He likes being in Hawaii - he doesn’t get bothered by people bothering his shit. Before I went to the studio, he picked me up and we went to play hoops. I first got there a little jet-lagged from Minneapolis. It was just sort of a very open artistic vibe: fourteen-hour days of having fun and being really creative. I use Auto-Tune in a different kind of way, and he was into that. He was pointing out lyrics from “Blood Bank” and said he was a fan of For Emma and really wanted to talk to me about the vocal techniques I’d been using in the studio. What did he say he liked about Bon Iver specifically? I said, “Oh, cool, I’ll come out to Hawaii, it sounds fun.” Hawaii, in February. I’d heard he wanted to use a sample of “Woods,” and we were talking on the phone for 30 to 45 minutes about music and life in general, where the record was at … He was interested in my aesthetic in a recording and production standpoint. The first person who reached out to me was Kanye himself.

His voice is the first thing you hear on the album’s first track, “Dark Fantasy” and the closer, “Lost in the World,” is based on Bon Iver’s “Woods.” We spoke with Vernon about how he and Kanye hooked up, and life in the studio. This meant Bon Iver’s bearded singer-songwriter-producer Justin Vernon would spend more time onstage than any other guest at last night’s New York concert. The most unlikely collaborator on Kanye West’s new album My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy also ended up on nearly half the songs.

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