Local rockers Margot & the Nuclear So and So's may be headlining Friday's Rock for Riley concert at the Vogue, but up-and-coming opener Bon Iver will be the main attraction for many in attendance.

Bon Iver's debut album, "For Emma, Forever Ago," is a haunting collection of soul-stirring funeral songs. Although the lyrics never directly address it, you could no more dispute death's presence on the album than doubt the existence of salt in the sea.

Singer-songwriter Justin Vernon wrote the album during a three-month self-imposed exile in a rural Wisconsin cabin around Christmas 2006. He passed a CD of the songs along to a few friends in early 2007, and soon was entertaining offers from several big-name indie labels. Bon Iver eventually signed to Bloomington's Jagjaguwar label, which released "For Emma, Forever Ago" to wide critical acclaim in February.

Vernon spoke to Indy.com about the mixed blessing of success, his unique approach to lyric-writing and more.

How are you feeling about all of the positive press?

I find my nerves are a little exposed. And by a little, I mean a lot, every day. My anxiety is riding at a pretty resonating frequency. But it's obviously exciting, too. It's something you wait for and dream about.... But I am very nerve-wracked, and I do have moments of little freak-outs, or breakdowns.

Why so?

I don't really know what I'm doing. I don't know how to do this well and stay the person that I want to be ... It's just constantly in my face, and I don't have any time to think about it or keep it at arm's length.

You took a unique approach to writing lyrics for this album, coming up with sounds before words. Could you explain that?

In the past I wasn't ever able to feel like I had actually said anything in a strong enough way to alleviate anything. And I started to realize that by singing these syllables, and creating these vocal sounds, and really getting the backdrop and the atmosphere right, the words would rise to the surface naturally. And it was really intense, because I was finding out the meanings of things that I don't think I could have ever come to with regular writing.

What kind of responses have you heard from fans?

Very, very heavy ones. I have gotten intense ones like, "This album has forced a divorce," or "This album has gotten me through my mother dying," or even, "I was doing fine until I heard your album and then I realized I wasn't happy." I don't know what I am supposed to do with the information, but I know it's cool that people are having these reactions.

Do you think (it's) an especially good album to grieve to?

I think part of the album itself is grieving about something. There is something about funerals and eulogies that attract people. When you have an opportunity to stop and say, "This is who this person is and what their life meant to me," moments like that are very special. I think people probably find out a lot about the meaning of their lives in those moments. I think people find a togetherness, something good, in the grieving process. And I think that was happening with this record. I was trying to pay tribute to an era of my life while trying to extinguish and overcome it, and a lot of people go through that same thing on different levels.

Are you comfortable with such a personal record being heard by so many people?

I didn't try that hard to jam it into anybody's hands, so I don't feel that uncomfortable. I am still trying to figure out what is going on in those songs, too.

If you play a song that comes from a kind of sick place, every time you play it, there is new dark territory where you can find new perspectives and basically search, whether it is searching yourself or scanning the horizon inside the song. At the same time, I'm not exactly holding onto it anymore. This album had a lot of emotion put into it, but I am sort of observing it at this point, too.