It was once written that ‘a great performance occurs when someone disappears into what they are doing and everything that comes out of their body is fluid and true and channelling something subconscious’. We see not the person on stage, but the emotion they are displaying rises to their surface, engulfing all else. This insight was originally attributed to the landmark performance of ‘Ball and Chain’, by Janis Joplin at the Monterey International Pop Festival. Her passion and power clawing their way out of her physical presence, as the intensity of her vocal reaches ever higher. It stops you in your tracks, as you marvel at the individual’s ability, and the subsequent affect the song and performance have on you. Performances like this are so uncommon, it asks an incredible amount from an artist to even manage one in their career. However, they do exist.

One such performance is from a young, bearded man on The Jools Holland Show in 2008. In earthy colours, he sits with a resonator guitar defying the standard EADGBE tuning. This performance sees Justin Vernon play the song ‘Skinny Love’ written under the band name or artistic title of Bon Iver.

From start to finish, the emotion that Vernon exudes in this performance burns through everything. The wavering reverberations of his oddly-tuned resonator, his voice charging from porcelain fragility to roaring thunder, and his face! His face at points appears more like a baroque image of Christ on his day of reckoning than a songwriter or artist. A torn, bawling visage. The performance is undoubtedly among the most emotive and vulnerable of the last two decades. And his songs, as well as the live renditions of them, began to make a great impression on the listening public. The album For Emma, Forever Ago shared this same quivering purity. Track to track this man seemed to bare his soul with very little obscuring it. The origin of the album supports this feeling as well. As the story goes that Vernon holed himself up in a secluded cabin in Wisconsin, escaping from artistic and romantic heartache. In this isolated state, he experimented with methodologies that would create this fragile honesty that permeates the album. Methodologies like pushing his voice into a wailing falsetto, and shifting his songwriting from alt-indie sensibilities to a more honest, folky aesthetic.

What he emerged with gave him a renewed energy and purpose, this creative energy also became apparent in the music scene at the time. It is impossible now to traverse the landscape of modern music without finding Vernon’s soul-bearing characteristics homaged in another’s project, as they discover this method of connecting with their own work. It seemed that Vernon had tapped into a purity that drew the listener close, and as such the appreciation for the artist was widely felt.

Naturally, critics expected similar work from Bon Iver after the groundbreaking first album. Blood Bank, an EP released two years after shared many of the same sensibilities. But when it came to a second album, what listeners got was beautiful, but by no means similar. The cold loneliness of Vernon’s voice was now choral and stronger. His lonely guitar had company now, as a full band played smouldering, Hornsby-esque ballads to sing over. Bon Iver, Bon Iver showed an artist expertly weaving that bold and quivering emotion into a band template, an outfit in which sonics came first and lyrics after.

In an interview with Pitchfork, Vernon describes being inspired by Richard Buckner’s lyricism, and how ‘his words are just about a sound and barely about meaning’, this, in turn, invited the listener to find their own meaning, tying them to the song and it’s narrative progression.

He noted that ‘Flume’ from For Emma, Forever Ago was the song he could still get lost in the most, as the images of the song are obscured with non-sequitur mysticisms. Here we see Vernon begin to understand what makes his project so incredibly special. It is not the falsetto (though this certainly makes it unique) but the gradient of clarity of what is fed through it. This album also gave rise to his collaborative nature, a facet of Vernon’s artistry that would certainly affect the project’s trajectory and style. Fans that would follow him through this transition would come to understand this natural progression towards coding. Bon Iver, Bon Iver brings lush sound and an undeniable emotion, but it is now fed vicariously through a myriad of instruments and deeply symbolic lyricism. The image of that man sitting with a resonator guitar laid across his lap was slightly obscured, blurred behind other agents and cryptic songwriting. But like an expressionist painting, certain parts of it were more delicate and refined than ever before.

Another break for Vernon, he stepped away from the Bon Iver project all together for some time. Citing issues with ‘being in the spotlight’ and a desire for self-healing, he took some time off. His tendency toward shirking the limelight could be yet another reason his fans found him and his sound a little harder to pin down on albums after his initial one. He would describe deep anxiety and panic attacks. All the while, an idea loomed in the background of his mind that he felt he did not have the wherewithal to create.

That idea would eventually blossom into the 3rd studio album under the Bon Iver name, entitled 22, A Million. It is at this point in time, we see coding and crypticism in the project reveal itself fully. Laura Barton comments on the willingness to ‘alienate his audience’ present in the album. The jarring, hypnagogic production style completely absent from his initial release, the adoption of all manner of encryptions from the hieroglyphic symbols that adorn the artwork given to each individual song, to the upside down letters and digits employed in the names of each track. In a press conference he gave after a preview of the new album, journalists and Vernon would agree that the intention with this album was to break what had come before and to ‘make it sound new’. One of the watershed moments of this came with the song ‘10 d E A T h b R E a s T ⚄ ⚄’, starting with a drum loop that sounded ‘broken down’, Vernon inched ever more in this direction with the song. He accentuated these aspects, taking it further and further away from the texture of his previous two albums. The song is haunting and intense, with Vernon’s beautiful lyrics shooting towards us through an overgrown forest of visceral drum and tape loops.

22, A Million feels almost as if we are 100 years into the future, piecing parts of that man seated with his resonator guitar together through random fragments of corrupted data and recordings.

Once again, as the obscuring of the purity is pushed to its breaking point, though it is inevitably informed by the albums before, our reaction is completely unique. Tracks like ‘21 M♢♢N WATER’ and ‘715 – CRΣΣKS’ are absolutely devastating in a way ‘Skinny Love’ would never be. The corrupted nature of each track intertwining with Vernon’s performance, as heart-shattering as that performance on the British music showcase hosted by Jools Holland.

It seems as though this album signalled the true catharsis Vernon needed in the Bon Iver journey. Vernon himself still suffered from mental health issues for a while after, but the music penned under the pseudonym would blossom into an unpredictable, palimpsestic goldmine of sound. He would reach out to a plethora of artists and songwriters, adding layer after layer on top of the once fragile, vulnerable project. That palimpsestic sound would be realised in the latest album i,i.

There’s a video by The New York Times in which reporter Joe Coscarelli talks to those that made the song ‘iMi’, the first song on the latest album. In said video, a host of artists, producers and friends of Vernon’s recount the 5 year period that the song was in utero. They reminisce about Vernon creating the first sparks of the song turning a radio on and off whilst his friend scraped cardboard along a surface, a host of musicians including James Blake layering sounds and feelings on top of it, and the sudden moment it burst into existence roughly 8 months prior to the release of the album.

What is presented expertly in this video is just how encoded the feeling Bon Iver creates has become. Vernon had spent years asserting that this would be the first song on the album. Producer Andrew Sarlo was able to pull it into a shape resembling a song, but still the make-up of it, it’s lyrical content and the nature of its samples is baffling and secretive. It’s true nature, a mystery to those who helped create it, including Vernon himself. The collaborative nature of the project has led to a multitude of artists taking that Bon Iver feeling and running with it for a short while. The title of the album itself is a tribute to the collective effort of the project. And songs like ‘Faith’ and ‘Jelmore’ breathe with this organic, yet communal aesthetic. They feel as though at any point they will pull completely in the direction of one of the collaborative artists, but they teeter somewhere between all of them. The instrumentation: beautifully complex. The lyricism: engagingly abstract.

And in these collaborative efforts, there is a renewal of a strand of artistic triumph that runs through each of the 4 albums. It’s as if the shattered image of that man with the resonator guitar has been collected up by countless musicians and put back together. They have added parts of themselves when needed, and they have made certain fragments more or less prominent, they have coded and decoded as they saw fit, and something truly magnificent has been unlocked in that 13 year period. Something that has allowed Justin to beam with pride in The New York Times video, looking revitalised and happy, he says that Bon Iver is just ‘a little town of people, trying to be good’ and it is that struggle that keeps and will keep listeners captivated for years to come.