Skinny Love

Justin Vernon recorded For Emma, Forever Ago alone in a cabin in Wisconsin during a winter of illness and emotional collapse. The record that emerged — made with a laptop, a microphone, and whatever instruments were at hand — became one of the most celebrated independent releases of the late 2000s.

Skinny Love is the album's most urgently melodic track: Vernon's falsetto straining at the top of its range, the acoustic guitar as insistent as a heartbeat, the lyrics aching in the particular way of someone trying to articulate a grief not yet become language.

For Emma announced a voice and sensibility that have continued to evolve through increasingly ambitious Bon Iver records. But the cabin record retains something the later, more orchestrated work cannot reproduce: the sound of being utterly alone with a feeling.