Bon Iver performs Bonnie Raitt’s “I Can’t Make You Love Me”

In the winter of 2008, I bought an album that received so much play that I stopped counting the number of times my iPod’s battery died in the midst of listening to it, which is (thankfully) the closest thing we have in this day and age to wearing out the grooves in a vinyl record. The album was Bon Iver‘s “For Emma, Forever Ago,” a heartbreaking rumination of singer-songwriter Justin Vernon’s journey into an emotional pit of frozen angst and despair following a break-up with his longtime girlfriend and subsequent retreat into the wilderness. I fell in love with every track on that gorgeous, haunting, and heartbreaking LP.

Seventeen years earlier another album, Bonnie Raitt‘s “Nick of Time,” received continuous play in my family’s apartment courtesy my mother. My musical inclinations mostly come from my father and siblings, as my mother rarely held enough interest in any music or specific artist to actually buy an album, let alone play it. Raitt was the exception and that album played on a continuous loop for weeks after she acquired it. I developed a soft spot for it and some of the tracks that remains to this day.

Just twenty minutes ago, I came across a link from the music blog Stereogum to a video of Bon Iver performing one of the songs from Raitt’s 1991 album, “I Can’t Make You Love Me.” I was skeptical at first, given the potential cheese factor.

I watched, listened, and was awestruck. There’s a lot of music that I enjoy, but it’s rare that I have a strong and visceral reaction to any musical performance in the way I did this. As I listened I felt my heart roll up my chest cavity and inch slowly up my throat. It seems ridiculous, but it happened.

From last night’s episode of “Late Night with Jimmy Fallon,” here’s Bon Iver performing Bonnie Raitt’s “I Can’t Make You Love Me.”