Bon Iver: Bon Iver, Bon Iver [JAGJAGUWAR]

Why you'll love it

Bon Iver, Bon Iver won the Grammy for Best Alternative Music Album and won Justin Vernon Best New Artist too. It debuted at No. 2 on the Billboard 200, and "Holocene" is one of the most beautiful songs of the 2010s.

This edition

• Single LP, 10 tracks
• Jagjaguwar pressing
• Recorded at April Base, Justin Vernon's studio in Fall Creek, Wisconsin

About the album

As most Canadians know, "bon hiver" is French for "good winter," and Justin Vernon spent a few of them holed up in a cabin in Wisconsin making the first Bon Iver album. For the follow-up, he moved into a converted veterinary clinic in Fall Creek, Wisconsin, brought in a band, a horn section, pedal steel and strings, and built something much bigger and stranger.

Every song on Bon Iver, Bon Iver is named after a place, some real ("Perth," "Calgary," "Minnesota, WI"), some imagined ("Hinnom, TX"), and the whole thing drifts like weather moving across a map. "Holocene" is the heart of it, as quiet and huge as a winter sky, and the closing "Beth/Rest" goes full soft-rock '80s and somehow gets away with it. It won two Grammys, sold over half a million copies in the US and made a reluctant indie hero into one of the most influential songwriters of his generation.

Also at Kops: more Bon Iver on vinyl · browse Alternative

Tracklist

Listen

On Jagjaguwar, first out in 2011.