That April, “Skinny Love” was its first single. The resulting album, For Emma, Forever Ago, was self-released in July 2007 then put out by an indie label in February 2008. Gradually, he wrote songs - wordless melodies at first, guided by falsetto syllables, then opaque lyrics, couched as a “small internal dialogue between me and the microphone”. Split from band and girlfriend, he was recovering from a serious illness. Vernon had “kind of given up” when he wintered in his father’s log cabin in rural Wisconsin. How that happened says much about the mechanics of the music industry over the past decade. It has helped turn its creator, Justin Vernon, into a Grammy-winning, genre-straddling super-collaborator, with a prominent fan in Kanye West. Yet that - and what better definition of a 21st-century pop standard is there? - has been its fate, as well as to be covered by Ed Sheeran. It’s just not the type of composition you expect to figure often on reality-show auditions. Obviously, it’s good - sonically arresting and emotionally compelling.

And what is skinny love anyway? ( Amour fou on the catwalk it ain’t.) Overall, you’re never sure if it works as score settling or self-abasement. The vocals swoop from a heady mumble at the start to venting like an angry hillbilly in the chorus. Written in 2006 by a lonely guy who had retreated from the world, its lacerating melody was originally played on a vintage resonator guitar. On first hearing, Bon Iver’s “Skinny Love” seemed an unlikely song to become a pop standard.

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