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." Related Stories Music Gabe Simon on Working With Noah Kahan to Craft 'The Great Divide' Music Carly Simon Reveals Parkinson's Diagnosis: "I Have Not Stopped Living. I Have Not Stopped Working"

Heti has been brought here by Justin Vernon, the 45-year-old creative force behind the iconoclastic indie act Bon Iver , long-running musical 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 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 ...

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