re: Stacks

Justin Vernon wrote and produced it alone; the album was recorded from November 2006 to January 2007 at a hunting cabin in northwestern Wisconsin, with extra recording at Fairall in Raleigh and mixing by Vernon and Nick Petersen at Track and Field Studios in Chapel Hill. It is track nine at 6:40 and the last on the record. Asked by an interviewer what the "re" meant, Vernon said it is "Regarding", and that the song is not the stacks but about the stacks. The opening lyric refers to the excavation at Qumran, which Bon Iver's early Myspace page listed as the album's only musical influence; Vernon told Drowned in Sound it points to the digs where the Dead Sea Scrolls were found, used as a metaphor for what comes after.

Wikipedia dates the single December 15, 2008, after "Skinny Love" and "For Emma"; it gives no label, catalog number or B-side, and we could not verify those. The song appears in the film As Cool As I Am, and carries RIAA Gold and BPI Silver certifications. Setlist.fm lists it eleventh among his most played songs with 224 performances, behind "Skinny Love" at 338 and "Blood Bank" at 319, though we took that count from a search summary. MusicBrainz lists later cover recordings from 2019 and 2021 and an Owsey and Resotone rework at 6:30. We found no music video.