Justin Vernon, better known as Bon Iver, is like one of those people that you meet for the first time, and after talking to them for fifteen minutes it seems as if you’ve known them for fiftteen years. I have never met Bon Iver (sadly) and he doesn’t share a lot of his personal life online in blogs or in interviews, so it’s hard to really know him as an artist. He reaches out and shares his persaonal experiences and heartaches through his music.

If you search in his name on Youtube, you’ll most likely find two music videos and a few of his one-of-a-kind lyric videos, all with millions of views. How could he be so popular in the world of music, and yet so many people have never heard his name? On the outside he covers all of the bases of a song writer and composer, creating albums every year or two, releasing a couple of music videos, and going on tour. Within his music he surpasses those bases by a long-slide, diving deeper into the words, sounds, and meaning behind each letter and guitar strum, than any artist of his time ever could.

I could be a little biased, but I believe that Bon Iver could easily be one of the greatest music writers of all time. His lyrics are nothing short of poetry, and are layered over of an unmatchable melody made with a little help from his instruments and technology.

At the start, my vision for this article was to different than it is now, because of one excerpt that Bon Iver said in one of his interviews, “We are in a room right now talking about music, and that is both ridiculous and amazing. It’s so ‘unnecessary’ and yet so necessary.” This sentence could be used a defining point of Bon Iver’s music, scaling his fans back, urging them to listen to his music because they want to. He reminds us that the effort should be out into the music, not the gimmicks that tend to distract us.

His songs act as a breath of fresh air, truly bringing his audience out of the reality we thought we knew, and into one inside of ourselves.