Released: 2008
Ah, that American staple, the cabin in the woods. A ritual as old as the frontiersman, the purging of society and modernism by re-immersing yourself in the arms of mother nature, you and the elements as one.
All of this may be an unknowable trial for the 21st century’s technology suffocated majority, but for Justin Vernon it became the knowable truth around For Emma, Forever Ago, a record that developed a cultural and commercial half life nobody anticipated it would prior to release.
Having been thrown out of his own band DeYarmond Edison, at one point contracting pneumonia and splitting up with his girlfriend, Vernon returned to his parent’s farm in Wisconsin, holing up in a log cabin on the property to think. What resulted was a collection of songs characterised by an almost primitive simplicity, their plain, lovelorn aesthetic resonating against a then-backdrop of the glossy, over produced mainstream.
Released under the moniker Bon Iver For Emma..became the sort of thing that wasn’t meant to happen any more, an indie release that would go on to sell over a million copies worldwide, one that had it been inside the machine would’ve probably ended up sounding completely different. re:stacks was about a reclamation of something, but the specifics remained coded amongst it’s bittersweet undulations, the Emma – it turned out, a metaphorical figure – neither close or far away. The cabin had been real at least, but like the songs from inside it that the world would hear, rapidly become as mythical as the spirits which never left.
The Voice Of Unreason 