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‘Have the courage to walk away’: Bon Iver on romance, retirement and his rapturous new record

Riven with anxiety from years of touring, Justin Vernon found he couldn’t leave the house. Then a new relationship changed his concept of love. His radiant new album shares the revelations

As soon as Vernon hit the public eye in 2008, he started pulling away from its obsessive glare – and from the caricature of him as the lonely woodsman who made his era-defining debut, For Emma Forever Ago, in a hunting cabin in his native Wisconsin. “I don’t really want to talk about Kanye,” he says – having worked on My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy and Yeezus, long before the rapper’s heel turn – “but it’s a good example of observing when people have their head up their ass a little bit, or they’re so busy, and so needed, that you start getting soft.” Days before Sable, Fable’s release, I speak to Vernon again: he has just flown to a cottage he’s been renting in Los Angeles, where he’s been splitting his time, after seeing Bob Dylan play Eau Claire at the weekend.

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