Bon Iver to Release 10th-Anniversary Edition of Album with Elaborate Artwork Elucidated

Bon Iver, whose music has evolved over time from sparse acoustic folk to a synthesized sound suggestive of intricate worldbuilding, will release a deluxe 10th-annivesary edition an album that counted as a Gesamtkunstwerk when it helped reposition the band in 2016.

For 22, A Million, the group’s third album, artist and designer Eric Timothy Carlson effectively joined the band and became an integral part of its creative process, such that its distinctive symbolist visual language and iconography figured in the making of the music and vice-versa. In an essay included in the album’s expanded release, scheduled for November 20, Carlson writes, “It takes a particular commitment to ambitiously pursue the visual work in the same breath as the music itself.”

As a press release announcing 22, A Million (10th Anniversary Edition) puts it: “Throughout the songs we encounter a collection of numerical relationships – binary code, mystic ages, Bible chapters, math-logic, repeating infinities – and inside these numbers are a sonic distillation of imagery describing positionality (‘Down along the creek,’ ‘In the stair up off the hot car lot’), strategies (‘I’d make myself escape,’ ‘Steal and rob it’), situations (‘Carrying his guitar,’ ‘Sent your sister home in a cab’), new lexicon (‘Astuary King,’ ‘Wandry,’ “Paramind’), temporalities (‘The math ahead, the math behind,’ ‘It might be over soon’) and recurring visuals (‘Five lane divers’).”

Carlson—who has worked on subsequent Bon Iver albums including SABLE, fABLE, whose salmon color was granted an official Pantone designation last year—delves into the creative process behind 22, A Million in a new 12-page booklet detailing the collaboration. More of a sample, in the artist’s words: “The songs were born as numbers, initially an unsettled numerology that calcified over time as the songs came into their own. The idea was to find an icon to hold each track. The Western Arabic numerals were to remain intact yet asked to be realized as unique forms, ligatures, glyphs, and monograms.”