Second Nature

Bon Iver builds this track in layers that accumulate like sediment — synthesizers and processed vocals and percussion arriving gradually until what started as something bare has become dense, almost humid. Justin Vernon's voice is treated here as texture as much as carrier of melody, run through pitch correction and harmonizers until it multiplies into something that sounds less like a person and more like a memory of a person, slightly smeared by time. The song is about accommodation, about the way behaviors and emotional patterns stop feeling chosen and start feeling inevitable, the moment when a relationship or a way of being stops requiring effort because it has become the only mode you know. There is something melancholy in that, and something comforting too — the ambivalence is not resolved, just held. Rhythmically the track is unhurried but not static; it breathes and shifts, the drums dropping away and returning as if testing their own necessity. This belongs to the particular tradition of Bon Iver's later work where folk foundations get submerged under electronic processing until genre becomes irrelevant, and what remains is pure atmosphere and feeling. You listen to it on a long drive at dusk when you're trying to figure out whether something in your life became a habit because it was right or simply because you stopped examining it.