Justin Vernon lights a blunt as he charges his Tesla, which is affectionately named John Teshla. When John’s batteries are full, we cruise around rural Eau Claire County, a sparsely populated area of Wisconsin where Vernon was born and raised and still resides, listening to a Grateful Dead bootleg from 1977. The hippie godfathers have been an outsized influence on the 38-year-old as of late, if not musically, then spiritually and psychedelically. LSD and DMT are more prominent in his life now, drugs whose therapeutic and creative properties Vernon champions. He has started to ask the crowd at Bon Iver shows if anyone’s on acid. One time, when no one raised their hand right away, he raised his own.

We crest hills on empty roads with names like County Road HH, from which, on this unconditional August day, you can see a highway cut through the treeline on the horizon. The city of Eau Claire, population 65,883, is split by the Chippewa River, leaving an oxbow lake just across from its state school, where Vernon once majored in religion and women’s studies. He loves it out here, surrounded by rolling green fields of soybeans and corn stalks, where time seems to be meaningless.

There are few American artists who have invested so much of their time and money to put their backwater hometown on the map—even if the reader’s poll in the local alt-weekly recently decided that Justin Vernon, his local music festival Eaux Claires, and the new downtown performing arts center he has supported are all among the city’s “Most Overrated” attractions. Vernon, ever the chill bro, is unbothered. “I’m riding just as hard for the people who are like, ‘Whoever this guy thinks he is trying to make cool shit happen in his own hometown with his guitar music can get fucked.’ I’m fine.”

He lowers the windows to prove just how quietly John Teshla rides. A left turn, a right, another right, maybe a left, and soon we’re at one of the few intersections in the area he doesn’t recognize. Just then a black bear ambles up onto the road in front of us, and Vernon slows to a stop. The bear takes its time crossing the highway, sniffing the asphalt, looking at us, then lumbering to the opposite side. We sit transfixed as a crunchy Jerry Garcia solo seeps through the speakers. The bear disappears into a field, and Vernon, beaming, lets out a cosmic “fuuuuuuuck.”

Vernon is relaxed these days, a perennially bearded Northwoods Lebowski, full of hell yeahs and yeah babys, who wears old T-shirts, a trucker hat, cotton shorts, and camo Crocs. He’s especially giddy at the moment because the whole Bon Iver family is due to reconvene in town tomorrow for rehearsal, a thought he returns to, apropos of nothing, several times throughout the day.

His band makes up just a fraction of the people who have helped him ascend from coffeeshop standby to an avant-garde pop icon the world over, redefining the genres of folk and indie rock in the process. They are the ones who supported his two Grammy wins, his April Base recording studio, his artist-friendly streaming service, and everything else that has arisen in the wake of Bon Iver’s heartbroken 2007 debut, For Emma, Forever Ago. Their new record, titled i,i, is a conclusion of sorts, the end of a masterful four-album run that has turned Vernon into an unlikely arena-filling star. He wants the world to understand that he alone is not responsible for his success, even though the one thing people might know about him is that he’s the guy who recorded that one album alone in the woods.