But it didn’t feel very good. In a 2008 interview with ABC News, Vernon looked visibly uneasy in the spotlight. In later interviews, he was more direct: he wasn’t ready for the fame. It wasn’t that Vernon resented listeners connecting with his music, but that the attention required him to perform, if not inhabit, the “sad boy” persona his songs seemed to summon.

His subsequent albums reflect a conscious resistance to that role. Determined not to be boxed in as the poster child of acoustic sincerity, Vernon experimented in ways uncommon in popular music. Yet sorrow remained his thematic polestar. Bon Iver, Bon Iver, his second album from 2011, which earned Vernon a Grammy for the exquisitely sad “Holocene,” layered lush instrumentation over the interior vastness For Emma had opened. By 2016’s 22, A Million, Vernon was processing sadness through digitized distortion—scrambled samples, autotuned vocals, atonal synthetic textures.

With i,i (2019), Vernon turned outward, toward more collective expressions of grief. Ecological fragility looms large—tracks like “Hey, Ma,” “Naeem,” and “Salem” could be adopted as anthems for climate justice. In the fall of 2020, I began bringing Bon Iver’s music into my courses on the ethics of climate change. More than any theological or philosophical text we read that semester, i,i gave my students a language to process their sadness over a world that was at turns sick (from the COVID-19 pandemic) and on fire.

I’d been turning to Vernon’s music to understand my own emotional life long before I introduced it in the classroom. When I first found Bon Iver after For Emma was released, I was caught in a depressive undertow, mistaking sorrow’s pull for truth’s depths. I’d come to see disappointment as life’s most dependable substance. Happiness, I now know, must be made—pursued, not inherited. But at the time, I kept making choices meant to repair my regret of previous mistakes: haphazardly transferring colleges at 19 after misconstruing my exhaustion as depression; marrying at 22, confusing love with a fear of loneliness; entering divinity school at 23, hoping religious transcendence might offer escape from the life my decisions had built. Through it all, the feeling of sorrow felt like the force of gravity.

Other metaphors also help explain what sadness came to mean to me throughout my twenties. While happiness felt too light to bear the weight of my experience, sadness was a sturdy kind of shelf upon which I could reliably set my moods. Or if happiness was a friend who visited irregularly, sadness was something like my 9 to 5, a structure around which I could organize my emotional routines.

Whatever the metaphor, Bon Iver’s music didn’t cure my sorrow, which is rarely why we turn to music anyway. It helped me hear it. Vernon’s gift lies in giving sadness texture and shape, making it feel companionable, like something you can live with, not just under. On his first four albums, sorrow isn’t an obstacle to living or even to understanding life, but a medium for its translation.

I said Bon Iver’s new album is about being happy, but that’s not strictly true. It’s about reckoning with what happiness might be—precisely because you’ve also come to terms with everything your sadness has been. Since such reflection occurs in two parts (looking back to look forward), SABLE, fABLE also takes a two-part structure. Technically it’s a double album.

The first part, SABLE, gathers the most recognizable elements of Bon Iver’s sound, as if out of habit. Yet there’s a quiet assurance here that, while these opening tracks remain familiar to Vernon’s normal emotional register, they don’t feel fated like they once did. That’s due, in large part, to the presence of a new emotional pliancy.

Take “S P E Y S I D E,” an early standout. What begins with what would typically read as Bon Iver vernacular, “I know now that I can’t make good,” is quickly complicated with an empathic desire for doing better: “Oh, how I wish I could go back and put me where you stood,” sings Vernon, his falsetto more naked than it’s been in years. Where For Emma once framed heartbreak in the language of imbalance—“I’m holding all the tickets, and you’ll be owning all the fines,” Vernon sang on “Skinny Love”—on “S P E Y S I D E” the gesture is toward repair beyond a tallying of hurts. SABLE’s dark textures may recall the Bon Iver of old, sure, but Vernon’s newfound buoyancy lets us know he has no interest in returning us (or himself) to the cabin.

It’s when “Short Story” kicks in, though, that the transition to fABLE, the album’s second part, takes hold. “Oh, the vibrance! Sun in my eyes,” Vernon sings, lustily as chanticleer, over a crescendo of layered synths and coruscating piano keys that could soundtrack a timelapse of snowmelt in springtime sun. Then, revelation: “January ain’t the whole world.” This, Vernon’s assertion that sorrow isn’t final, indeed that its comprehensiveness was never absolute, lands with unsettling force considering his larger oeuvre. The next lines deepen the turn: “Falling’s really over shown, and you’re never really, really on your own.”

What’s on offer here is more than merely the catharsis of shared grief, something Vernon delivered peerlessly time and again on previous Bon Iver releases. It’s rather a refusal to let winter stand for the whole of life, as well as an invitation to see that the prospect of stepping into whatever warmth we find near us holds the promise of our living year-round.

Vernon has said that, beyond writing sad songs, his greatest gift is cultivating what he calls a “church sensation.” “I love nothing more than trying to give that spirit to people—that church setting outside of doctrine,” he’s explained.¹ But after years of expertly channeling trouble and woe into moments of collective effervescence, Vernon began to feel as if he’d run his vehicle into the ground. Foremost on his mind was whether the source of his power was also limiting his personal and creative growth. Was he staying sad, effectively hurting himself, for artistic validation?

“Everything Is Peaceful Love,” fABLE’s second track, is Vernon’s answer to whether something other than cathartic sorrow can occasion transcendence. The song is an ecstasy, built around a refrain that’s a declaration of pure joy: “Damn if I’m not climbing up a tree right now,” Vernon exults, his voice simultaneously climbing the notes of a tonal scale. Most striking is the way Vernon marshals Bon Iver’s regular instrumental palette to evoke delight. Slide guitar is perhaps the saddest sounding instrument ever invented. But in “Everything Is Peaceful Love,” it lifts us skyward, an accelerant of the rapture Vernon wants—indeed, needs—us to know he feels.

Other songs on fABLE explore dimensions of happiness beyond the feeling of groundless, dizzying exhilaration. “Walk Home” slow-jams sexual fulfillment as a kind of reverie, while “From” is a profession of the patience love inspires. It’s also an homage to early-nineties Bonnie Raitt.

The best of the bunch, “Day One,” unfolds as a simple piano jig buried under sampled drums and layers of sonic residue: vocal snippets, warped synths, an ambient hiss, all evoking the feeling of Vernon talking through his mental health journey with a trusted group of friends. Jenn Wasner of Flock of Dimes and a Bon Iver bandmate delivers what may be the album’s clearest sense of hard-won insight: “Some may say that you lack the stuff, and you burn it down and clack your cuffs. But you may have to toughen up while unlearning that lie.” Our healing sometimes means stepping outside the circuits created by other people’s opinions to rewire our commitment to what’s true.

Not all of fABLE is successful. “I’ll Be There” and “If Only I Could Wait” on the back half of the album drift through dense emotional terrain without ever reaching a clear destination. The latter, a duet with Danielle Haim, stages a conversation that instead comes off as competing monologues. Vernon had less involvement in composing the music for SABLE, fABLE than on any previous Bon Iver release, and while that frees the album from familiar strains, it also dulls its edges. There are fewer musical risks here, and because of that, less surprise.

Vernon is no stranger to collaboration, and he’s long harnessed its power to escape the limits of the singer-songwriter archetype. On foregoing albums, especially i,i, Vernon’s interest in dissolving into his band’s collective hum yielded rich, genre-defying compositions. Yet on SABLE, fABLE, the ease of collaboration is more apparent than its urgency.

Predictability isn’t the problem here (it never has been for Bon Iver), but distance might be. SABLE, fABLE glows with the warmth and perspective of a man whose persistent questioning has led him, at last, to a kind of peace. Yet peace doesn’t bruise. Should we even want it to?

We’re led back, then, to the familiar happy/sad binary where we began. Because happiness resists elaboration, moves too quickly over things, it’s presumed to be shallower, more simplistic than the kinds of experience available to us when we’re sad. This is dissatisfying—just because happiness is untroubled doesn’t necessarily mean it’s also unexamined. It’s this facile sort of happiness that Vernon wants to explode.

By dawning the black robes, as it were, on SABLE so as to step into the light fABLE shines, Vernon could of course be accused of maintaining the binary he set out to negate. Yet negativity is kind of the point. While a lesser artist might have simply extolled happiness as a product of sorrow’s defeat, it’s to Vernon’s immense credit that he instead magnifies happiness and sorrow’s entanglement.

Vernon’s deepest insight, along these lines, is that the two feelings aren’t the antitheses they’re usually made out to be. They’re mutually implicating—states whose full meaning only appears when each is allowed to haunt the other. The early-nineteenth-century German philosopher G.W.F. Hegel would call Vernon’s approach a “tarrying with the negative,” which marks a crucial moment in Hegel’s articulation of the dialectical process from which thought emerges.² Consciousness develops, Hegel argues, by engaging, not avoiding, contradiction. Contradiction isn’t a failure of thought but its engine. On this angle, seemingly contradictory emotions like happiness and sadness aren’t strict opposites but instead are made possible only insofar as they preserve a knowledge of what the other entails. They each bear the negative of the other as a constitutive part of their formation.

On SABLE, fABLE, Vernon doesn’t flatten feelings of happiness and sadness into a contrived resolution. He lets the happiness he voices speak through his experience of the sadness it had to survive. (This is the point of fABLE, which holds the lessons Vernon has taken from sorrow’s influence.) Vernon’s sadness, conversely, reflects upon the latent happiness that made his becoming so sad possible in the first place. (That’s SABLE, a word meaning black, which Vernon makes darker by turning up the contrast.) Vernon thus isn’t denying the contradictions inherent to the two juxtaposed states, happy and sad. He’s tarrying with their negativity, and in the process enhancing negativity’s role in his coming to an awareness of how he thinks, how he experiences, which, according to Hegel, is tantamount to Vernon’s own path to truth.

Thankfully, Vernon doesn’t avail himself of philosophical language—or, mercifully, Hegel’s own idiosyncratic vocabulary—to articulate his enactment of dialectical awareness. “Can I feel another way? Or are less and more the same?” he sings at fABLE’s conclusion on its penultimate track, “There’s a Rhythm.” The repetition of relational intensities, not the pendulum swing between fixed poles, is the album’s fundamental emotional resonance. A brief, wordless coda, “Au Revoir,” follows Vernon singing the refrain, “There’s a rhythm, there’s a rhythm,” to close fABLE out. It’s a fitting dénouement. Like happiness and sorrow, we understand what it means to say hello because we also understand goodbye. Continuity, not opposition, abides the contradictions we bear.

While SABLE, fABLE isn’t Bon Iver’s best album, it’s Vernon’s wisest—and I don’t mean that as faint praise. The main realization that materializes across this new release, building on the lessons of all of Bon Iver’s music that have come before it, is: to be reconciled to contradiction isn’t to transcend ourselves, but it is to be transformed. It means acknowledging that the oppositions that trouble us, the sorrows we assume obstruct our joy, belong to who we are. The force of contradiction is internal. “You will never be complete,” Vernon sings on “Short Story.” “And the strain and thirst are sweet. You have not yet gone too deep.” We transform by going further in.

For years, I was preoccupied with transcendence and transformation as they’re conventionally understood. I wanted to become someone else—free of my mistakes, unburdened of regret. But the fantasy of shedding the self evades the risk of finally reentering it. Wholeness, if we can speak of it at all, comes from the contradictions we endure and never escape. I mean endurance here as persistence, not suffering—like how hope endures because it knows desperation, or clarity endures against the contrast shadow provides. I learned that the strength to say Yes to my life came from all the times I told it No.

The question thus isn’t whether people really change, tempting as that question is. It’s whether we learn to live with ourselves. Because change, when it comes, doesn’t result from sheer will or a flight from the past. It grows in the soil of acceptance when we stop desiring strict coherence and begin honoring our complexity. To the poet Rilke’s arresting imperative, “You must change your life,” Vernon’s response is the quieter, more challenging, and I think truer direction: You must embrace it first. It’s only then that, as Vernon sings in the SABLE track “Awards Season,” “You can be remade. You can live again.”

Russell C. Powell, a research affiliate at the Center for the Study of World Religions at Harvard Divinity School, examines the religious, ethical, and political resonances of contemporary environmental issues. He has a PhD from Princeton Theological Seminary.