The Story
The origin story is true: after his band broke up and his health and a relationship collapsed, Justin Vernon spent the winter of 2006–07 in his father's hunting cabin in northwestern Wisconsin and came out with For Emma, Forever Ago — five hundred self-released CDs of layered falsetto that became one of the defining folk records of its era once Jagjaguwar picked it up.
Instead of repeating the cabin, Vernon kept burning it down. Bon Iver, Bon Iver (2011) swapped solitude for a full band and won two Grammys — Best New Artist and Best Alternative Music Album. 22, A Million (2016) shredded the songs through processors and invented glyphs; i,i (2019) reassembled them into community.
The community is literal: Bon Iver is a band — its current lineup includes Sean Carey, Mike Lewis, Andrew Fitzpatrick, Matthew McCaughan and Jenn Wasner of Wye Oak — and Vernon's orbit runs through Volcano Choir, Big Red Machine and the folklore-era Taylor Swift duet 'exile', his first Billboard Hot 100 top ten.
SABLE, fABLE (2025) brought the warmest writing of the catalog and two more Grammy nominations. Nearly two decades on, the project that started as one man in the cold keeps insisting on the opposite: more people, more color, more room.
