'What caught my eye first was the branches. It seemed like birch trees - the stark white of birch trees is always really beautiful." Justin Vernon - tall, plaid-shirted, his beard thatched around pale features - is standing in Tate Britain, looking at the paintings of Peter Doig. "I don't know a lot about him," he says, "but I know that he's Canadian, and that makes sense to me. I'm from northern Wisconsin, which is close to Canada - the landscape is very similar. I find myself connecting more with Canadian artists. It may have something to do with the psyche, the midwestern and Canadian vibe, of lakes and trees, fields, no mountains, no oceans."
Vernon is a musician who records under the name Bon Iver, and whose debut album, For Emma, Forever Ago, is a record of rare, quiet perfection. It was created over one long winter in a cabin in Wisconsin, when Vernon was a solitary figure in bare-branched, snowy isolation, as if in a Doig painting.
"When it's winter out there," he says,"there are no leaves on the trees and the pines are really tall, and there's lanes of light inside them, and bare hills, and so much space. That space really did hand me a lot of ideas - ideas that I already had, but that I needed help with strengthening."
Vernon arrived at the cabin in a state of disrepair, having driven through the night from the stifling, swampy heat of North Carolina, where he had settled with the members of his former band, DeYarmond Edison, with whom he had played since his teens. "I felt very uninspired [in North Carolina]," he says. "I needed to get back. So I broke up with everybody, I broke up the band, I broke up with my girlfriend - broke free to do that."
The cabin was built in 1979 by his father, and Vernon would often spend weekends there growing up. It stands on 80 acres of land rich in aspens, wolves and wild turkeys. "The cabin's like a little alpine-style, timber-frame cabin, used to just have a dirt floor, but the last few years my dad's made it ... maybe too nice." He smiles gently. "Like there's plumbing in it now. But there's still that ancient vibe, because you're so far away from everything."
At first, he admits, he did little but drink beer; gradually, he began to acquire a self-sufficiency that may be the source of the record's feeling of completeness. He chopped logs and hunted for food. "That year was the first time I had killed a deer. It didn't feel good. You want to hit it here," he says, touching his side. "You want to kill it really quickly." It was a good two weeks before he set up any of his music equipment - two weeks in which his head cleared and inspiration came. "I didn't go up there to make a record," he says. "But music was just part of the process of me ironing out that weird vibe inside me. I sat down and started working on the songs, layering vocals on top of vocals, trying to be a choir." Sometimes, the vocals were more syllables than words. "That's how almost every lyric on the album was written, in that weird, subconscious back-door way." The result is something quite otherworldly, with stacked vocals, potent imagery and Vernon's star falsetto, poised somewhere between gospel, alt-folk and a cathedral choir.
Back at the Tate, we are looking at a warm-weather Doig painting: red earth, blue sky, parched grass. I ask Vernon if the record would have been very different had he recorded it in the summer. "Probably would have been a bit more joyful," he says. "But it's weird, I find I get more heavily depressed in the summertime. In the winter, it's more like this lengthy, beautiful thing. It's more inquisitive; winter is a time of internal thinking for me."
And would it have been a very different album if he had recorded it elsewhere? He nods. "I often find I live in different places in different songs. Like that painting." He refers to the painting with the blue sky and the red earth. "I sometimes feel like I want to be there, or I want my music to come from there. I have all these ideas but I want to be focused. I wanted to have songs that live in one place."
As we walk around the exhibition, Vernon talks warmly of his home town, Eau Claire, describing it as "nothing extravagant. Its industry used to be logging and paper, there used to be a big tyre plant there." Vernon himself has recently bought a house there, "80 yards from where I was born". He laughs. "Even as a teenager, I was already worried that I wanted to live there my whole life. Like: dude, you should probably not love it so much here. But the idea that I could live in Eau Claire, and I could not know every nook and cranny, or that I could not know every nook and cranny in my own home, or my own land ..." he shakes his head. "I think it's pretty telling how widely travelled people are and yet they never maybe examine where they are as much as they could. I really like locality. I like permanence. I like people being in one place and knowing it."
For Emma, Forever Ago is out now on Vital. Bon Iver plays the Leadmill, Sheffield, tonight. Box office: 0114-221 2828. Then touring.