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Bon Iver's For Emma, Forever Ago at 20: the sick winter in a Wisconsin cabin

In November 2006 Justin Vernon, sick with mono and a liver infection after his band and his relationship ended, moved into his father's hunting cabin in Wisconsin. By February he had the nine songs of For Emma, Forever Ago, first sold as 500 self-released CDs and platinum in the US by 2017.

By Riffiter

Justin Vernon of Bon Iver on stage, September 2009. Photo: Moses Namkung, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Twenty years ago this month, in November 2006, Justin Vernon drove from Raleigh, North Carolina, back to Wisconsin and moved into his father's hunting cabin, about an hour northwest of Eau Claire, where he grew up. By February he had nine songs. They became For Emma, Forever Ago, the first Bon Iver album.

The year before the cabin

Vernon had moved to Raleigh with his band, DeYarmond Edison. In 2006 the band split, and so did his relationship. Then he got sick: pneumonia first, then mono, which turned into a liver infection. "I was laid up in bed for three months," he told an interviewer in 2008.

That November he drove north through the night to the cabin.

Snowy woods at Black River Falls, Wisconsin
Winter woods at Black River Falls, Wisconsin, a stand-in for the land around the cabin. Photo: PinchyCC, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Nine songs on a Power Mac

For the first weeks he wrote nothing. He chopped wood and hunted, as he told The Observer Music Monthly in 2008. Then he started recording on an old guitar, a single microphone and a Power Mac G4, stacking his own voice into the choir that opens "Flume". He said he went up there with no plan for an album: "I really had no intention of making a record. But in the end, that's what happened."

The name came out of the illness too. "Bon hiver" is French for "good winter". He dropped the H, he said, because "hiver" looked too much like "liver".

500 CDs

Vernon put the album out himself in 2007, starting with 500 CDs. Indy Week and Pitchfork wrote about it, and the Indiana label Jagjaguwar reissued it in February 2008. "Skinny Love" became the song most people know from it. The RIAA certified the album platinum in 2017.

Justin Vernon singing on stage under a spotlight
Justin Vernon on stage in September 2009, a year after the Jagjaguwar release. Photo: Moses Namkung, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

The cabin is the part everyone remembers. The sickness, the breakup and the end of the band are what sent him there.

On Riffiter, For Emma, Forever Ago holds a 4.23 average from 227 ratings.

Sources: Justin Vernon's 2008 interviews (The Observer Music Monthly), Pitchfork, The Daily Telegraph, Indy Week, Songfacts and the RIAA certification database.

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