Your standard rural Wisconsin self-imposed-exile masterpiece.

Entering into the winter a broken Justin Vernon…he emerged as Bon Iver. Having endured breakups with his longtime band and girlfriend, Vernon holed up in a cabin in the woods to collect his thoughts and split logs. Soon he began spending 12 hours a day recording songs with a mic and acoustic guitar. The songs are built around his somber falsetto and buoyed by backing vocals, haunting horns and sparse drums and guitars—all performed by Vernon. For Emma is all longing and loneliness, but the purging of his pain is beautiful. Vernon chose his moniker Bon Iver because it “sounded cool,” yet found it coincidentally carried the appropriate French translation of “good winter.”