The first time I heard it, Bon Iver (aka Justin Vernon) invited me to a festival he used to put on in Eau Claire. He introduced the entire album from start to finish – no one had ever heard it before. I remember feeling so connected to the first track and a few of the others. The more complex tracks were pretty hard to grasp on first listens, and I find it takes me a while to really grasp a record that complex. When I was listening to some of the sounds, I was like, “What is this and where is this coming from?” It wasn’t until it came out and I processed it more that I started to understand how each track influenced the one around it – it was a kind of ecosystem.

That was a gigantic Record for me. I’m a sucker for long-form music and this record fits together so beautifully, like a tapestry. I could never imagine these two songs, for example, as separate pieces of music. “8 (circle)” is actually one of the most accessible pieces on the record – it’s a beautiful, straightforward Americana-style Bon Iver song, but “Moonwater” is an extraordinary, bizarre, quite disturbing, very beautiful patchwork thing and for me, combining the two is again about this concept of earning your right to relax after the tension, just like Stravinsky.

There’s also this increasingly crazy saxophone solo that actually starts to go out of tune, so that when the first beautiful 1980s Juno synth pad kicks in at the beginning of “8 (circle)”, you think, “Oh, thank God! What was that chaos I was listening to?!” But then it starts very movingly with his vocoder singing and some simple lyrics about the road ahead and the road behind us. There’s also this feeling like he’s communicating something in some mysterious way, but you don’t know what it is. I’ve never spoken to him about the meaning behind the lyrics, but I feel like something very powerful and complex is being communicated, and then when the second song starts, something very simple and deep. Maybe it’s this shift from the cosmic to the heart. I think that has a pretty big influence on what I do.

There are still musicians who produce albums in a certain order, and I will always be one of them. I think it’s so important to honor the original album format, and these two songs are an example of the importance of that order.