Justin Vernon’s falsetto-folk infiltrated pop and caught Kanye’s ear but now he’s kicking against the fame game. For his new album, he explains why the last thing he’ll do is a Beyoncé-style Pepsi tour

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Even on a midweek morning, the line for Al’s Breakfast, a 10-foot-wide, 66-year-old establishment in the Dinkytown neighbourhood of Minneapolis, runs all the way out of the door. At the back of the queue stands Justin Vernon, sweltering in the heat and sharing his latest preoccupations: the wonder that Apple once sacked Steve Jobs; the exceptional difficulty of ever pinning James Blake down to a precise meeting time and place; and the lessons of Idiocracy, Mike Judge’s uncomfortably prophetic film satire in which celebrity culture and anti-intellectualism are rife and a blustering dunderhead has been elected president.

Twenty minutes later, seated at the counter, Vernon takes a sip of coffee and exhales. “If I stop doing the music thing, I could see myself doing something like this, man,” he says, taking in the room: the 14 seats, the waitresses filling cups, the sound of Fall Out Boy on the stereo. “Open a small breakfast joint, play the music I want, maybe have shows in it at night; people could drink whiskey. That sounds like my dream.”

It’s a steady, contemplative Vernon I meet today; a different artist to the one who emerged wide-eyed in 2008 under the guise of Bon Iver to release For Emma, Forever Ago. It was the album that redefined the breakup record with its sparse, desolate songs and unleashed a hundred cabin-folk falsetto imitators in its wake.

Much has changed in the years since. There have been the worldwide tours; the synth- and sax-heavy follow-up album; the collaborations with Kanye West and James Blake; the production work with groups such as the Staves; the Grammy awards; the side projects; the Eaux Claires festival he founded two years ago in his hometown of Wisconsin. And there has been the kind of intense and overwhelming success that means that today the waitress will lean across the counter to tell him, sweetly, how much she and her mother love his music.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Justin Vernon on Jimmy Fallon in 2014. Photograph: NBC/Getty

But there has also been uncertainty. This month, he releases his third Bon Iver album, 22, A Million. That there should even be a third album at all is something of a surprise: four years ago, Vernon announced that he was walking away from the Bon Iver project for the foreseeable future. “I had mental stuff, stuff I felt needed healing,” he explains now. “And as morose or self-involved as it is, I felt that the only thing I could do was to go into myself a little bit.” In fact, even at the start of this year he came close to quitting this album; it was by his account “a gruelling process to figure out”. He was plagued by panic attacks and anxiety, and battling the feeling that “I had this huge idea and I didn’t have the wherewithal to go through with it”.

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Part of Vernon’s discombobulation stemmed from the experience of being in the spotlight. “Having people asking to get their picture taken when you’re just trying to get eggs and not having a good day,” he says. “There are times when it’s just a nuisance, and there are times when it makes me panic. There are people who are straight-up into being famous. And I don’t like that. I think that’s why I had to take a long break.”

The break itself, however, did not go particularly well. “I decided this was the time to go hang out in Europe and travel,” he says. “And so I went to [the Greek island of] Santorini. But I’m a horrible planner, so I went in off-season and there’s no restaurants open and there’s nobody there. And so I just feel pulverised: dealing with some unrequited love situation-slash-just knowing that that isn’t even the issue, I’m the issue, I need to get my shit straight.” Walking around the island for the fifth day in a row, Vernon experienced his first panic attack. “It was like: ‘Oh my god, my chest is caving in, what the fuck is going on?’” he recalls. “I don’t like talking about it, but I feel it’s important to talk about it, so that other people who experience it don’t feel it’s just happening to them.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Vernon and Kanye at Coachella in 2011. Photograph: Jeff Kravitz/FilmMagic

The anxiety continued even after he returned home, saw a doctor, and began treatment for depression. “It was not good,” he says simply. “It was bad, bad, bad and then really bad, for a long time. I’d say I was having very bad days for about a year and a half.”

Still, it was during the period he calls “the European horribleness” that he began writing this album. “I kept moving hotels because I was, like: ‘Well, this is completely depressing, I’d better go to a different place.’” Then he was hit by a line – “It might be over soon” – that would become the backbone of the opening track, 22. “I just kind of hummed that to myself,” he recalls. “I had a little sampler with me, and I got back to this weird hotel room, and I just sat there and chopped it up. And I had this rare moment of: ‘This is a good thing’, where you create something.”

It became apparent to Vernon along the way that in his willingness to play shows, promote records, produce and champion other artists, he had somehow neglected his own creative needs. The person who reminded him of the importance of looking after himself? One Mr Kanye West. “Kanye speaks of how you have to love yourself. And believe in yourself,” says Vernon. “I heard him say something recently: ‘I love myself so other people can love themselves.’ So they get up in the morning and put on a song and be like ‘FUCK YEAH’. And that is what it’s for.”

In 22, A Million, there’s also a sense of Kanye’s willingness to defy expectation and, if necessary, alienate his audience. For those who still consider Bon Iver to be the sound of a man lovelorn in a Midwestern winter, this album might prove rather confounding. There are the song names themselves: instantly tattooable jumbles of symbols and words such as 10 d E A T h b R E a s T and 21 M♦♦N WATER that read like a mingling of punk logos and EE Cummings poetry. Then there are the unexpected musical directions: attempts to distill difficult emotions into sound, through distortion and the strange collision of instrumentation and voice, such as the track ____45_____ in which the saxophonist Mike Lewis duets with Vernon on a saxophone vocoder. It felt, says Vernon, like “a conversation, like an instrument that only two people can play”; one that explored many of the album’s themes: “It’s sorrow and pain explaining joy, and family, and fear of death, and love.”

If the isolated, acoustic, woodsman sound of his first record began to shift on his second album, this time it has given way further to digital manipulation: voices slowed down, sped up, words mushed and buried beneath scuffling synths, dolorous sax, the sense that sound is being layered, twisted and contorted, its rhythm frequently more urban than pastoral. But what it shares with previous Bon Iver records – indeed with all Vernon’s projects – is a profound tenderness.

More than anything, 22, A Million is about Vernon getting lost, both mentally and physically. He is laying to rest two decades of searching for self-understanding, and letting go of the deep connections to place – particularly the idea of home and belonging – he explored on the previous two albums. “As much as I love that I made it so sacred, I feel like the places are behind me,” he says. “I know that the most important thing is you belong to folks.” There’s a line at the end of the final track of the first Bon Iver album that perhaps encapsulates the sentiment best – sung, then, about moving on from lost love, it rings just as true for this new phase of his career: “This is not the sound of a new man, or crispy realisation,” he sings. “It’s the sound of the unlocking and the lift away.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Dicing with fame... Vernon. Photograph: Cameron Wittig and Crystal Quinn

We take a drive through one of Minneapolis’s more affluent neighbourhoods near where he owns an apartment, to the Lake of the Isles. In the driver’s seat Vernon lights up a cigarette, winds the windows down, puts on the Waylon Jennings track Are You Sure Hank Done It This Way. It’s an important song for him, as Jennings questioned the way the country music industry had become so in thrall to glitz and celebrity. Forty years later, Vernon finds himself asking similar questions about the way the music industry operates and he’s started to explore other ways to be a working, touring musician without succumbing to the pressures that sent him so off-kilter.

“I’ve played the game enough. Next time I probably won’t do photos at all” Justin Vernon

On the last Bon Iver tour he compiled a dossier of all the things he didn’t want to do again. He reels some of them off: “Playing a lot of shows, realising that playing shows for Live Nation is just bullshit and fuck that. I grew up loving bands like the Indigo Girls, and they stood for something, doing benefit shows and talking about shit and changing culture or changing people’s mindsets and raising awareness. What’s music for? It’s not about having a bunch of CDs.”

He also decided against doing many interviews, choosing instead to hold a press conference because “why not have fun with this shit?” And that there would be absolutely no photoshoots showing Vernon’s face in full. “I’ve played the game enough, and next time I probably won’t do photos at all,” he says. “The more years that go by where there’s no pictures of me, the more that will happen. It’s my self-preservation thing.” Touring will be different this time, too. He speaks of wanting to capture “the vitalness, the necessity of a performance”, of “playing places with a street set-up, a truck with a generator so we can play right there… So it’s not just a money-grabbing exercise.”

Already there is the week-long 80-artist collaborative residency in Berlin, followed by a two-day festival, which he has co-organised with Ryan Olson of Gayngs and Bryce and Aaron Dessner of the National. He also has a hankering to go to Roslyn, Washington, where his favourite TV series Northern Exposure was filmed, “to go fishing and meet some people who hopefully never heard of us and say ‘Hey, we’re coming into town and we’re going to play in the community centre, five bucks, and we’re giving the money to the local shelter…’”

The big idea, he says, is to break both artists’ and music fans’ expectation of a record release, touring cycle, stadium shows, promotion. Vernon is not alone in this ambition: consider this year’s Frank Ocean and Beyoncé albums, sent out into the world without the usual flurry of interviews and polished promotional activity. Musically, this circumnavigates the media juggernaut and renders the relationship between artist and record-buyer more direct. Yet simultaneously the artists can become more remote figures. We know fewer details about their lives, their motivations, the stories behind their songs. For those artists accustomed to the strange quarantine of megastardom, this transition is perhaps not so challenging. But in the case of a musician such as Vernon, famed for his emotional depth and authenticity, will fans understand the new sense of detachment?

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“Hopefully, people will understand that I will come and play for you, I will get to you, eventually, in your city, but when I get there hopefully we will play something more special, we won’t just play some gig, we’ll have thought about it. We won’t just be ‘Hello Cleveland-ing!’ through our lives.” This isn’t, he stresses, about ego, nor is it an exercise in rock star worthiness. Rather, it’s about wanting to halt the idiocracy. “You can never be self-righteous, but it’s okay to be a little righteous,” he says. “You have to believe in something. Like, I’d prefer Beyoncé didn’t do a Pepsi tour. Do not take two million dollars from Pepsi and be a role model for young girls. Do not do that. That stuff does anger me. And I feel like I am not afraid to talk about that stuff.”

We need people to speak out, he suggests, or otherwise we’ll find a blustering dunderhead in the White House and an idiocracy in full sail. “It is the reversal of mental aptitude,” he says. “Let’s turn it around.”

22, A Million is out on Friday; Bon Iver tours the UK from 10 Feb