Artist

Bon Iver

US indie folk band

Eau Claire, United States • Formed 2006

Bon Iver is a music group from Eau Claire, United States, active since 2006. Their discography on Gatefold includes 11 records.

Start your shelf →Open in app

Albums tracked

464

In collections

2006

Since

Biography

Bon Iver is a Grammy Award winning folk band from Eau Claire, Wisconsin, United States, and one of Justin Vernon's current and most notable music projects to date. The band also consists of Mike Noyce, Sean Carey and Matt MacCaughan. The name 'Bon Iver' (pronounced "bon ee-VAIR") is a play on the French phrase 'bon hiver' meaning 'good winter'. Vernon independently released Bon Iver's debut album For Emma, Forever Ago in 2007, most of which was recorded during a four-month stay in a remote cabin in Wisconsin.

The Arc of Bon Iver

The pivots — what forced Bon Iver to reinvent.

The Cabin Isolation
After the collapse of his previous projects and his personal life, Vernon retreated to his father's cabin to track For Emma, Forever Ago. The record is defined by its limitations: the creak of floorboards, the hum of a cheap interface, and the use of falsetto to reach notes his speaking voice couldn't handle. It is a document of accidental lo-fi brilliance that relies entirely on raw performance over production polish. When it finally got picked up by Jagjaguwar, it transformed from a private demo into the blueprint for a decade of indie folk.
The April Base Expansion
For the self-titled 2011 follow-up, Vernon moved into a massive renovated studio space and brought in session heavyweights like Colin Stetson and Greg Leisz. He traded the solo acoustic guitar for pedal steel, horns, and 1980s adult-contemporary textures that sounded like Bruce Hornsby on a bender. This era moved the project from a bedroom hobby to a maximalist orchestral force, winning Grammys and proving he could lead a large-scale ensemble. The sound is lush, reverb-soaked, and far more concerned with the texture of a place than the lyrics of a song.
The Messina Glitch
The 22, A Million sessions marked a total rejection of the 'folk' label, driven by the creation of the Messina and the OP-1 sampler. Vernon started chopping his vocals into digital fragments and replacing song titles with numerology and symbols. The acoustic instruments are still there, but they’re buried under layers of distortion and granular synthesis that make the records sound like they’re being transmitted from a dying satellite. It was a polarizing shift that successfully shed the casual listeners who just wanted more songs about heartbreak in the woods.

Influences

Bruce Hornsby — Vernon has cited Hornsby’s piano style and 'The Way It Is' as core DNA, eventually bringing him in to play on 'i,i.' You hear it in the bright, mid-tempo piano clusters and the soft-rock palette of the self-titled record. It’s the sound of the 80s Midwest filtered through an indie lens.
Bonnie Raitt — The track 'I Can't Make You Love Me' is a staple of Vernon's live sets and a direct influence on his vocal delivery. Her influence is all over his soulful, yearning phrasing and the way he uses silence between notes. It’s the bridge between his folk roots and his R&B sensibilities.
Mahalia Jackson — Vernon frequently references Jackson as a primary influence on his approach to choral arrangements and vocal power. The layered 'choir of one' effect on his early work is a direct attempt to replicate the spiritual weight of her gospel recordings. You hear that devotional intensity in every stacked harmony on 22, A Million.
Peter Gabriel — The two collaborated on the 'Scratch My Back' project, but Gabriel's influence dates back to his experimental use of Fairlight samplers and world-music textures. The shift from pop songwriting to textural soundscapes in Bon Iver's middle era mirrors Gabriel's own departure from Genesis. It’s that shared obsession with the studio as an instrument.
The Staple Singers — Vernon has pointed to the group's early folk-gospel records as the reason he started exploring the lower registers of his voice alongside the falsetto. The raw, tremolo-heavy guitar work on 'For Emma' owes a massive debt to Pops Staples’ minimalist style. It grounds his more experimental tendencies in something much older and dustier.