Earlier this year, I thought about posting my favourite lyrics from Bon Iver’s LP Bon Iver, Bon Iver. But after the first two songs, I realized it was too difficult, like picking out what you thought were the best looking peacock feathers from a bunch that were the same, and as intricate as the rest.

We talked about this one lyric from the chorus of “Holocene” – the line “I could see for miles, miles, miles.” It makes me think of how tricky and strange the formulation of song-writing can be, and it makes you wonder why Justin Vernon decided not to use any conjunctions in this line. There’s a sense of flow, a prolonged sense of pain and exhaustion by the repetition of the long vowel sound in “miles”. And then you read an interview on Pitchfork, where Vernon talks about how in Milwaukee, adults “get blind drunk and try to forget about their childhoods,” and suddenly you realize this lyric is about (hasty) resolution and whether it can be sustained, about temporality and erasing the lines, charged with insignificance.