Re: Stacks

Justin Vernon closed his first record — the one he recorded alone in a Wisconsin cabin over a winter — with “Re: Stacks,” six and a half minutes of a single acoustic guitar and his layered falsetto singing about a gambling metaphor and a woman he has decided to stop missing. It is the quietest, clearest moment on For Emma, Forever Ago and the one that most earns the whole record’s mythology.

The song has the specific quality of a morning when the cold has finally broken something loose. Vernon sounds like someone who has finished saying what he needed to say and is now just watching the last smoke go out of the stove. Put it on the morning the year turns and see what rises.