For Emma, Forever Ago by Bon Iver

For Emma, Forever Ago, the debut from Bon Iver, first slipped out as a self-release in July 2007 before Jagjaguwar gave it a proper launch in February 2008. It's really Justin Vernon's record. Laid low by mononucleosis and a liver infection and fed up with his life and his songs in Raleigh, North Carolina, he holed up in his father's hunting cabin outside Eau Claire, Wisconsin, and made these tracks there from late 2006 into early 2007, hunting for his own food and seeing almost nobody.

You can hear the snow on it. Vernon sang wordless melodies first and fitted words to them afterward, so its songs of lost love and mediocrity arrive half-buried under a stacked, churchy choir of his own falsetto, folk guitar and the odd mournful horn. He never set out to make an album; friends pushed him to release it. "Skinny Love" became the one everybody knows, and it went gold.

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