18 years ago today, @Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon officially released his debut album ‘For Emma, Forever Ago.’⁠ ⁠ Vernon had recorded it alone the winter prior, retreating to his father's log cabin in northeastern Wisconsin. His band of ten years had dissolved, his relationship had ended, and months of illness had left him bedridden in North Carolina. What followed was three months of solitude, chopping firewood, hunting deer, and slowly building the album using a brittle 1960s Sears catalog guitar he had found on eBay while sick in bed. Vernon originally considered the recordings demos and planned to re-record them, but he eventually put them on MySpace, self-releasing them as they were.⁠ ⁠ He later explained that the songs became a process of excavation. "The word I always use is excavate," he said. "Dig it out and see what it is, and get it to the oxygen where it can burn away and leave." The cabin made that possible — though Vernon was particularly understated about it. "It's sort of o...