Into the Wild With Bon Iver

Backstage after a sold-out show in New York, Justin Vernon — who records haunting, strummy folk rock as Bon Iver — is hiding out in his dressing room. Outside, friends are knocking on the door, a joint is making the rounds, and his tour-rider-mandated 12-pack of Heineken has long since been emptied. A rowdy bandmate yells from outside, "Are you done having sex yet?" Vernon runs a hand through his shaggy hair and exhales. "You have no idea how much I don't want to deal with that right now," he says. "I've been cruising for three days, just hang, hang, hang out, hang out. After a while there's just nothing to say. So it's nice to shut the door a little."

Vernon, a bearded, lumberjack-esque 27-year-old in thrift-store clothes, knows something about hiding out. In the winter of 2006, after his first band broke up, a serious relationship melted down and he contracted a nasty case of mono, Vernon retreated to his father's hunting cabin in the wilds of northwestern Wisconsin to nurse his wounds. He brought a Vienna Boys' Choir CD and a set of Northern Exposure DVDs, which he watched on his laptop. "That show had this weirdly profound effect on me," he says. Subsisting on Leinenkugel's beer and venison that he hunted with his dad and his brother, Vernon wrote and recorded a collection of raw but pretty songs about living in the woods and being bummed out. He credited the resulting album, For Emma, Forever Ago, to Bon Iver (a corruption of bon hiver, French for "good winter"), a phrase Vernon heard in a Northern Exposure episode. "I didn't want to call it the Justin Vernon Woodsman Hunting Experience," he jokes.

Growing up in Eau Claire, Wisconsin — 90 miles from Minneapolis — Vernon learned his first guitar chords from his father and how to play piano from his mother. On For Emma, Vernon, who was a religious-studies major in college, layered vocal track over otherworldly falsetto vocal track, harmonizing along to chopped and spliced guitar. Since the album came out on the indie label Jagjaguwar in early 2008, Vernon has become a favorite of TV music supervisors (he's had four songs on Grey's Anatomy) and his peers (Lily Allen has blogged about him, and he's performed with Lykke Li and Okkervil River).

As For Emma picked up steam (it has sold 131,700 copies to date), Vernon's touring band grew from two players to three, and he began distributing lyric sheets to encourage audiences to join in. "We played a big show in San Francisco — the Outside Lands festival, in Golden Gate Park," says Vernon. "Fucking beautiful. Something like 7,000 people just singing along, and it's the loudest thing."

Vernon recently released a follow-up, the four-song EP Blood Bank, which sold an impressive 22,500 copies in its first week. And he's not done making music in Wisconsin: His brother, Nate, 24, left a job at a medical-equipment company to become his tour manager. The two bought a house 10 minutes from the Eau Claire bar where their parents met, and are building a studio in it. But first, as his tour wraps up, Justin is excited about a few months of "hunkering down." "I'm just looking forward to going home and having a normal life: splitting wood and hanging out in Wisconsin, where I feel at home and at peace," he says. "I understand the rotations of the Earth there."

[From Issue 1072 — February 19, 2009]