Hunting a Myth in the Wisconsin Woods

Hunting a Myth in the Wisconsin Woods For years Justin Vernon has loomed over the Badger State town of Eau Claire. At a music festival he curated there this weekend, the mystique went full supernatural. Seven hours before Justin Vernon will possess the body of Bob Dylan, northern Wisconsin is thinking about God. More accurately, time, the universe and God. The literary author Sheila Heti is holding a writing workshop inside a schoolhouse-museum in a sprawling wooded park in the town of Eau Claire, and she advises the packed room to include those elements. Also, to invite the universe along as co-author. “Should I make my protagonist first-person or third-person? Should my book be long or short? Flip a coin,” she encourages. “Chance is a tool.” Heti has been brought here by Justin Vernon, the 45-year-old creative force behind the iconoclastic indie-music act Bon Iver, long-running avatars of beautiful melancholia. Everyone here has been brought by Vernon, really, by mystical conjuring if not literal invitation, the rock star as co-author. The celebrated musicians, the eclectic writers, the artist troupes, the lumberjacks, the magicians. And, of course, the fans. They pour in by the gaggle, hipsters and working-class alike — the twentysomething art kids from Northeast Minneapolis and the rough-ribbed farm workers from Chippewa Falls — united by their love of Vernon, and, apparently, by skin-blanketing tattoos. A menagerie out of a Dylan epic. Fitting, as Dylan will shortly be brought here too, or maybe summoned captures it better. More on that in a minute. But first, wait, what is this place? Eaux Claires, the plural of Eau Claire, the mecca of the Bon-iverse, and a reborn music festival (it had run four years in the 2010’s before getting put on ice for eight). Yet to hear the hardcore tell it, this bears little resemblance to that. This bears little resemblance to anything, including itself. Modern music festivals don’t have Mark Fiore, “one of the top jugglers in the Upper Midwest” putting on a show at the same time as performances from the Gen Z indie-pop phenom Samia or Gen X pioneer Aimee Mann; they don’t take place on the same field where Hank Aaron played his first non-Negro League games; they don’t have a “Mom’s” stand with beatific presences doling out sunscreen and Cheerios; they don’t have a “writers-in-residence” program. And they definitely, certainly don’t boast an explicit mission of human unity in the age of digital atomization. “This is exactly why we did it — to create opportunities to meet new people,” says The National’s Aaron Dessner, Vernon’s Eaux Claires co-curator and sometime-musical collaborator, from the stage of his own set. To achieve that unity, Bob Dylan had to be involved. Somehow. For some reason. The decision to restart Eaux Claires has, like so many things Vernon, already entered the realm of canon, just five months after he made it. Back in February everyone was minding their own business when the musician had an announcement. Eaux Claires, dormant for so long, would return for a two-day engagement. As he explained in an Instagram voice-over in his northwoods sing-song, “Oh, it was about a year ago. Bob Dylan came through town. I went with my dad and about 16 of my friends. I’ve lived here for 44 years. And it’s been too long to remember since the town felt that together. So we thought — ‘we’d better get the festival back going.'” That alone would have been cause for interest. Vernon these days almost never speaks publicly and certainly doesn’t announce chummy weekend gatherings for the general public. But then he took matters a step further. “I haven’t felt much like being what I’ve been. Or been seen to have been. Or what I wanted to have been. Or what I’ve become,” he continued enigmatically. “So I thought it’d be cool to try to be Bob Dylan for a night.” Vernon’s discomfort with his own incarnations are legion. Only one modern pop-music figure has the same seeming level of disdain for his previous talent, the same zeal in confronting us for liking him, the same insatiability for identities to come: That figure, of course, is Bob Dylan. And so here we were, the shapeshifter shapeshifting into the shapeshifter. If you thought about it too long your head might explode. Or the universe would. But Vernon stated his intention simply: “I’m trying to turn Bon into Bob.” The Boniverse freaked out. Somehow Bon Dylan, as it soon became known on the festival’s lineup page and breathless subreddits, would balm what ailed us — the malignancies of political division, the shrieks of capitalism, the piling layers of technological simulation distancing us from ourselves. That sure seemed like a lot to put on the shoulders of one musical performance. But then, as fans reminded (I confessedly/proudly am one of them), Vernon had already broken so many rules of modern musical creation and marketing (more on that in a minute too). It helped, at least buzz-wise, that he had not done a proper show since 2023 despite Bon Iver releasing its highly acclaimed fifth studio album (a 13-track juggernaut produced by Jim-E Stack called Sable, Fable on his longtime label Jagjaguwar) last year. And it really helped that he would not do this again — not Bon Dylan, maybe not anything. As is also well-known (according to another legend), Vernon has sold all his touring equipment to ensure he never, ever returns to the road. Adam Voith, Vernon’s former booking agent and part of an unofficial group of inner-circle advisors, says that, despite its vaudevillian vibes, this one-night-only thing wasn’t a marketing gimmick. “I could fill auditoriums all over the country of Justin doing Dylan — a whole tour,” he tells me. “But that would defeat the purpose. The idea behind this show is that you can only get it right here right now, and then it’s gone.” In an age of content TikTokified and YouTubized, where no one plays a beat without it ricocheting around the world and then hovering above us like an unclearable dust cloud, Justin Vernon was going the other way. A brief, beautiful flare and pfft. So throughout the grounds of Eau Claire’s Carson Park, amid the thousands that had gathered on this cool-ish summer Friday, as they waited on line for cheese curds or lounged in front of a music stage, parked themselves on folding chairs at a literary reading or clumped around a merch stand, the din made only one sound: What the hell was this Dylan thing going to look like? ** Four hours before Bon Dylan, and Michael Perry is working on his monologues. A nurse-turned-trucking-industry-freelance-writer (this is the kind of job that exists in the Vernon-verse), Perry has written a whole bunch of poetic intros to the Dylan songs that he will intone unseen from backstage at Vernon’s mid-show command, and he is polishing them now. He doesn’t know which ones Vernon will want until it comes time to play the songs. But he is writing them all just in case. Vernon himself is nowhere to be found. If he was sound-checking it was out of sight; if he wanted to see what he had wrought he was learning it from others. Yet his presence is ubiquitous. Across the festival, fans chat amiably but intensely expressing song wish lists, recounting long-ago Bon Iver concert experiences, wondering if Bon Iver even still exists as Vernon has been vague, guessing what other performer’s set Vernon might crash, maybe Dijon? (This is fueled by Vernon showing up in the soul-rock musician’s SNL set in December with a ballcap and green electric guitar, sitting in the circle of a dozen musicians like any session normie.) And, of course, playing the where-are-you-from game. As local as this festival feels, people have come from far away. Like, really far. Neil, a Londoner who built risk models for a bank, decided to travel to Eaux Claires by himself. “All my friends want to be on the beach in the summer so I couldn’t get them to come with me. But hearing Justin is better than any beach,” he tells me. A compatriot from Liverpool has Neil beat — he had taken three flights to get to Minneapolis, then rented a car to drive the last 90 minutes to Eau Claire. All of this may seem like an awful lot of effort to catch one musical act. But Vernon’s voice and aura have that kind of effect; his music blurs the line between song and spiritual state. Let me take a minute to try to explain if you’re not already in the tent (if you are, feel free to skip/eyeroll). I mean I’m biased, but only in the sense that I already love Bon Iver/Justin Vernon; it’s not like anyone suckered me into that love. Anyway, simply put, the appeal is arrangements at once so musically complex yet so emotionally universal you almost can’t believe the two can co-exist. Nearly all sung with Vernon’s trademark falsetto or vocal distortion. (The name Bon Iver is inspired by a Northern Exposure greeting/the French for winter, though with a dropped “h” so as not to look like liver.) You may have first encountered Vernon via his many collaborations, with Taylor Swift and Bruce Hornsby, Charli XCX and Bonnie Raitt, Noah Kahan and Kanye. You’ve probably come across a few BI songs in movies or passing broadcasts without even realizing it — “Holocene,” “Skinny Love,” “Hey, Ma.” Fine and sturdy tracks. But there are dozens more, all universes unto themselves. To grab your lapel further at this bar and demand you watch this YouTube clip right now, I’ll enumerate four. Try listening to BI’s Danielle Haim collaboration from Sable, Fable “If Only I Could Wait” and not feel the pain of every breakup you’ve ever experienced; or “U (Man Like)” from 2019’s i,i or its BLM-era spiritual follow-up “AUATC” and not understand injustice in a profoundly emotional way; or, more polarizingly but probably most effectively than all of them, “Beth/Rest,” the keyboard-heavy 2011 sophomore-album capper that sounds, as much as any pop song ever has and I can only imagine ever will, what entering the afterlife must feel like. In a famous McSweeney’s humor piece a few years ago titled “What Your Favorite Sad Dad Band Says About You,” the entry next to Bon Iver simply read: “Perhaps the most accurate term to apply to your situation is ‘seriously injured and lost in the woods.'” Many of Vernon’s songs, rooted in personal sadness, indeed appeal to listeners with those tendencies. But they also have a weird way of lifting you from them, partly by making your sadness feel accompanied but also because he has, like some kind of scurvy-defying 16th-century explorer, dodged all the arrows to locate the tiny oasis of light and beauty hiding behind the underbrush. Listening to a Bon Iver song is like being told by a friend that they, too, are depressed — before they turn around and give you three reasons for hope. Spend any time in the comments sections of Bon Iver’s YouTube songs — and there are thousands of such comments amid tens of millions of views — and you’ll soon come across sentiments like: “Some time ago I was diagnosed with depression, my thoughts are spinning in my head like bees and they become a constant problem, but when I listen to Bon Iver it is as if the thoughts expand and vanish from my head. In this way it is easier to fight against my depression. My mind expands with music. Thank You Master.” And then dozens of people will write in with their own experiences. The feedback turns into unabashed sharing, comment-section as confessional. “There are songs by Bon Iver that bring me back to what life used to be, when i loved life and i felt like life loved me back,” said one on his doleful Sable, Fable single “Speyside. “I’ve never really put that down into the universe anywhere. I’ve been listening to Bon Iver since 2012, 20 years old and full of passion, joy, and happiness. It’s comforted me through PTSD from military deployments, losing my mom to cancer almost immediately after returning from those deployments, and plenty of other things. I hope i get better. I don’t think i ever will, but i find so much comfort listening to music that transports me back to who i used to be.” Any musician worth their dime would trade all their fame for a testimonial like this. Yet I can’t help feeling like something else is animating the fandom besides the group catharsis. I just can’t pinpoint what it is. ** Two hours before Bon Dylan and — twist! — Vernon takes the stage as himself. The performer scheduled for that slot, the underappreciated veteran singer-songwriter Kevin Morby, just had a baby and couldn’t make the show. OK, so not as *himself * but as “Bon,” in the word of a handwritten notation on the online schedule. Was this Bon Iver but without the winter, because it’s now summer? Was it half of Bon Iver because the band wasn’t there? Was he just wishing us a good time? Was it Bon Jovi? The grounds were abuzz. The second choice proved correct — a Vernon solo act, playing Bon Iver songs. He comes out in a headband, black tanktop and black blousy pants, just him and his acoustic guitar. A half-dozen cuts, none of them Dylan. The standouts are three pure OG throwbacks, including the opener and closer from his breakout 2007 debut For Emma, Forever Ago, which he probably last played live, well, that far in the past. Only like all the other songs, he now sings in a gravelly (Dylan-y?) register and not the falsetto he made famous on the record. This is full-on Daniel Day-Lewis stuff. There is something shocking about the whole scene. For a man who for so much of the past two decades has hidden behind alternate voices, behind production tricks like reverb and vocoders, and who sometimes just hides period these days — to see someone like that strumming unadorned is jarring, a vulnerable man now matching the vulnerability in the music. So out of character is it for Vernon that some fans wonder if it is even really him. (It is. I think.) An intense reverence settles on the crowd as he plays. Thousands of people are silent, which only happens at Coachella when — come on it never happens at Coachella. At one point there is a medical emergency, and dozens of people in the crowd put their hands in the air to wave EMT staff over in the sad way of music festivals but entirely silently and while still staying fixed on the show, creating a kind of unintentional group-mime performance. This was all going down the same weekend as Comic-Con, and while the constituency overlap certainly felt scant, the events maybe also move in parallel, since caring about one specific thing a shit-ton is what makes us feel like ourselves in 2026 and getting together with other people who care a shit-ton about that specific thing makes us feel less alone in 2026, and while that specific thing feels like the reason we are doing all the shit-tonning, maybe the actual reason doesn’t really matter, and it’s all just a means to an end, that end being a reason to step out of bed in the morning that doesn’t involving getting mad at someone for having the wrong opinion. And then Vernon closes the set with “Hayward, WI,” an unreleased coming-of-age song from 2006 that I didn’t know — think a more ethereal, Midwestern spin on Springsteen’s “Growing Up.” I consider myself a reasonably attuned Bon Iver fan, but one of the hallmarks of such fandom is that there’s always someone nearby who will make you feel, through the sheer force of their obsessive knowledge, that you just arrived to the scene. Today that someone is David Kolen, a thirtysomething labor negotiator from Chicago at Eaux Claires with two friends. You know Kolen is a fan even before he speaks, because he has tattoos all over his arms and legs of various Bon Iver lyrics. “Do you know what you just saw?” he says to me after “Hayward” ends and Vernon leaves the stage. “Something special that has only happened once before and will probably never happen again.” (The once-before was a For Emma ten-year anniversary show in 2017, and it quickly becomes clear from the reaction of everyone around me that I have witnessed history, if of a very niche kind). Even the superstars are dumbstruck. As he takes the stage for his set with Dessner a few minutes later, the British mega-producer Fred Again seems unable to shake the feeling. “I just stood there like all you guys 20 minutes ago crying my eyes out,” he says. “When I first came on stage literally my tears were still wet from watching Justin.” The idea that only a few people in the world have ever heard this song live makes me feel special, which is an odd thing to feel about a song you didn’t know existed 10 minutes before. But maybe that’s part of the magic of this Vernonian one-offism, the idea that something doesn’t need to come pre-baked with meaning. It can not exist before just as it won’t exist again. The whole point is ephemerality. This thought immediately goes to war with my frustration that my phone ran out of battery before I could capture much of the set. Throughout the set Vernon did not speak on stage — he never does — just gave a slight bow and warm raise of the guitar before walking off. Actually, that’s not entirely true re the speaking: he offers a lighthearted “bear with” when the sound glitches at one point. “I was surprised he even said that much,” Voith, his confidante, later tells me drolly. It turns out Vernon hadn’t planned on doing any of it, including the singing. When Morby dropped out, Vernon told a few of the inner-circlers he might want to take the opportunity to play one song, “Hayward.” The group was shocked. The song felt too early in his career, too close to the childhood bone, for him to ever trot it out again. But Vernon went “into the barn” — his rehearsal space — at his recording compound in Eau Claire known as April Base. He played the song — just for his own edification, just trying out how it feels. Within a day Vernon was texting the inner circle again. He wanted to do not only “Hayward” but a whole solo mini-set around it. It wouldn’t be Bon Iver, because the band wouldn’t be there, and also because Vernon maybe was, as he’d been hinting, trying to get out of the sad Iverish/wintry place he’d been in for too long. But there would be songs from the Bon Iver era. As a reward-for-people-coming deal, as a you-have-to-be-there deal. At a festival whose whole unique ethos is try-not-to-be-anywhere-else, let’s-fight-the-perpetual-distraction-age, let’s-throw-back-to-what-concerts-were-like-when-we-or-at-least-anyone-over-30-was-young. As a just-enjoy-the-firefly-without-trying-to-capture-it-for-Instagram deal. Sitting right outside the festival venue are “phone lockers.” No one was making you check your phone; it was just offered as an option, should you want to further unplug and purely enjoy the moment and the people purely putting it on for you. A line stretched 15 deep. ** Ninety minutes until Bon becomes Bob, and everyone stirs in anticipation for a second Justin Vernon performance after years of none. Murmurs go up around the grounds. “I wonder if Bob Dylan himself will be a surprise guest,” (He won’t. He’s playing in Virginia tonight.) “Yeah, it would be cool for Justin to do Dylan covers while Dylan is on stage.” (Again, the Virginia thing.) “It would be cool if Dylan did Justin covers.” (Now that I’d like to see.) “It would just be cool to see these two mysterious people together.” Justin Vernon didn’t set out to become a cult hero, which appears to be exactly what helped him become one. Anonymity in the age of overexposure is powerful sorcery. Even mega-stars have come under its spell. While making his smash record The Great Divide,” Noah Kahan hired Vernon for some contributions. One day the backing instruments and vocals literally just appeared with no notice in Kahan’s inbox. “He’s such a mythical figure in my head that it’s cool to have him just float into my songs,” Kahan said recently. “It’s like a mysterious wood person will lay down guitar and I won’t see it, but it’ll come through email and I’ll be like, ‘Oh, my God, this is him.'” Vernon lore is littered with such moments of aloof mystery — a lore that he has, to be sure, at least helped along. The most famous example is that for For Emma, Forever Ago in the mid-2000’s, he decamped from North Carolina after a breakup to live solo in his father’s hunting cabin in Northern Wisconsin, where he did nothing but write the record and eat what he hunted for the three months of the two-year Wisconsin winter. The Internet has amplified the story, but Vernon at one point did tell it. Other times he has just watched it happen. Two weeks after Vernon appeared as a musical guest on SNL in 2012, Justin Timberlake turned up playing him in a sketch about meeting baby Blue Ivy Carter. The Vernon character memorably tells Beyonce and Jay-Z that “I was just wandering barefoot in the woods of Wisconsin, and fashioned this guitar out of a canoe.” Aiding the aura is the not-speaking-publicly thing, including to the press. Unless he has an album out (which happens maybe twice a decade), Vernon speaks mainly through his lyrics, which are exceedingly cryptic and of which there is a massive trove, ransacked for meaning daily on Reddit. When the only way you communicate with the world is with lines like “I’ll go put the pathfinder on waltz,” “we are weightless like a wayless beast” and “the hawser rolls, the vessel’s whole and Christ, it’s thin” people are going to start thinking you’re a mystic whether you want them to or not. The not-speaking thing also has the effect of creating a strange kind of third-person detachment around Vernon; even when he’s close, his confidants talk about him as though he’s missing. Just before he takes the stage for his solo set, Perry’s voice booms over the P.A. system “Justin wishes to acknowledge right up front that this was supposed to be Kevin Morby’s set,” an odd sentence-construction given that Justin was right there and presumably could have done the acknowledging himself. A mural in town painted for a previous album has a similar effect; people make pilgrimages to it like they do the Elliott Smith mural in Silver Lake, even though Vernon is very much still with us and lives just several miles down the road. Balancing all this are many secondhand indications that Vernon is just, like, a regular dude. A man named Bob whom I meet (not Dylan) — a Massachusetts native who moved to town when his wife Jill got a job teaching at University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire — tells me knows Vernon from the Menomonie Market Food Co-Op in town where Bob used to do shifts. “Justin would come in and shop. He and his entourage were the nicest people in the world,” Bob tells me. Bob has a dad-jokey air about him, a coping mechanism, he says, from having survived a brain-cancer diagnosis more than a decade ago that gave him only three years to live. The artistic spirit of this town, he says, has helped get him through. He and Jill had come to the festival to hear Heti’s writing workshop and to tap into something deeper in themselves. And, of course, to support Vernon. To promote Sable, Fable last year the singer went on Jimmy Fallon and played a voice mail from an older neighbor named Brian who called, many years into his fame, to let Vernon know that his song “Skinny Love” was on The Voice, as if now he’d been made legit. “Brian’s the best neighbor in the world,” Vernon told Fallon, genuinely smiling as the two basked in the story. Just before the Bon set I see an older man at the festival wearing a pink T-shirt with the words “Brian’s the best neighbor in the world.” I have to ask. “Are you, um, Brian?” He was! He had the T-shirt custom-made. He and his wife proceed to tell me what a great neighbor Justin is. All of this humanizes Vernon — or, more precisely, makes his mystique seem tantalizingly within reach, even though it rarely is. The most basic facts of his life elude. He is believed to be single — or, at least, all the relationships we know are hazy literary fragments of ex-girlfriends sung about retrospectively. He did do some media and promotional stops for Sable, Fable last year in which he pulled back the curtain, including the Fallon appearance, but often worked his way to basketball, which he plays/loves. There have been few pictures of him over the last year since those press stops, which is why when he emerged at the festival with a much scruffier beard it jolted (and fueled the body-double conspiracy theories). Anyway, you can see how the cult reputation happens. Artistic hermitude crossed with the guy in aisle five asking you to squeeze this avocado makes for a potent combination. According to the inner circle, the mythology is something that amuses Vernon more than anything else. “He kind of invites us to poke fun at it,” Perry tells me. At a reading Friday afternoon the consigliere, speaking about how the festival gets curated, quips to the audience, “Justin turns us loose and the only instruction he gives us is ‘keep it restaurant.'” (This is a very inside joke over a misheard lyric on a 2019 track that would take more time to explain than it was worth and also make you doubt my assertion that I am not an obsessed fan.) “Now, I don’t know what that means,” Perry continues, roasting the artist in absentia. “But when you’re him you can say things like that and everyone thinks you’re a genius.” Perry is especially eager to take a shot at the hunting-cabin myth. “People talk about that time as if he couldn’t get food,” Perry says to me. “I mean there was a [convenience-store] Kwik Trip nine miles away. It wasn’t like he was north of the Arctic Circle.” ** Justin Vernon emerges as Bob Dylan. Or Bon Dylan. Or Bob Iver. Or whatever you want to call him. He comes out looking like the Bard, in a casual sport coat and that light-colored flat-brim western dress hat Dylan has favored in recent years. He offers no introduction, no fanfare, just steps right up to the mic and begins singing, Dylanishly. Word had it this would be 1994-era Bob Dylan, but Vernon immediately launches into “Not Dark Yet,” Dylan’s great comeback ballad from 1997’s Time Out of Mind. The 1994 thing is just the vocal style from that era; as James Austin Johnson can tell you, you need to pick one. This song has a special meaning in Vernon’s inner circle. Justin has texted it to friends going through a hard time. It’s kind of the proto sad-song-that-gives-you-hope. If you studied it deeply enough, you could probably use it to unlock the entire Vernon psychic vault. Then he launches into the rest of the 16-song setlist spanning the Dylanian ages — an alt-country-flavored “Tangled Up in Blue,” a rootsy “All Along the Watchtower, a banger “Shot of Love” harmonized by Gospel backup singers, a vocally uncanny “To Make You Feel My Love” (right down to the nasal twang/quaver), a duet with the folk-experimentalist Monica Martin for the romantic downer “Boots of Spanish Leather” (“Friends among and around us, here to sing the saddest sad song, please welcome the songbird, the cat mom, the amazing Monica Martin,” Perry voice-of-Olympuses), a rich keyboard-heavy “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right,” a heartfelt harmonica-less rendition of the anti-U.S.-militarism anthem “With God On Our Side” (though he oddly skips the WW1, WWII and Cold War verses) and a wistful spin through the underrated 1989 regret-ballad “Shooting Star.” The set works on two separate, possibly contrasting levels. Part of you goes through a rational progression knowing that this is not Bob Dylan, but Justin Vernon, who made his name with a very different career, simply playing Bob Dylan, and how impressive that he managed to play him so well. Then there’s the instinctual part that can’t wait to get home and tell everybody what a great Bob Dylan show you just went to. The impersonation feels less random that it should. Two men, born 40 years apart nearly to the day, growing up in the same part of the country, both inspiring rabid fans while trying to keep a low profile. Someone recorded the show and posted it to YouTube. I’m hesitant to link because if I just spilled this many words for the message that you had to be there, and Vernon just created a whole festival dedicated to the principle of you had to be there, posting a link to a YouTube clip of Bon Dylan would make a liar out of both of us. But then I decide to include it. I mean the whole spirit of the festival is screw it, isn’t it. Also, because I realize that when someone undertakes a daredevil act of creativity even a replica can seem pretty cool; we all loved Man on Wire even as it doesn’t begin to capture what happened that ’70s day. It hits me, finally, what the deeper appeal of Vernon is, what is is fueling the intense following, how it goes beyond the quality or even depth of the music. It’s the attitude. The best word I can think of after a few days in the northwoods is: earnestcore. A word I just made up but in fact may capture what’s happening: a phenomenon in which the importance of the thing stands impervious to any outside expectation or reflexive irony. Life in the 2020s is about putting performance above purity, optics over essence, fronting ahead of vulnerability. All of these forces have their place, or at least their reasons but how nice sometimes to reverse the equation and let the banished concepts have their say. Such earnestcore-ness becomes clear talking to the natives of Eau Claire — from the young pro BMX rider who has created an official “Eau Claire Time Machine” art installation under the baseball-field bleachers (it features various pieces of town footage and 20 vintage TVs and he will tell you all about the circuitry he used to make them work) to the young man and woman working at the hotel who will spend a sincere 10 minutes giving you restaurant recommendations when you casually ask if anything’s still open. Vernon of course didn’t create earnestcore. He just tapped into it around him and broadcast it to the world — a world that it turns out has been badly thirsting for it, that has wanted for so long to feel like someone in this messed-up joysticked time was just doing something for its own damn sake. Vernon closes the set with “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door,” a fitting song for what has been in the end a night of covers, as this particular Dylan song has of course been made more famous by others than it was by the songwriter himself; and because it first appeared in the Western film Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, the kind of damn-the-convention frontier story that mirrors Vernon’s own; and because the crowd, having been almost impossibly reverent for most of the 85 minutes acts like it, too, is on the threshold of divine entryway. Then the song ends and Vernon walks off. He gives some gentle backslaps to band members and interacts with the crowd for the first time all set, giving them a few waves and, just before he disappears from sight, doffing his flat-brim, a gesture so Dylan that it’s not clear where the latter’s legend ends and Vernon’s myth begins. The crowd lustily makes known its approval, clapping and cheering and spilling out of the park and through the woods comparing favorite tracks and excitedly talking about the set. Bon has become Bob. ** Vernon is nowhere to be found the next day on the grounds or on a stage. The hope that he would join Dijon for his performance proves futile. Dijon’s set is preceded by a 2016 collab Vernon undertook with the songwriter-producer Francis Starlite (and Kanye) titled “Friends.” Born six weeks after Vernon and a kind of public-facing alter ego for the singer at past Eaux Claires, Francis has materialized as a surprise guest at the Dijon set. He runs and dances and hypes up the crowd, then sings “Friends” by himself. “This place taught me so much,” he says when he’s finished. “How to be together, right now, alive.” But this place, for all its virtues, doesn’t have Vernon in it. He is safely back in an unseen box, or April Base, or just the woods, hopefully not injured. Yet his specter is everywhere, and people in Eau Claire know it won’t be long before the actual man will be too. I see Bob, the co-op worker, and he has a message. “If you talk to Justin,” he says to me, “tell him Bob from produce says hello.”