This year, a particular reminder appeared in my Facebook memories. A random March 7th in 2016 I wrote a few paragraphs about Bon Iver’s second album, Bon Iver, Bon Iver, which turns 10 today (curiously, that same year Bon Iver would announce its follow up after five years). Not only that is the one first piece of writing I dedicated to an album, it is also an example of how influential that particular collection of tracks is for me. In the first iteration of Sound Exposure I transcribed that initial ‘review’ expanded it and gave it a more formal structure. I insist, that was because, in a way, I can’t escape that album. I need to return to it eventually, and now I’m doing so again.

I remember the first time I listened to Bon Iver, Bon Iver. Coming from the highly regarded and influential folk record, the isolated-in-the-woods For Emma, Forever Ago, Justin Vernon of Bon Iver, suddenly found himself motivated to expand the project beyond any boundaries that could’ve possibly existed before. Bon Iver, Bon Iver sounds like a man setting himself free after dealing with an emotional tornado and placing himself in a particular time and space. The album’s wide-reaching nature would have big consequences in the band’s career and Vernon reaction to that is understandable after analyzing the context.

Bon Iver were going big in 2011. A massive tour, TV appearances, Vernon being impersonated by Justin Timberlake on SNL, the band winning the Grammy for Best New Artist; all these were byproducts of an album that greatly expanded on the band’s sound and harnessed Vernon’s textured songwriting to create something as approchable as it was beautiful. Of course, Vernon’s appearance in one of Kanye West’s most lauded albums the previous year helped a lot to the newfound attention, but the band’s heart-pumping performances of songs that feel as grandiose as they are intricate definitely are a big contributor.

From start to finish, the album flows, track after track, as a road trip, the kind that gets you deeply invested in the journey, making meaningful reflections on every part of it. An analogy that can be taken literally, as many of the songs here are are entitled as places or referencing them. ‘Perth’, ‘Minnesota’, ‘Wash.’, ‘Calgary’, (even the album title resembles an address) these particular names, although specific, seem more like pinpoints for all the things expressed throughout the verses of these songs. Even ‘Holocene’, a beautiful piece of shimmery folk, with its fingerpicked arpeggios and faded marching drums in the background, is a song about a realization of personal worth, entitled by our current geological period and a bar in Portland.

After all these years I keep noting, and have come to fully understand that thread between Bon Iver, Bon Iver‘s tracks: places. Not only physical space but spiritual also. The value of realizing where you’re at, in a particular moment in your life, is not only attached to making sense of what surrounds you and what you can touch and perceive with your senses, it is also creating a connection of what you perceive, how that touches your feelings and how ultimately you’re able to process it. This underlying focus keeps all these tracks moving, something that has given me the chance to greatly enjoy the album whether deep in my thoughts, isolated in my bedroom, or just driving to a particular place, letting myself go to the rhythm and pace of every sound in the record.

If all of this meaning of ‘personal location’ makes sense to how the album was made and interpreted on a larger scale, then ‘Beth/Rest’ is actually the perfect example of a destination. Its intertwining horns and guitar, the washy, 80s-drenched beat and Vernon’s thundering yet tender voice drawing to a close a blood-pumping personal expression which was presented on Vernon’s own terms. Loving to this day how the lyrics more than fully formed sentences, are short-lived ideas connected between themselves with the main purpose of serving the song itself.

Vernon would immerse himself in themes of spirituality and self-realization on Bon Iver, Bon Iver’s two 2010s follow-ups. Hiding himself from the public scrutiny behind cryptic titles and heavily-processed samples, Vernon’s focus would be one of oblique experimentation somehow maintaining the beauty intrinsic to Bon Iver’s music. This outlines how the band’s second album portrays a facet of the band we may never listen to again. And that’s arguably Ok. That’s one of the beauties of this collection of tracks, it is simultaneaously embedded in a particular moment of the band’s history (spring, to be exact) and it is not specifically identified by it. It exists freely in our minds and the band’s catalogue with meaningful weight and emotion.

Curiously, I didn’t put it at the top of my favorite 100 albums of the decade list (number 3 is still good). But it is still my favorite album of the last 10 years. A few months after it came out, Bon Iver, Bon Iver became an indelible part of my music library. After all these years it is definitely a record I can still put on whenever and get myself embraced by it. I’m still deciphering it, I’ve been doing so since it came out and I’m always inclined to it. I have to stop me from putting it every day, because this album is full with unbriddled fervor; it is closure and re-start; it is the sound of breaking ground; it is all we know; it is Axiom.

For the love, comes the burning young

From the liver sweating through your tongue

Well, you’re standing on my steernum

Don’t you climb back darling

Oh, the sermons are the first to rest

Smoke on Sundays when you’re drunk and dressed

Out the hollows where the swallow nests