text: When I meet up with Vernon back in Minneapolis after the festival, he had already cancelled his flight home twice and was coming down with a nasty cold. He had only been off the plane for a couple of hours, and I could tell he still hadn’t really landed. We gravitate toward the most private booth at Constantine, a fancy basement bar downtown, where he nurses a brandy hot toddy.
  
  He says the idea of leaving Berlin and the artistic utopia he helped create felt bad—“like sooooo bad, like almost scary bad.” He tells me he rolled on the last night of the fest—little pills with the Chupa Chups logo were being passed around back at the Michelberger, because Berlin—but “it might have been the most unnecessary drug experience of my entire life.” It helped him stay up until 10 in the morning, but he doesn’t remember anything after 3:30 a.m. Plus, his serotonin and dopamine levels were spiking that whole week anyway. “I felt like I was on rolls from Tuesday until Saturday,” he says. “The only other time I felt like that before is when I was a hormonal 13-year-old kid at Camp Manitou.” He feels like he found a new, stripped down mode in which to perform. “That’s how I want music to feel,” he says.
  
  While the principals involved have concluded that the happening was an unqualified success, Tom Michelberger tells me he did lose between 100,000 and 200,000 euros on the endeavor, adding that it’s probably impossible to do this again without some straight-up revolutionary changes in arts patronage. But is it too ambitious to ask artists to lead the charge? Especially at the Funkhaus, where musicians were once spied on by the Stasi literally around the clock—every Bauhaus-style clock in the entire complex used to be bugged—it doesn’t seem preposterous.
  
  “I can accept more about myself and my position when I start to really feel the tribal thing happening,” Vernon says. “This weekend I felt so comfortable—and if I was ever uncomfortable, it was because of some drunk guy asking, ‘How is it like being you, man? Isn’t that crazy?’ I’m not even close to being in that zone. I’m not worried about who I am and all these problems that I had because I’m so far away from it.”
  
  But Vernon is trying not to shy away. Even though 22, A Million invites so much scrutiny over its internal numerology, a very considerable amount of ingenuity went into finding words and numbers and symbols that complement Vernon’s tone and expand his message. His jersey number in high school was 22. And along with the naked biblical allusions that come with the number 33, that was the age when Vernon went through the most shit, when he was really grappling with fame, when people were hungriest for what he had to say, stopping him in the street and telling him how great he was, when he never felt so alone.
  
  Vernon is feeling better about dealing with the pressure now. He’s more concerned about the responsibility of the artist—what is the most powerful way to connect? What message should he be conveying? Are there more viable platforms than fame?
  
  Ultimately, he wants to explore without completely abandoning what he’s already done. “I always feel like it’s my job to give people a little something that will be weird but also give them an avenue of understanding,” he tells me. He adds that, in Berlin, he was equally excited to play with Bon Iver as he was to play with Hrrrbek, the noise project he shares with Trever Hagen, named after the folk hero first baseman for the Minnesota Twins. Because Hagen has been living in Europe for 13 years, Hrrrbek has been a catch-as-catch-can situation: random gigs in parks at night or for a handful of people in a hotel bathroom. But at the Funkhaus, in Saal 6, more than 100 people watched them perform. And, at least at the outset, the audience was rapt.
  
  Vernon started out on the OP-1, making a loop of Hagen’s breathy trumpet sounds. Then they were joined by Kristín Anna Valtýsdóttir, formerly of the Icelandic band Múm, who mumbled and played the softest grand piano I’ve ever heard, and Bon Iver’s Fitzpatrick, who plinked on another piano. The four of them moved around like deranged children who had been overdosed with ritalin—at one point Vernon lost his ballcap and his wispy top hairs jumped through the discord of his acoustic guitar as noise eventually turned into a riff. Vernon then picked up his hat and set upon a piano. As Valtýsdóttir scrambled to a drum kit, Hagen began to make chicken sounds.
  
  Eventually, the audience started to leave—in dribs and drabs at first, then in a steady stream. They obviously knew they were watching Justin Vernon from Bon Iver, but it probably appeared that he had lost his mind, or was at least indulging madness. As the discord wound down, Valtýsdóttir somehow conjured an apple and flung it into a bass drum with a satisfying thunk. End of show.