Bon Iver at First Avenue - Photo by Stacy Schwarz

For Emma, Forever Ago—whose intriguing provenance has been documented almost to the point of legend—is an intimate, inward album, right down to the wood-grained production and stark instrumentation. Justin Vernon stays true enough to that aesthetic in performance, but complicates and burnishes his creations with noisy jams and keening soundscapes that burn hotter than anything on the record, the band members feeding off each others’ energy and that of the audience, the quieter spaces in the songs swelling to fill the room, the clamor of the crowd replacing the creaky paucity of the album’s sonic landscape.

I can only surmise that Justin Vernon connects with something in people that’s more than musical, more than even the emotional string that gets plucked inside us when we’re truly moved by our favorite music. It goes beyond even that. He connects with something deeply interior and private in us, which makes it all the more incongruous when that connection is made so publicly, over and over, in so many people at once—it’s beautiful, yes, but in an almost unsettling, voyeuristic way. Like you’ve stumbled upon something secret you weren’t meant to see.

So the connection, the communion is of course not going to be obvious or even apparent. Maybe the closest it ever came to an outward manifestation on Friday night during was a handful of moments—the cover of Talk Talk’s “I Believe In You” that the band turned into a slow-burning stoner jam; the customary singalong at the end of “Wolves I & II”; or the wrenching, nearly a capella cover of Sarah Siskind’s “Lovin’s For Fools.” But not even those highlights, those reference points come close to describing the sum effect of the music, to mapping the correlation between what was happening in the Main Room and what was truly happening deep inside everyone. Not even close.

Backstage at First Ave - Photo by Stacy Schwarz