NOT MAGNIFICENT (profanity alert):

"It's sort of odd to look back and see it as magical, because it felt like a lonely few months at the cabin, where I plugged in the laptop and f[****] around," Vernon told The AV Club after the album's release -- and for his second album, Bon Iver, first released in 2011 and now re-released for its 10th anniversary -- he destroyed that mythological cabin and let the world in. Though the overall atmosphere of For Emma remains intact -- it's still gentle, occasionally a little bit glitchy for indie-folk-this is something much, much bigger. Gone were the gentle spatterings of drums and horns that made their way into For Emma, occasionally reminding you of a world outside of the cabin. Bon Iver is comparatively maximalist, with Vernon (supplying about 20 different instruments and sound sources, like choir recordings and handclaps) joined by 10 other musicians, each of them manning boatloads of different instruments themselves. We get the equivalent of an orchestra spread out over these songs, with every woodwind, string, and percussion instrument you could want thrown into the mix. Want some saxophone? Not to worry -- Colin Stetson is here, and outside of his flute and clarinet, he's got three different kinds of saxes. This is also where Vernon's streak of collaborations with the likes of Sean Carey (otherwise known as S. Carey) began, and where you'll find a few of Vernon's Volcano Choir compatriots. Bon Iver teems with life, with all of the other organisms in Vernon's sphere all perfectly matched with the album's aesthetic.

The ever-present desire to rejoin the world at large is baked into the DNA of this album; hell, just look at the cover, which gives us the painted image of a cabin, but also surrounds it with an expanding world that you can't quite make out the exact shapes of, but that you know are there. The fact that every song on Bon Iver is named for a place feels like the exact move someone might make when they want to escape their loner legacy by invoking the scope of the world. He invokes Wisconsin, but also Australia, Texas, Canada, Michigan, Washington. He also plays with the layered meanings of everything; with "Towers," he gives us a nondescript location that makes us imagine something grand, but in the song, the "towers" refer to the inside of a honeycomb. Then there's beloved single "Holocene": it's named for a bar in Portland, OR, but it's also named for the geological epoch, the song's double meaning helping to center a location far away from April Base Studio (the veterinary-clinic-turned-recording-studio Vernon converted in Fall Creek, WI), but a period of time too grand to even fully fathom. "Holocene" joins a long, long legacy of songs that grapple with the understanding that any one life is insignificant in the grand scheme of time itself, giving us a brief thesis statement that seems to perfectly capture where Vernon's mindset was at the time: "And at once, I knew/ I was not magnificent."

Tweet   @brothersjudd