Bon Iver’s ‘22, A Million’ Turns 10 With an Anniversary Edition Built Around Its Artwork

22, A Million looked as strange as it sounded. Ten years after Bon Iver’s third album arrived on Sept. 30, 2016, with its fragmented vocals and song titles made of numbers and symbols, the label is putting the artwork first. A 10th-anniversary edition is due Nov. 20 from Jagjaguwar, and its centerpiece is the visual language of Eric Timothy Carlson.

Carlson is the artist and designer who, as ARTnews puts it, effectively joined the band during the making of the record. His icons, one for every song, were built alongside the music rather than wrapped around it. The new edition includes an essay by Carlson and previously unseen artwork, plus a new 12-page full-color booklet documenting how the album was made, Spin reports.

The songs were born as numbers, initially an unsettled numerology that calcified over time as the songs came into their own. The idea was to find an icon to hold each track.

Eric Timothy Carlson, in the anniversary edition’s materials, Spin

In his words, the Western Arabic numerals had to stay intact but become “unique forms, ligatures, glyphs and monograms.” The essay also digs into the meanings behind the album’s unusual song titles and symbols, from binary code to Bible chapters, which the press release describes as a collection of “numerical relationships.”

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The physical package leans into that. The vinyl is a limited edition on frosted silver, with alternate artwork on a soft-touch gatefold and the original 28-page lyric booklet reprinted in three silver inks. A limited CD comes in a custom 12-panel “inverted cross” fold, according to Spin.

Carlson’s partnership with Justin Vernon didn’t stop at 22, A Million. It carried through i,i and last year’s SABLE, fABLE, whose salmon color earned its own official Pantone designation, ARTnews notes. “It takes a particular commitment to ambitiously pursue the visual work in the same breath as the music itself,” Carlson writes in the new essay, which arrives with the reissue on Nov. 20.

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