Good Winter
The arc of the Midwest indie project Bon Iver, now potentially complete, is long and winding but finds its clearest expression in Christ.
By Will Bryant
Midwinter spring is its own season …When the short day is brightest, with frost and fire — T.S. Eliot, “Little Gidding”
The story is a cliché at this point. Almost performative. Burned by a breakup and nursing a bad case of mono, a Midwestern folk singer named Justin Vernon retreats to a cabin in the cold Wisconsin winter with nothing but a mic and a resonator guitar. What emerges is the breakup album of breakup albums, spidersilk ballads and mournful horns and a howling falsetto set to lyrics more heartsick than legible. This is For Emma, Forever Ago, the first album from Bon Iver, at this point in 2007 Vernon’s solo musical project.
For Emma’s gutwrenching single “Skinny Love” went viral and Vernon played Letterman, but the album couldn’t get out from under its own overwrought storybook origins. Pitchfork’s 2007 review begins hypocritically, “The biographical details behind the creation of an album shouldn’t matter when it comes to a listener’s enjoyment…” before spelling out in detail Vernon’s biography and the dramatic retreat to the cabin.
After the vatic and intense 2008 EP Blood Bank, the project’s second full album Bon Iver, Bon Iver saw Vernon expand the band and garner his first critical success with a Grammy in 2012. The self-titled album is lush and percussive, an instant shibboleth for Midwestern indie music and a recapitulation of Vernon’s early work as a part of the Durham-based group DeYarmond Edison. Without a breakup to provide a framework as on For Emma, the lyrics were cryptic at best and gibberish most of the time. For those with ears to hear, “Hinnom, TX” opened a religious conversation Vernon would continue on Bon Iver’s next album. The album’s second single “Holocene” was a certified platinum hit and the band, now comprising Vernon and several others, hit the road for a world tour.
But all was not well under the surface. Vernon couldn’t shake the pain of reliving For Emma every night in front of sold-out crowds. After the tour wrapped in Dublin, speculation flourished that the band’s last show had passed. Vernon slow-walked his stress. Only in subsequent interviews would he disclose the turmoil he felt during the self-titled tour.
After writing only one song in five years – the irreverently holyrolling “Heavenly Father” – Bon Iver returned in 2016 with its third album, 22, A Million. Watchers noted “an unexpected turn toward the strange and experimental.” Closer watchers noted 22’s continuity with the experimental elements of the Blood Bank EP and with Vernon’s longheld fascination with the religious and the esoteric. He had majored in religious studies in college with a focus on Gnosticism, no doubt thanks in part to the popularizing labors of the historian Elaine Pagels whose widely read book on the Gospel of Thomas was published the year Vernon graduated. 22’s numerology is its clearest connection with the Gnostics, with titles like “33 ‘God’” and “666 ʇ.” The album also plays with symbology in the song titles – “22 (OVER S∞∞N)” and “715 – CRΣΣKS” – and in the album art by Eric Timothy Carlson which contains all manner of mysterious pictograms the tamest of which would strike fear in the heart of any Satanic Panic-stricken suburban Baptist mother.
For all its religious experimentation 22’s reception was positive. Most explained away the weirdness and fervor as a product of the stress Vernon had undergone after Bon Iver, Bon Iver. The lyrics were as delectably inscrutable as ever, and even if 22 wasn’t happy, at all really, at least it wasn’t For Emma’s overdone Midwestern sadness.
The newness continued on 2019’s i,i, a calmer and more hopeful take on 22’s sample-driven electronica. Religious questions remained, but with less of an edge. 22’s Vernon was haunted and yelling and quoting Psalm 22, but on i,i he seems at peace, even sheepish at his previous psychotic rambling. This fourth album was received by critics as a glad move away from the solipsism that had plagued the first three records.
Bon Iver’s 2025 SABLE, fABLE brings us to the present and continues the happy trend. After an interlude of darker musings on fame and a nostalgic sad-boy-with-guitar victory lap released as the standalone EP SABLE, this fifth full album is joyous and uptempo, the first stuff ever from Bon Iver that could pass as danceable. And the lyrics are shockingly legible. For the first time Vernon sings conversationally, “When I called you from the hotel / You said you were doing well.” SABLE, fABLE is Vernon’s most conscious statement yet of an emotional distance between him and the past self that wrote Bon Iver’s first three records. And it may be his last album under the project. The closing track on the album is “Au Revoir,” a parting play on the French origins of “Bon Iver,” and in interviews Vernon is candid about the possibility that he may not make another.
If SABLE, fABLE is indeed the end of Bon Iver, then Vernon has left us a coherent canon of five albums. Though the sonic palette evolved from For Emma to SABLE, fABLE, Vernon’s lyrics remained focused. If you spend any time reading Pitchfork reviews of Vernon’s work or listening to New York Times music podcasts, you’ll discover the typical reading of the Bon Iver discography, and it goes something like this: the project was born in For Emma’s elegiac suffering, matured into the self-titled’s muted sonic depth, faced an anxiety-driven spiritual crisis on 22, and finally abandoned the self-torture for peace, love, and good vibes on the final two albums.
This narrative is wrong. It unfairly flattens the first two albums as fundamentally sad and the last two albums as fundamentally happy, and it struggles to explain the third album, 22, which is too moody and haunted to be classed with the latter two albums and too experimental and ambitious for the first two. In place of the typical account, we’ll test out a new narrative that uses 22 as the key to interpret all five albums. The first two albums, For Emma and the self-titled, wrestle with questions about history, geography, sacrifice, and redemption that receive their clearest (and most Christ-centered) articulation on 22, and 22 begins answers to these questions that are expanded on i,i and SABLE, fABLE.
Vernon is simultaneously excavating his painful past and seeking newness, redemption, a fresh start.
Today is Qumran
If we manage to look past the haze of sadness that clouds For Emma in the popular imagination, we’ll find Vernon questioning the history of his breakup, processing his lonesome pain, and searching for redemption on the album’s historiographical coda “re: Stacks.” The chorus to the album’s second song “Lump Sum” sings, “Fit it all, fit it in the doldrums / Or so the story goes / Color the era / Film it as historical.” Already Vernon is attempting to reclaim the history of his relationship with Emma and to relegate it to the “doldrums,” the garbage time of history. So far, though, he’s been unsuccessful, and he ends the song with a downer, “We will see when it gets warm.”
Next comes the downer of downers, “Skinny Love,” and then “The Wolves (Act I And II)” and “Blindsided” which are Vernon’s clearest expression of the loneliness he suffered in the cabin in Wisconsin. He opens “The Wolves” singing vengefully “Someday my pain will mark you / Solace my game, it stars you” and an extended outro repeats the lines “What might have been lost / Don’t bother me.” The bridge to “Blindsided” repeats the loneliest line, “Would you really rush out?” and there is no respite from the isolation on the next two songs “Creature Fear” and “For Emma.” Across the album, Vernon is struggling to get out from under the lonely pain of the breakup.
But he is no helplessly heartsick lover, as the conventional narrative would have it. On For Emma Vernon is already searching for redemption, whether through revision on “Lump Sum” or revenge on “The Wolves.” The album’s final song “re: Stacks” sees Vernon at his clearest and most mature, the closest yet to getting over the breakup. The song is also the most religious on For Emma, opening with a reference to the cave where the Dead Sea Scrolls – a key artifact for the revival of interest in Gnosticism – were found: “This my excavation and today is Qumran / Everything that happens is from now on.” This line contains the whole album in microcosm. Vernon is simultaneously excavating his painful past and seeking newness, redemption, a fresh start. If you sift the gibberish, the chorus has Vernon unloading the weight of the breakup: “In the back with your racks and / you’re unstacking your load.” The final verse of the song, and the final words on the album, are the most optimistic yet: “This is not the sound of a new man / or crispy realisation / It’s the sound of the unlocking and / the lift away / Your love will be / Safe with me.” Finally Vernon can see himself “unlocking” from his past without papering over his pain with “the sound of a new man” or “a crispy realization.” He is optimistic about this solution but short on the details of how he will accomplish it, saying only “Your love will be safe with me.” For the first time on the album, Vernon can find safety and comfort in the fact that Emma, for all the pain she’s caused, will remain with him. This redemptive unification, not in spite of loss but through it, will stick with Vernon and receive an emphatic religious treatment on 22.
In Hinnom
On the self-titled album Vernon makes the important move of abstracting away from For Emma’s breakup, but his focus on history, pain, and redemption remains. He uses place names in song titles – “Perth,” “Minnesota, WI,” “Hinnom, TX,” “Lisbon, OH,” “Calgary” – as a way to continue to explore the geographic entrapment he felt on For Emma, but removed from the context of the breakup. His lyrics on these songs are weird but specific. It’s possible to identify concrete places, events, and people, even if the narrative is nonsensical. On “Holocene,” for example: “You’re laying waste to Halloween / You fucked it friend / It’s on its head / It struck the street / You’re in Milwaukee, off your feet.”
Lyrical moments suggest that Vernon has started to see distance between himself and the pain of For Emma. On “Minnesota, WI,” he sings, “Water’s running through in the valley / where we grew to write this / scripture,” and “Holocene” opens, “Someway, baby, it’s part of me / apart from me.” There are signs of distance and redemption: water and life has returned to Vernon’s valley of the shadow of death. But Vernon doesn’t abandon his history, in keeping with his maxim from “re: Stacks”: “this is not the sound of a new man.” He recognizes that there had been revelation – “scripture” – in the dark valley, and that the pain that is “apart from” him is nonetheless still “a part of” him. Again, Vernon’s redemption comes not in spite of suffering but through it.
On “Hinnom, TX” Vernon explores redemption from an explicitly religious angle for the first time. Don’t be fooled by the title: Hinnom is not a town in Texas, it is a valley south of Jerusalem where residents maintained a perpetual garbage fire for the city’s trash. As a result, the word became synonymous with “hell,” now the typical biblical translation for “hinnom” from Hebrew. The Texas reference likely comes rather from a lyric in the song’s second verse, “I got outta La Grange,” an allusion to a Lucina Williams song where she celebrates leaving the Texas town of La Grange and “burying the stranger inside of her,” according to Vernon. The song “Hinnom, TX” is focused on redemption and ritual, the first verse opening with “In the first of light / Past the Noachide / Bodies wrapped in white / Stranded every pain / Baby, pasts are slain / I got outta La Grange.” The Noachide are a religious group who follow the Noahic covenant, the promises that God made to Noah after the flood. The community is made up of non-Jews who see God’s covenant with Noah as sacred for all people, and they observe seven laws related to ritual and ethical purity. Vernon’s reference to the Noachide, along with the later phrases “pasts are slain” and “I got outta La Grange,” suggest a postdiluvian newness and redemption. On the chorus Vernon speaks to his past self, “In Hinnom / All this time / with your heart in mind / Didn’t you edit?” He questions why the version of him that wrote For Emma spent so much time suffering in the trash heap, rather than redemptively editing his history. There are no concrete answers to Vernon’s quest for redemption, not yet, but “Hinnom, TX” puts the search in explicitly religious terms.
Vernon continues to explore growth and newness on “Wash.” and “Calgary,” before ending the self-titled with “Beth / Rest,” a sister song to “re: Stacks.” “Beth” is Hebrew for “house” or “place,” and the song has Vernon and an unnamed lover on a sea voyage homeward. The song concludes, “Our love is a star / Sure some hazardry / For the light before and after most / indefinitely / Danger has been stole away.” As on “re: Stacks,” love is the North Star homeward for Vernon. “Hazardry” and “danger” are nothing compared to the “light before and after.” So Vernon’s redemptive love reappears, this time with more specificity than on For Emma. It guides him and his lover home to safety and rest and renewal.
These lyrics are the most emphatic on the album. Vernon submits for deposition in the court of record his affection for Jesus’s bloody atoning crown of thorns.
Partial to the Bleeding Vine
We arrive now at 22, A Million, the third album in our sequence and the crux of Vernon’s religious journey. The opening track wastes no time speaking to God: “There I find you marked in / constellation / There isn’t ceiling in our garden / And then I draw an ear on you / So I can speak into the silence.” It’s important to clarify here that Vernon is by no means a Christian. His metaphysic is probably materialist, finding the need to “draw an ear” on God and, in a later song, sampling from Jim Brown’s “Morning,” “When we leave this room it’s gone / I know so well that this is all there is.” Nonetheless, Vernon is always God-haunted and on 22 he explores a distinctly Christian approach to sacrifice, grace, and redemption.
On the Trinitarian “33 ‘God’,” Vernon starts a conversation with Jesus. The song builds on the self-titled’s focus on specific places. In the chorus Vernon samples, “I find God / and religion too…” and he is “staying at the Ace Hotel,” a storied Los Angeles venue modeled after a cathedral that was used as a church in the 90s before it was converted to a hotel. As a nod to its history, the Ace keeps a big red neon “Jesus Saves” sign on the roof. He goes on to sing, “If the calm could allow / Then I would just be floating to you now,” and then later, “I’ve been looking through your mind … / All my goodness to show / Why are you so far from saving me?” This last line is a quote from Psalm 22 and Jesus’s last words on the cross: “Eloi, eloi, lama sabachthani?” Vernon’s search for redemption, which began on For Emma and reached new geographies on the self-titled, has led him on 22 to a particular place – the cross – and a particular person – Christ. But Vernon isn’t satisfied, not yet at least. “I didn’t need you that night / Not gonna need you anytime” he protests in the outro to “33 God.”
On the next song, “29 #Strafford APTS,” Vernon warms to Christ. On the first chorus he sings, “A womb / an empty robe … / Paramind” and on the next, “A womb / an empty robe … / Canonize,” meditating on Christ’s climactic miracles–the Incarnation and the Resurrection–and the sanctifying newness that they bring. On “666 ʇ” Vernon is skeptical and leans atheistic, as the title would suggest, but on the bridge his ranting breaks with angelic singing, “I’m still standing in / Still standing in the need of prayer.” Vernon is seeking Christ and him crucified, but he can’t reconcile his doubts.
In keeping with “re: Stacks” and “Beth / Rest,” Vernon reaches clarity on 22’s final track, “00000 Million,” a three-verse poem in the lyrical and musical style of a Christian hymn. The song opens with an assessment of his previous spiritual experimentation: “Must’ve been forces, that took me on them wild courses / Who knows how many poses that / I’ve been in.” But then Vernon challenges his history, singing “A word about Gnosis: it ain’t gonna buy the groceries / Or middle-out locusts, or weigh to find.” This line condemns 22’s previous nine songs of Gnostic gibberish–after all of his questing Vernon wants a creed that is practical, sensible, and load-bearing. He goes on to express a desire for home, “I worry about shame, and I worry bout a worn path / And I wander off, just to come back home / Turning to waltz…” Turning towards the three-step Trinitarian dance he closes the verse with a meditation on a heavenly eternal lamb: “Cause the days have no numbers / It harms me, it harms me, it harms like a lamb.”
The song reaches its climax, as any good hymn does, on a heartfelt opening to its final verse. Vernon sings, almost shouts, “So I can depose this, partial to the bleeding vine.” These lyrics are the most emphatic on the album. Vernon submits for deposition in the court of record his affection for Jesus’s bloody atoning crown of thorns. The verse, the song, and album close with humble resignation to eternal peace, “Cause the days have no numbers / Well it harms it harms me it harms / I’ll let it in.”
22 ends with the same self-sacrificial redemptive love that ended For Emma and Bon Iver, Bon Iver. But this time, Vernon’s expression of this love is clearer and surer than it has ever been, and more Christological. For Emma’s inchoate yearning for redemption gained geographic and religious structure on the self–titled, and then matured into 22’s Christian framework. Vernon’s desire for a place-based redemptive story of sacrifice is fulfilled perfectly in Jesus. He is not doctrinaire by any stretch of the imagination, but 22 demonstrates that Christ allows for the clearest articulation of Bon Iver’s artistic project.
Vernon’s inchoate lyrics amount to babbled responses to a God he does not fully know, who nonetheless lisps back in Christ.
I Can Hear Crying
Having been set free in Christ–at least artistically–on 22, Vernon turns towards practical redemption on i,i. However, contrary to the Pitchfork Doctrine that post-22 Bon Iver is all butterflies and rainbows, Vernon doesn’t shed For Emma’s searing heartbreak. Instead, he exchanges his solipsistic sorrow for a communal crying against division and injustice. Unfortunately, but not without self-criticism, Vernon loses his Christocentrism along the way.
On “Naeem,” Vernon weeps with those who weep, singing repeatedly on the chorus, “I can hear, I can hear / I can hear, I can hear crying.” He continues to fight with his pain from For Emma, concluding at the end of the second verse, “Why can’t we just patch this up / And I cannot seem to carry it all.” Vernon hasn’t papered over the pain he expressed on his early albums. Instead, he has expressed it in collective rather than individual terms. Vernon sublates his own suffering to the suffering of others, that together they might carry the weight. This allows Vernon to express more clearly the redemption he has sought since “re: Stacks.” On “Naeem”’s last verse he sings, “All around me I can hear em / So what is gonna happen now? / If you don’t look away,” demanding the listener not to ignore the crying all around. He exasperates for future renewal, shouting “And it can’t be that it’s all … / And it won’t be very long.”
Having found a communal expression of pain and redemption, Vernon is triumphant on i,i. But in a reversal of the trend from the first three albums, the closing song “RABi” has Vernon doubting his victory. The first two verses summarise his newly “peachy” and “anodyne” perspective, and the last verse doubts that it can carry the day alone: “So what of this release? / Some life feels good now, don’t it? / Don’t have tomorrow have a leaving plan / Nothing’s gonna ease your mind / Well it’s all fine and we’re all fine any way.” Vernon is unsure whether his new optimism will really ease his mind. Vernon’s doubt, in my diagnosis, results from his inability to express his new joy in the explicitly religious terms of 22. On 22, he showed that communal redemption results from a Christ-like self-sacrificial love, but on i,i he lacks the religious framework to express how that love is made real in community. Instead, he resorts to vague pleasantries: on “Faith” he sings “So what I think we need / Is elasticity, empowerment, and ease.” We can explain Vernon’s fading confidence theologically: as he leans away from Jesus he loses the clarity of articulation that only capital-T Truth of Christ can bring.
No Need to Crow No More
SABLE, fABLE is split into the opening EP SABLE and the following complete album fABLE. SABLE recapitulates Bon Iver’s early period, especially on the acoustic “SPEYSIDE,” a lucid expression of Vernon’s wrestling with history, geography, and redemption. The song shows Vernon’s maturity–he has always been concerned with his past but “SPEYSIDE” takes an especially retrospective view, opening poigantly, “I know now that I can’t make good / How I wish I could / Go back and put / Me where you stood.” As on 22 and i,i, he challenges his previous work: “As I fill my book / What a waste of wood … I can’t rest on no dynasty / Yeah, what is wrong with me?” Again, redemption is possible only through a place-based sacrificial love, the song closing, “I really damn been / on such a violent / spree / But maybe you can / still make a man / from me / Here on Speyside quay.”
After SABLE’s darker introspection, fABLE leans into i,i’s optimism, this time even more clearly. As if to make a point, fABLE’s first full song is called “Everything is Peaceful Love.” “Walk Home” is Vernon’s most romantic yet, a sappier take on the homeward comfort he first felt on “Beth / Rest.” His heavenly imagination from 22 remains, singing, “No, we don’t need no window curtains / And we can let the light come in / And we can shed your earthly burdens / Of this I am certain.” The next two songs redeem Vernon’s earlier sadness and proclaim a new beginning. Quoting “Skinny Love,” Vernon triumphantly sings on “Day One,” “I told you to be patient, I swore that I was wrong.” The chorus of “From” references “re: Stacks” and declares, “From now on / Don’t let it trouble your mind / Just take my love in your time.” The second verse on “I’ll Be There” is all about practical virtue. He sings, “Don’t you dare go down / Tape the polaroid to your dome / Keep the sad shit off the phone / And get your fine ass on the road / Girl, it’s time that I do testify / No more alone, I hear you coming.” Vernon is confident and optimistic, ready to testify and no longer alone.
The album’s lyrical closer “There’s a Rhythm” completes the Bon Iver arc, uniting his present hope with his past pain. He opens with a happy resignation to the emotional range of his “wild courses,” singing, “Can I feel another way? / Or are less and more the same? / Can I really still complain? / To be back here once again.” He recognizes his history – “There are miles and miles of tape / You can watch it, it’s been saved” – and he exhorts equanimous forward progress – “There’s a rhythm to reclaim / Get tall and walk away.” The second verse forecloses on For Emma’s loneliness: “I could leave behind the snow / For a land of palm and gold / But there are miles and miles to go / And I’ve been down this road before / There’s another chance to show / No need to crow no more.” Referencing the “black crow sitting across from me” from “re: Stacks,” Vernon can finally rest in the snowy “good winter” of Bon Iver’s painful Wisconsin origins.
In a nod to the name “Bon Iver,” SABLE, fABLE’s instrumental closer “Au Revoir” is another French amphimacer, and Vernon has finally come home. His last two albums, though, strayed from the Christological core of Bon Iver’s artistic project. Vernon’s deposition at the end of “00000 Million” is the literal crux of a five album chiasm – the cross gives Vernon the clearest language to express the redemptive truth he seeks in every album from For Emma to SABLE, fABLE. His own lack of religious commitments should pose no theological problem, because if all truth is God’s truth, then if Vernon finds anything he will find Christ at the center of his search, regardless of his own intentions. John Calvin wrote that God “lisps with us as nurses are want to do with little babes.” Vernon’s inchoate lyrics amount to babbled responses to a God he does not fully know, who nonetheless lisps back in Christ.
The name of the project, a French misspelling of “good winter,” describes its arc. Bon Iver began in winter, in the Wisconsin darkness and an infected liver. By some miracle Vernon found something good in the winter, and it took him five albums to figure out what it was. He traveled far over the course of five albums but, in the words of T.S. Eliot, the end of all of Vernon’s exploring is “to arrive where he started / And know the place for the time.” It would be easy to interpret Vernon’s later optimism as a rejection of his early pain, but he always holds the two together. And at the crux of Vernon’s journey, they are held closest together in Christ.
Illustrations by Najma Zahira;
from album cover artwork by Brian Moen, Gregory Euclide, Eric Timothy Carlson, Aaron Anderson, Justin Vernon Ruben Nusz, and Miles Johnson
Will Bryant lives in Washington, DC, and works in clean energy policy. He graduated from Dartmouth College, where he studied Religion and Quantitative Social Science, in 2024.
