Justin Vernon moved to a remote cabin in the woods of Northwestern Wisconsin at the onset of winter. Tailing from the swirling breakup of his long time band, he escaped to the property and surrounded himself with simple work, quiet, and space. He lived there alone for three months, filling his days with wood splitting and other chores around the land. This special time slowly began feeding a bold, uninhibited new musical focus.

This slowly evolved into days filled with twelve-hour recording blocks, breaking only for trips on the tractor into the pines to saw and haul firewood, or for frozen sunrises high up a deer stand. All of his personal trouble, lack of perspective, heartache, longing, love, loss and guilt that had been stock piled over the course of the past six years, was suddenly purged into the form of song. The end result is, For Emma, Forever Ago, a nine-song album comprised of what's been dubbed a striking debut by critics and fans alike.

Bon Iver (pronounced: bohn eevair; French for "good winter" and spelled wrong on purpose) is a greeting, a celebration and a sentiment. It is a new statement of an artist moving on and establishing the groundwork for a lasting career. For Emma, Forever Ago is the debut of this lineage of songs. As a whole, the record is entirely cohesive throughout and remains centered around a particular aesthetic, prompted by the time and place for which it was recorded. Vernon seems to have tested his boundaries to the utmost, and in doing so has managed to break free form any pre-cursing or finished forms.

For nearly a decade, Leslie Feist did not stop moving. Her 2004 album Let It Die led right into 2007’s The Reminder, which earned her four Grammy nominations, six Juno wins, the Shortlist Music Prize, and the opportunity to teach Muppets to count on Sesame Street. She made her Saturday Night Live debut and toured the world. She covered an album with Beck, watched Stephen Colbert shimmy in a sequined “1234” jumpsuit, and made a documentary about recording The Reminder. And then, finally, after the seventh year, Feist rested.

“There’s a lot of squeezing yourself out on tour,” she says. “In the downtime afterwards I was sponging—I was trying to absorb as much as I put out for seven years.” She watched Fellini films and read poetry as her creative batteries juiced up again. “I was being still and trying to learn how to be quiet and remember that silence isn’t aggressive,” she adds. “Sometimes after being in a lot of noise and movement, silence and stillness can seem completely terrifying.”

When Feist was ready to make music again, she had very different ideas about how to shatter the quiet. “I played so many shows with such care, I really want to be loud again,” she says, referring to her early days as a guitarist in punk and rock bands. She started writing in the spring of 2010 and met up with her longtime collaborators Chilly Gonzalez and Mocky the following January to arrange 12 songs that would become her fourth studio album, Metals. The trio spent a frigid month in Toronto “Trying to sound like we had played together as long as we’d known each other collectively, around 50 years,” then decamped for California’s rugged Big Sur to transform “audio photographs” into finished songs.

“You just know you are somewhere super-potent and untouched in Big Sur,” Feist says. “And it has this literary tradition, with Henry Miller, Anais Nin, and John Steinbeck having lived there. We truly found a room perched on that edge between earth and sea, a giant empty space that this woman usually paints in. No music had ever been made there.”

The songs Feist and her band—Gonzales, Mocky, percussionist Dean Stone, and keyboard whiz Brian LeBarton—laid down with producer Valgeir Siggurdsson over two and a half weeks in February plumb different emotional paths than her previous work. “Time passes, shit goes down, and then it resolves. Something gets wounded and it heals,” she muses. “I feel a little bit more like a narrator. Rather than being like, here’s my truth, it’s like, here’s something I think is just true.”

Metals is not a reaction to The Reminder, but Feist did learn a few lessons playing her acclaimed album’s songs night after night. “In [The Reminder’s] ‘I Feel It All,’ to have a chorus be, ‘Ooh I’ll be the one who’ll break my heart/I’ll be the one to hold the gun’— you sing that 300 times and eventually the universe listens. Okay, sure, we can do that for you. So this time I wanted to cast the spell 300 times saying something that’s more of an observation about human nature.”

Metals songs like “The Bad in Each Other” and “Get It Wrong, Get It Right” are forthright, dry-eyed tunes about heart mending, not heart rending. “A Commotion” bristles with tense energy, while “How Come You Never Go There” slips along to a jazzy groove. “It’s a lot more flying off the handle and chaos and noise than I had before,” Feist says. “I allowed for mistakes more than I ever have. But what’s also in there is more brambles. It was a little bit about un-simplifying things. We were sort of testing the air, like a sea captain licks his finger to see which way the wind is coming from. It was less Brill Building and more naturalistic.”

Some of the results wound up being more intimate portraits of relationships, like “Get It Wrong, Get It Right,” which Feist describes as “a slideshow of a season in a place and a dynamic between two people.” But more often she found herself gravitating to the universal. “What’s that expression: We hold these truths to be self-evident,” she muses. “After everything settles there’s really no blame to be laid in a lot of these situations. People are being their true selves, everybody is in their story trying to get to the next chapter.”

Brainstorming along those lines helped lead her to the album title Metals. “I was thinking about a giant force of elemental truth and how people change things,” Feist explains. “We try to harness most things in nature, and we have managed to manipulate metal. The raw material is one thing and what the minds of men turned it into is a completely other thing. Also the word ‘mettle,’ a man proves his mettle by how he manages difficult times.”

Sonically, Feist and her tight-knit crew strove to forge a connection between the future and the past. “We fancied we were developing a modern ancient genre,” she says. “There’s a bunch of human yelling into the air together, all this group singing that’s all over the record, that’s sort of a little ancient. Then Brian LeBarton has access to these ultra modern, futuristic sounds. He has a way of making a celeste completely futuristic.”

Ultimately, Metals’ aesthetic has a deliberate patience and natural beauty that echoes Feist’s approach to writing the album overall. “I read a National Geographic article about soil and modern farming,” she says. “The point is for food to grow, the point isn’t for it to grow all at once and never grow again. Soil does its job, but unless you let it rest it can’t regenerate its own minerals and do the same thing again. You just have to let it lay there under the sun, dry out, get rained on and be still a little while.” That she did. And now she’s back.