Songfacts®:

• This hypnotic track is a cappella but drenched in Auto-Tune, which was becoming very popular in 2009 but wasn't what we'd expect to hear from Bon Iver, an artist not known for hip-hop-style production. Justin Vernon, aka Bon Iver, explained to Guy Raz on NPR Music: "This for me was a way to extend my voice or to experiment with different techniques, or just sounds. It was really freeing for me to do, and I'm really happy it's the last song on the EP."
• In 2010, Bon Iver teamed up with Kanye West on the song "Lost In The World," which is based on "Woods" and interpolates the track. It appears on Kanye's 2010 album My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy.
  
  Justin Vernon ended up contributing backing vocals to the track "Monster" on that album as well - you can hear him in the intro. Vernon also sang on a few songs on Kanye's 2013 album Yeezus.
• The woods of Wisconsin are where Justin Vernon made the first Bon Iver album, For Emma, Forever Ago. He spent three months in a remote cabin working on the songs, then released the album independently in 2007. It drew attention from music blogs, and record companies took notice. He signed with a small label called Jagjaguwar Records, which issued the album in 2008 and helped promote it. Suddenly he was touring the world and doing lots of press, which was a shock to his system. Bon Iver also became more of a band than a solo project around this time.
  
  He released "Woods" in 2009 as the last track of his Blood Bank EP. The song finds him centering himself, going back to the woods in his mind and shutting out all the noise that came along with his success.