Bon Iver’s Inexplicable Power

Many of them were mad at him then, but the baffled Grammy viewers who tweeted out “Who is Bonnie Bear?” when Bon Iver won Best New Artist over Nicki Minaj in 2012 were really paying tribute to the band whose name they had butchered. Bon Iver, once a one-man folk brand and now an experimental noise-pop collective, thrives on being misheard.

I thought the Wisconsin band’s impressive new album, provocatively addressed “the towers in New York” and being “young and gay then” until I read the lyrics about “the, ) in the songs. Bon Iver advertised the album “Keep it restaurant,” which is a joke on the delivery of the lyric “Keep it rational,” which shows up in the new song “Sh’Diah,” whose title abbreviates “Shittiest Day in American History,” which refers to the Wednesday after Donald Trump’s election.