The Ghost at the End of the Record

Beth/Rest closes Bon Iver, Bon Iver—the self-titled 2011 album—and it sounds like it was recorded in a completely different decade from everything that came before it. The record opens with spare chamber folk and slowly accumulates strings and horns across its eight songs, then ends with this: a slow, Eighties-soaked synth ballad with unironic saxophone and cavernous reverb, something that could have played over the closing credits of a film you half-remember watching as a kid. Justin Vernon has said it’s about acceptance, about learning to be okay with something ending—whether you hear it that way or read it as the sound of someone falling apart in slow motion probably depends on the day. What I know is that it’s one of the few album closers that actually closes something; you feel the weight of it settle after the last note fades, and the whole record turns out to have been leading here all along.