Justin Vernon would rather not be doing any of this. Releasing a new Bon Iver album, promoting it. He absolutely isn’t going to tour it. “I don’t need to do this any more,” he says. “I want to be done with this whole thing. But I am dead serious about these songs. That’s how much I care about them, that I’m going to do something I haven’t been comfortable with to put them out.”
As soon as Vernon hit the public eye in 2008, he started pulling away from its obsessive glare – and from the caricature of him as the lonely woodsman who made his era-defining debut, For Emma Forever Ago, in a hunting cabin in his native Wisconsin. His sound grew cryptic and mutated, though he was no less popular for it. Kanye West and Taylor Swift wanted to collaborate. But anxious from the demands to flay himself for entertainment, he clouded his image. He intimated that he would retire, which only created more distorting attention. As Vernon puts out his first album in six years, he knows better than to make such declarations, though he “might peace out” after releasing Sable, Fable.
