Last night, Bon Iver appeared on The Tonight Show and performed “8 (circle)”; it was the debut of the song for national audiences, as it’d only ever before been performed at frontman/founder Justin Vernon’s Eaux Claires Festival. Accompanying him in playing the track off the upcoming album, 22, A Million, was a chorus composed of some quite talented musicians, including Buke and Gase’s Arone Dyer, Anaïs Mitchell (whose concept album Hadestown — about Eurydice and Orpheus — was recently put up as a theatrical production at the New York Theatre Workshop), Gordi, and the Staves.
22, A Million will be out on September 30. Come the album’s actual release, you might find yourself struggling to talk about liking individual tracks (despite, from what “8 (circle)” teases, it seeming like this will be an accessible and even comforting album), as “8 (circle)” is among the easiest name to pronounce/commit to memory; others names from the album include “10 d E A T h b R E a s T ⚄ ⚄,” “____45_____,” and “666 ʇ.”
Watch the performance: