“Hey, Joe.”

“Where are you?”

“In Eau Claire, by the mall, where I can get reception.”

“Cool.”

“The fish is amazing, what, right over your head.”

“Yeah, right?”

[laughs]

“Where are you?

You have a nice pink background.

I like this.”

“Yeah, we call it red.”

[singing] “All my life, I was ...

... keepin’ what you tellin’ me, I know mine.”

“I’ve known Justin since we were 16 years old.”

“And what was he like when he was 16 years old?”

“Exactly like he is now.”

“[singing] Back in all those sunny days.

Back in all those days by the water.”

“Did you always think of Justin as the one?”

“We didn’t know any better, but we

knew that that was a crazy voice.”

“[singing] I’m gonna suckle on the hope in light brassieres.

My, my, my--”

“He’s going to be tinkering till the day he dies,

trying to figure out what else is a possibility.”

“Here we go.

Are you recording, Trevor?”

“Yes.”

“My best friend, Trevor, and I,

we were out up in the bar in the middle of the winter,

making music in whatever way we could.”

“It’s kind of like free improv performance art

work that we do, but mainly just for ourselves.

Right away, he kind of went to a radio

and was messing around with the different knobs.”

“I was turning the radio on and off.

Still don’t know what song is playing.”

“And then I started sliding on this piece of cardboard.”

“Trevor was just dead on with the slides."

“And do you hear that as a beat, essentially?”

“Yeah, it’s like the—

you hear it in hip-hop sometimes.

It’s, like, the chop.”

“It’s sort of rhythmic and sort of melodic,

and you can kind of start to mess with it.”

“But it was such a fragment of an idea,

and even then, he was dead serious.

He was like, this is going to be the first song

on the next Bon Iver record.”

“The part that I wrote came about from a jam

that we did maybe four years ago.”

“Justin’s really good at piecing it together

in weird ways.”

“Maybe a year later, we were in London.

James Blake was in the neighborhood,

and so I had him come by, and he just improvised.”

“Justin invites a pretty eclectic cast of characters.

He loves to be in the middle of all this

but sort of let the chaos unfold.”

“It’s kind of like a little game that you play with

the song, like you try and figure out what works

and what doesn’t.”

“I didn’t even know who Bon Iv— uh,

I didn’t know who Justin was.

You know, when he played it,

I was like, load me up, come on with it.

And I just threw the drums on, and then

that [expletive] just turned into a whole ’nother genre.”

“God, I mean, I will never remember all the things

we tried to do on this song.”

“I made three trips to Wisconsin,

and each time, it was in kind of a different place.”

“We just kept trying stuff.

Oh, let’s play new chords.

Let’s do piano.

Someone play acoustic.

Let’s do a bunch of electric guitars.”

“Justin was kind of like, try anything, anywhere.”

“Throughout most of this,

Justin had not sung on it at all.

There wasn’t — there wasn’t even really a scratch vocal

for a long time.

I think a yearslong time.”

“I could never figure it out,

and I think I was scared for many—

I think writing the first verse of this album,

you get scared, you get in your head,

you have little obstacles.”

“When we got to Texas, it was, all right,

we’ve got to figure this out."

“The ranch is 40 miles south of El Paso.”

“The property butts up against

the United States-Mexico border.”

“There is literally a wall on Tony’s property,

and then on Tony’s property, there’s no wall.

It just, like, stops.

So you can just put your hand over and here I am, Mexico.

This is all very [expletive] up.

Doesn’t make any sense.

A lot of perspective there.

While we were at Sonic Ranch,

it was still very, very unfinished, this song.

And I’m still just like, it's got to be the first song,

got to be the first song.

And Brad’s just like, it’s not a song at all, you know?”

“I show up and I can’t find anyone.

And of course, the first person I run into

is Justin, smirking ear to ear.

Bon Iver was my hero in college.

Because of that, I was really motivated

to try some [expletive].”

“Justin played on that song right away,

and he looked him in the eye,

and he’s like, I don’t get it.

I want to figure out what the [expletive] is going on.”

“I didn’t see any significance in doing that at all

until, while I was working on it, I’d just see almost all

of them pacing around, listening through the door,

and that if I wasn’t nervous, that made me very nervous.”

“That was a really big turning point for that song.”

“What did you do to it?”

“God, I feel like I was Jackson Pollock-ing it,

and you’re asking me, what colors didn’t I use?

I don’t even remember.”

“What you would understand to be a chorus—

—he took that little part, cut it out,

and made it sort of this hook, and then put bass under it

and made it feel like a drop.”

“He pulled a form out of that song

that hadn’t been there before.”

“And it was giving me some new energy.”

“He was just like, man, I’m going to sing on this.

I’m going to sing on this.

And I think that was it.

That was his reaction.”

“Brad's just like, dude, you got to write this verse.

Go write this [expletive] verse.

Go [expletive] do this, you know?

Like here’s your bars, do something.

Brad’s a really good friend.

He produced me as a person, just as much as a musician,

really, in the last few years.

He’s just encouraging.”

“Justin’s had a hard time asking

for help over the years.”

“You get tied up in knots inside.

These knots get so — so thick and so tight,

that you don’t even know where to begin to unravel them.”

“If I’m going to be honest with you,

I think there was some real burnout going on.”

“When I was going through some tougher [expletive],

like battling all that [expletive], the fame

and attention, the inability to have relationships,

the inability — just the isolation of where I found

myself, Brad got me to relax and just

say what I’m feeling.”

“As soon as he sings, I feel like it

makes everything right.”

“It still makes me cry.”

“I like it when people get inspired,

because when they get inspired,

they usually have some sort of empathetic, euphoric feeling.

That’s the idea with Bon Iver in general.

It’s just like a little town of people trying to be good.”

“This song has been a beast for us.”

“I do love that song.

I don’t know, it makes total sense to me.

I just hear it and I’m like, oh, yeah, cool tune.”

“It was very interesting to see that progression

from that first recording into what the song is now.”

“One of the guys said even Frank Ocean

might have been around when James

was messing with the song.

“Yeah, I think Frank took his track, though, man.

I don't know what he did.”

Classic.

“He’s like, yo, like, some crazy Midwest dude.

I’m taking these tracks out of here.”

[laughs] “Fair enough.”