Reporting by Piet Levy, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel / Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
With Bon Iver, Justin Vernon became a Grammy-winning phenomenon spoofed on “Saturday Night Live.” His music inspired other seminal artists like Ed Sheeran, Lorde, James Blake and Phoebe Bridgers. He’s collaborated with a wide range of superstars, including Taylor Swift, Zach Bryan, Travis Scott, Noah Kahan and Kanye West on his landmark 2010 album “My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy.”
And en route to becoming one of music’s biggest stars, he’s nurtured his Wisconsin roots, from building a recording studio in his native Eau Claire County to collaborating and playing in bands with home-state friends to hosting a unique music festival in his hometown.
That festival, Eaux Claires, returns July 24 and 25 in Eau Claire’s Carson Park for its first installment since 2018. Curated by Vernon himself, Eaux Claires offers attractions not typically held at a music festival – this year, that includes a writers in residence program – with special bookings like a rare collaboration between EDM superstar Fred Again and the National’s Aaron Dessner, and Vernon himself leading a Bob Dylan tribute performance as “Bon Dylan.”
Ahead of Eaux Claires’ comeback, here’s more information on Vernon, one of the most accomplished and influential Wisconsin musicians of all time.
How Justin Vernon grew up in Wisconsin and fell in love with music
Born April 30, 1981, in Eau Claire, Vernon first found his love of music through his mother, Justine – she plays piano, organ and French horn, and would sing Indigo Girls, Neil Young and show tunes driving around her three kids. Vernon began playing in bands in sixth grade, and was in the jazz program at Eau Claire Memorial High School, where he also captained the football team, played basketball, and served on student council.
After graduating from the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire in 2004 with a world religious studies degree, Vernon moved the following year to Raleigh, N.C., as part of Wisconsin-born alt-country band DeYarmond Edison. But by 2006, after a falling out with his bandmates and breaking up with his girlfriend, Vernon was back in Wisconsin licking his wounds. And that’s when the Bon Iver story began.
How Justin Vernon, through Bon Iver, became an unlikely superstar
When Vernon returned to Wisconsin in late fall 2006, he retreated alone to his father Gil’s remote cabin in Dunn County, where he hunted deer, chopped wood and put up walls in a barn. He also started writing and recording folk songs about regrets and lost love, and developed what would become a signature falsetto, which he manipulated and layered to create a ghostly choir-like effect.
That was the birth of Bon Iver, a project whose name Vernon took from the show “Northern Exposure,” an intentionally misspelled French phrase that translates to “good winter.” Making that music, Vernon told the Journal Sentinel in 2018, was like “shedding skin.”
Listeners clearly felt that. The debut Bon Iver album, “For Emma, Forever Ago,” was released on MySpace in the spring of 2007, and self-released on 500 CDs, with 17 copies sent to music labels and websites. One of them was Pitchfork, the trendspotting music site that posted a glowing review that October, prompting major buzz and label interest. The following February, indie label Jagjaguwar re-released “Emma,” which became “the most important record we’ve ever released,” label co-founder Darius Van Arman told the Journal Sentinel in 2019.
“The initial plan was to set an initial budget where we would break even if we sold 5,000 records worldwide,” Van Arman said. “We sold that much in the first week and have been trying to keep up ever since.”
The album was certified platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America in 2018, with Pitchfork and Rolling Stone proclaiming it one of the best albums of the 2000s, and the latter putting the album on its list of best debuts of all time.
What albums has Bon Iver released, and what awards has it won?
“For Emma” was such a sensation that it threatened to become the one thing Bon Iver would be known for, a certain type of music fans would only demand from Vernon.
But following that debut, Vernon redefined what Bon Iver would stand for, drastically altering its sound across subsequent albums, and picking up raves and awards along the way.
In 2011 came sophomore album “Bon Iver, Bon Iver” which maintained the pretty fragility and intimacy of “Emma” but expanded on the sound with experimental, cinematic production. The band won two Grammys in 2012 – including a Best New Artist win – and Bon Iver became such a sizable figure in the pop-culture zeitgeist that Justin Timberlake played Vernon in a “Saturday Night Live” sketch that year.
Following the sophomore album’s touring obligations, Vernon took a break from the project, returning with a third album in 2016, the even more experimental “22, A Million,” with glitchy and chaotic electronic beats alongside pretty musical passages. Even though Bon Iver was back, Vernon opted to partially conceal his face in promotional photos due to discomfort with fame.
Bon Iver again earned great reviews and Grammy nominations, including Album of the Year, for 2019’s “I,I” which saw Vernon and his collaborators altering the Bon Iver blueprint with more sonic experimentations.
In 2025 came what Vernon has suggested in interviews may be the final Bon Iver album: “SABLE, fABLE.” Its first songs are closer to what Vernon did on “For Emma” than anything that came after, but the album shifts to again throw sonic curveballs, with Vernon, a typically cryptic songwriter, offering some of his most direct lyrics to date, and also some of his most positive music yet. Great reviews and Grammy nominations again followed, but Vernon opted not to tour behind the album, making his upcoming Eaux Claires appearance his only planned performance of 2026.
Justin Vernon influenced, collaborated with superstars like Taylor Swift and Ed Sheeran
After the breakout of “For Emma,” music superstars joined fans, labels and reporters in taking notice.
In the wake of “Emma,” Kanye West similarly used vocal manipulation to express his feelings on breakup album “808s & Heartbreaks” later that year. For 2010’s “Fantasy,” West enlisted Vernon as a collaborator, using Vernon’s distorted falsetto for a pivotal palate-cleansing intro on “Lost in the World.” It’s the most pronounced pairing of the two artists, with Vernon having a hand on other tracks on “Fantasy,” plus on the West albums “Yeezus” and “Ye,” and West’s “Watch The Throne” album with Jay-Z.
Other noteworthy Vernon collaborations include for rapper Travis Scott’s 2023 “Utopia” album (on the songs “My Eyes” and “Delresto (Echoes)”); a remix of Charli XCX’s “I Think About It All The Time” from her zeitgeist-seizing “Brat” album; and on the song “Boys of Faith” with outspoken Bon Iver fan Zach Bryan.
Vernon’s music has also had a big influence on other influential artists like Ed Sheeran – who tattooed the lyrics to “Emma” song “re:stacks” on his arm – and electronic artist James Blake. Blake listened to “Emma” “obsessively” in college, he told the Journal Sentinel in 2013, before he went on to influence artists like Frank Ocean and Drake, and collaborate with Beyoncé and Vernon himself.
But the most noteworthy Bon Iver fan and collaborator is Taylor Swift, who got a Grammy nomination for a Vernon duet, “Exile,” on her surprise 2020 album “Folklore.” “He’s just the coolest,” Swift said of Vernon on the Disney+ special “Folklore: The Long Pond Studio Sessions.” Vernon also got a thank-you from the superstar when “Folklore” won Album of the Year at the Grammys, and he appeared on five songs on the second surprise Swift album of 2020, “Evermore.”
As popularity grew, Justin Vernon kept working in Wisconsin, and working with Wisconsin musicians
As Vernon continued to achieve success, he did something not every international breakout artist from Wisconsin has done: He stuck around. While living in Eau Claire, he became co-owner of built-from-scratch Eau Claire boutique hotel the Oxbow, and made music and toured with longtime Wisconsin friends in the blues rock trio the Shouting Matches and art rock group Volcano Choir.
Vernon also built a studio in Fall Creek, Wisconsin, called April Base that became Vernon’s frequent musical playground, and where artists like Sufjan Stevens, Bruce Hornsby and Indigo Girls (and Wisconsin bands with Vernon friends, like Altos) made albums.
“We’re losing money on it, but I don’t care,” Vernon told the Journal Sentinel in 2013. “The goal with the place is for people to make records there for weeks at a time and have it be a safe, special summer camp for adults to make important music.”
He also used his celebrity to get behind the Confluence Project to bring a new performing arts venue to Eau Claire, with the the Pablo Center at the Confluence opening in 2018. And he got involved in the “For Wisconsin” voting initiative in 2020 that Swift herself promoted. (In terms of his personal politics, Vernon performed at Wisconsin rallies for presidential candidate Bernie Sanders in 2016 and Kamala Harris in 2024.)
And he established the Eaux Claires festival, which ran annually from 2015 to 2018, and returns in 2025. Featuring exclusive festival performances like Paul Simon performing with chamber string group yMusic; the premiere of Bon Iver’s “22, A Million;” and star-studded tributes to John Prine the Grateful Dead, Eaux Claires drew about 25,000 people a year from 2015 to 2017 who annually spent $6.8 million in the community during the festival, according to Visit Eau Claire.
This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: What to know about Justin Vernon, the Eau Claire musician of Bon Iver
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