Justin Vernon

“I don't want the big flashing lights and red carpet, like, 'Here comes another Bon Iver album!' I just want it to be my bedroom-y thing. But that'll take a while to figure out.”

“I don't really write songs anymore.”

“I'm just happy and proud to be playing music every day. Recognition is really cool, but it can also be kind of scary.”

“Our lives feel like these epochs, but really, we are dust in the wind.”

“I really have to be in a specific headspace to even begin to illuminate an idea that would create another Bon Iver record, and I'm just not there.”

“The falsetto stuff, it must be a reaction to the black gospel singers that I really enjoy listening to.”

“I'm barely at home enough to enjoy the simple lifestyle that I want to live.”

“I'm really honored that Bon Iver gives me a platform to do whatever I want, but there's only so much time you can spend digging through yourself before you become insular. I'm not in a hurry to go back to that temperature.”

“There's a few times in the past when I wrote a song, and I put the words together, and they were very clear pictures, and I felt like I was putting together a really good story. But I don't think I was ever really able to stay on that. What I've sort of developed lyrically is more about the sound of the vocals and what they are.”

“I could go on and on and on about how we use the word 'place' in so many different ways. About how somebody might ask you 'Where you at?' And they're not asking where are you sitting, where are you living, they're asking: 'How are you doing?”

“For the most part, I've been influenced by black singers and singers I couldn't sound like. Whenever I tried to do a dark note or a bent note, I would just sound like Hootie And The Blowfish.”

“I don't want to get myself in trouble - and I don't think I'm super important or anything - but I think it's so funny that when you look at the business and the way that people make decisions in their lives, whether they're in art or music or they're in industry, they forget that being unique is the answer.”

“Those old Appalachian singers use a falsetto sometimes. They can change their voices to sound high or low or really scratchy. When you're singing, usually you're trying to express some kind of pain or joy. I think that voice allows me to do a lot more of that.”

“There's a large opportunity for Bon Iver to be a special thing, even from a business standpoint - just trying to do cooler things. Every band sells t-shirts and plays certain auditoriums, but I'm sick of being like everyone else, because I'm not.”

“I can pour myself into Bon Iver. It's a thing about self- and mental discovery, and those are all important things. But it's not 148-shows-over-a-year-and-a-half important, though. It's a machine, and it's money, and you just get put on this indie rock cart, and it's embarrassing.”

“Just in general as a person, not necessarily as a songwriter, being in cities wasn't the right fit. I couldn't escape and be in the woods in 10 minutes if I needed to. I like that in Eau Claire, I can walk to a bar or a coffee shop, and there's city-ish things, but I can also drive and in eight minutes be at my parents' land outside of town.”

“Growing up, all I did was write about the fact that I'm from where I'm from. I was a big champion of where I was from and Wisconsin in general, and the Midwest.”

“It just didn't seem to fit the story and lineage, I guess. So I just sort of surrounded 'Blood Bank' with three other songs that were very different from one other, and they all kind of came together as a palette cleanser for the last record. And I'm really excited about it.”

“I know too many musicians that have to tour on the same 10 songs, and they burn out. They get back to their house, and they have no reason to write new music. They are music'd out.”

“The way I see it is that I grew up with a good set of values, but it was never too strict. I was always encouraged to be a free-thinking individual. I spent the first five years out of high school trying to make it work in Eau Claire, then I had to leave because there wasn't enough going on in town.”