Bon Iver (2011)

Bon Iver, Bon Iver (; also known as Bon Iver) is the second studio album from American indie folk band Bon Iver, released on June 17, 2011. The album is composed of 10 songs and was seen as a new musical direction for the band.

The album debuted at number one on the Norwegian Albums Chart and the Danish Albums Chart, and number two on the US Billboard 200 chart. It sold 104,000 copies in its first week in the United States. As of September 2016, the album has sold a total of 629,000 copies in the United States. It received acclaim from critics, some of whom named it one of the best albums of 2011. The album won the Grammy Award for Best Alternative Music Album at the 2012 ceremony, while the song "Holocene" was nominated for Song of the Year and Record of the Year.

History

Bon Iver's second album was rumored to be titled Letters for Marvin but was later confirmed to be Bon Iver. "I brought in a lot of people to change my voice – not my singing voice, but my role as the author of this band, this project," said Justin Vernon, band leader and founder, who hired well-known players like bass saxophonist Colin Stetson and pedal-steel guitarist Greg Leisz. "I built the record myself, but I allowed those people to come in and change the scene." The second album is described as an "ambitious musical departure" from the first.

The band announced the release through various media and from the official Jagjaguwar and 4AD websites, on April 20, 2011. The album was recorded in a remodeled veterinarian clinic in Fall Creek, Wisconsin, which was bought by Vernon and his brother in 2008. It was converted into April Base Studios, built mainly over the defunct swimming pool attached to the clinic. Vernon's reason for recording in the location was that "[it's] been a wonderful freedom, working in a place we built. It's also only three miles from the house I grew up in, and just ten minutes from the bar where my parents met."

The album's first song "Perth", was the first song that Vernon recorded for the album; "The first thing I worked on, the riff and the beginning melodies, was the first song on the record, 'Perth,'" said Vernon. "That was back in early 2008. The reason I called it that right away, is because I was with a guy that I didn't know very well, but basically, it's a long story, but in the three days we were supposed to spend together — he's a music video maker — in those three days, his best friend (Heath Ledger) died and he was from Perth. It just sort of became the beginning of the record. And Perth has such a feeling of isolation, and also it rhymes with birth, and every song I ended up making after that just sort of drifted towards that theme, tying themselves to places and trying to explain what places are and what places aren't. We were down at my parents' house shooting the video for 'Wolves.'" The director of the video, Matt Amato, happened to be close friends with Heath Ledger. "It was January," Vernon said, "fucking 25 below. We're out shooting, and we come back in, and his phone had been going off." Ledger, it turned out, was dead. "So I've got this guy in my house whose best friend just passed away. He's sobbing in my arms. He can't go back to L.A. because the house is under siege. Michelle Williams is calling my parents' phone. All this stuff." For the next two days, Amato drank brandy, cried and reminisced about Ledger riding horses back home in Perth. The morning he left, Vernon wrote the song's first draft.

The album's third song and second single was described by Vernon as being: "'Holocene' is a bar in Portland, Oregon, but it's also the name of a geologic era, an epoch if you will. It's a good example of how all the songs are all meant to come together as this idea that places are times and people are places and times are… people? They can all be different and the same at the same time. Most of our lives feel like these epochs. That's kind of what that song's about. "Once I knew I was not magnificent." Our lives feel like these epochs, but really we are dust in the wind. But I think there's a significance in that insignificance that I was trying to look at in that song."

On May 17, 2011, a month prior to its scheduled release, the entire album was briefly and accidentally made available for sale on iTunes, resulting in customers buying and leaking the album over torrents and file sharing services.

The album entered the UK charts at number 4 in the first week of release.

In November 2011, the album was re-released on iTunes with short films by visual artists Dan Huiting, Isaac Gale, David Jensen, JoLynn Garnes and Justin Vernon himself accompanying each track.

A 10th anniversary edition of the album with Justin Vernon and Sean Carey's October 2011 AIR Studios sessions was released on January 14, 2022, alongside an essay from Phoebe Bridgers on the physical release.