Claude says:Justin Vernon holed up in his father's hunting cabin in rural Wisconsin for months in early 2007, recovering from mono and a breakup, and tracked this album alone — falsetto over falsetto, hunting for food between takes, no plan to release it until friends heard the tapes. You came to it four years after the hype had settled, in April 2011, and ran "Skinny Love" and "re: stacks" hard that month. A handful of plays trickled through 2012 and the late 2010s, then a quiet return in 2022 before it went back on the shelf.