon left the cabin, he “still felt like shit”, but, with hindsight, and an album to boot, Vernon later realised “how much it did” for him and his self-esteem. After his initial self-released run of For Emma, Forever Ago became blog-beloved in late 2007, this year has found the official, pressed-up albums —issued by Jagjaguwar in North America, 4AD in the rest of the world— flying off shelves.

In the wake of such, Vernon's spent nary a day in snowbound isolation. With an unending litany of tour dates looming, the breakout year for Bon Iver shows no sign of slowing down.

Photo © [Sarah Cass]