In a 1957 review of Gertrude Stein’s Stanzas in Meditation, the poet John Ashbery wrote that Stein’s verse was interesting because it contained all the fallibility of people themselves. Her lines were “annoying or brilliant or tedious.” Stein was prone to stopping short in the middle of a sentence to wander the waking world. Her lines kept you at arm’s length.

Over the course of the last decade, Justin Vernon’s lyric writing and actual sound has drifted from a form of unvarnished memoir to a modernist opacity. It made me think of Ashbery’s writing on Stein. By being less intelligible, Vernon seems even more human, more ridden with flaws, and undeniably more interesting. Among the songs that have been released from Bon Iver’s upcoming 22, A Million so far, the surfaces have been cool to the touch, alien, yet phantasmagoric with lush electronic sound. In “33 ‘GOD’,” Vernon has crafted a piece that lives within contradictory states of privacy and open-hearted bombast.

“33 ‘GOD’” is filled with false invitations, lines that seemingly address an audience but become pleasantly garbled by personal meaning or nonsense: “We find God and religions to/Staying at the Ace Hotel.” He swerves wildly between references, clipping his words, stutter-stepping from clause to clause, all while maintaining his characteristic falsetto and a sense of humor: “I’d be happy as hell,” he sings, “if you stayed for tea.” Vernon’s words are swaddled by naked piano keys and thunderous drums, giving his delivery a feeling of paradoxical collision. A high-pitched and nearly inaudible chorus makes the effect of the epic scale even more bizarre. It’s hard to know who this song is made for other than Vernon himself. In that way, it has a tantalizing openness. You can take the words and sounds for your own. What might seem just plain grating or willfully obscure in “33 ‘GOD’” is somehow deeply human.