When Bon Iver (Justin Vernon) first started playing the major festival circuit last year, he discovered an unexpected instrument that could help amplify his subtle, spacious music and carry it across large open spaces: the audience.

"I never thought of it like that until we got to a couple of festivals and realized that's a clever instrument to pull as a performer," Vernon said at a Bonnaroo press conference recently. "It just started out as a thing where we needed a choir and most people can sing, growing up in church or something, so that's kind of the idea. But the festival thing -- it becomes a different energy."

Vernon built upon the idea of expanding Bon Iver's sound at this year's Bonnaroo by borrowing the Dearland horns from Elvis Perkins, who had performed an earlier set on the same day. "I feel less pressure at festivals because people aren't there to see you necessarily," Vernon explains. "There's like 5,000 bands. It just makes me feel more relaxed and more able to play the festival better."

That's nice. Not to put the pressure on you or anything, Mr. Iver, but even one rabid fan in the audience can cause international attention --and, with it, scrutiny -- these days, given instant technology such as YouTube and Twitter.

"As big as tweets seem -- and they do seem like they're taking over the world -- they're an isolated phenomenon," counters Vernon. "When somebody tweets somebody else, not everybody else in the world reads it. I kind of like that. People aren't so interested in what's the biggest thing -- they're more interested in what's going on between them and the 10 people they know here at the festival. It becomes less popularized and makes it more about what people want to hear, I guess, which wasn't always the case. And I like that part of it."

We tried to tweet that last point as part of Spinner's Bonnaroo coverage but, of course, we could only give you the gist of it at the time -- it just didn't fit into 140 characters or less.