Bon Iver on Your Internet Box

Justin Vernon —the bearded, blue-eyed-soul balladeer whose bruised tunes trade under the faux-French moniker Bon Iver— has had a year of much unexpected success. Buoyed by the impossibly-romantic making-of back-story behind his Bon Iver debut, For Emma, Forever Ago, Vernon has struck a note with critics and audiences both, and looks likely to be a fixture of many a 2008 Best-of countdown.

Having broken up with both band and girlfriend in North Carolina, Vernon returns home to the woods of Wisconsin, lives off the land in a snowbound log cabin, and pours out his heartache onto rolling tape. Over the course of one snowy winter, Vernon becomes a new millennial Thoreau, a manly minstrel able to shoot deer, chop wood, and gently strum a guitar with the one set of hands.

Continuing his infiltration of the most overground of pop-cultural institutions, Vernon and his on-the-road Bon Iver band recently recorded a live 'session' for Rupert Murdoch's ever-popular social-networking/data-mining internet behemoth, MySpace. At the website's Transmissions hub, there's both video of Vernon being interviewed —recounting, oncemore, that much-loved tale of how he spent his "wilderness time"— and of the band playing the songs.

Less fleetingly, there's also the please-thieve .zip of the session's four-songs here, meaning you can bypass the whole MySpace machinery, and just treat it as some free virtual EP, with permanent playback of every croaked falsetto note that pours forth from Vernon's throat.

Oh, and PS: That whole unending Bon Iver world tour he started in July still hasn't ended.

Photo © [Sarah Cass]