The standard origin myth of the 2008–2014 indie folk revival starts in a hunting cabin near Eau Claire, Wisconsin, where Justin Vernon spent a winter recovering from mononucleosis and the breakup of his band and recorded what became Bon Iver's For Emma, Forever Ago. The myth is partly true. Vernon really was alone, the bare-bones, near-single-mic recordings really did capture the room as much as the songs, and the album really did set the visual and sonic vocabulary — beard, flannel, long trailing reverb — that the next half-decade of folk-coded indie would adopt.

What the myth tends to flatten is that the same impulse was surfacing in three cities at once — Seattle, New York, London. Fleet Foxes, working in Seattle with the Beach Boys and Crosby, Stills & Nash in the rear-view, released their self-titled debut in 2008. In New York, Sufjan Stevens — Detroit-born but based in Brooklyn — was building a vast catalog of literary, banjo-heavy songs about Michigan and Illinois. In London, Marcus Mumford — a drummer who had toured as a sideman for Laura Marling — was assembling the group that would briefly make the off-beat kick drum the most monetized sound in popular music.

It is easy in retrospect to read the revival's instrument choices — upright bass, banjo, mandolin, hammered dulcimer, and four-part harmony singing — as nostalgia. At the time it functioned as a position. The mainstream pop of the late 2000s was running on Pro Tools-perfect vocal stacks, Auto-Tune as texture, and EDM build-and-drop architecture, while the financial press was wall-to-wall dread over the crash. To turn your back on both and pick up a plain instrument was itself an argument. Reaching for a Martin D-28 was both an aesthetic and a political gesture — of a fairly soft sort — and a plain acoustic guitar sounded like the one honest thing in the room.

It also opened a door for lyric writing that did not have to compete with a synth riser. Bon Iver's "Skinny Love" could rest on a single fingerpicked figure for three minutes. Fleet Foxes' Robin Pecknold could spend an entire verse listing migratory birds. Sufjan Stevens could write a song called "Casimir Pulaski Day" about a friend's cancer and trust the listener to fill in the context. The revival's commercial peak was inseparable from the fact that the songs sounded like they could be sung out loud in an ordinary room, lights on. Mumford & Sons' Babel sold six hundred thousand copies in its U.S. release week in 2012, on the back of "I Will Wait."

Critics at the time tended to dismiss the wave as costume drama — the suspenders, the waistcoats, the Civil War aesthetic of certain music videos. The deeper anxiety the revival was processing was not 1860s America. It was the early stages of social-media saturation. Facebook went public in 2012. The iPhone 4 had arrived in 2010. The smartphone was finishing the job the laptop had started: keeping the listener reachable by text, email, and notifications at every moment, even during a song.

Acoustic-folk arrangements answered that condition by demanding a different kind of attention. You cannot really scroll through a Fleet Foxes harmony stack. The Bon Iver record asks you to sit with the room tone. The argument the revival was making, almost without saying it, was that some music is worth making yourself unreachable for a while to hear. It is a strange argument for a streaming-era genre to win — and yet, briefly, it did.

The victory did not last. By 2015–16 the wave had receded as a commercial phenomenon. Bon Iver pivoted to the digitally processed, lyrically opaque 22, A Million; Mumford & Sons quietly retired the banjo on Wilder Mind. Fleet Foxes took a six-year hiatus. The signifiers of the revival — beards, the off-beat kick drum — were absorbed into car commercials and lost their edge.

The writing, though, did not go away. Phoebe Bridgers, Big Thief (and its center, Adrianne Lenker), Aldous Harding, and the entire subsequent decade of singer-songwriter records inherited the revival's central permission: that you can write a song slow, with words you would not be embarrassed to see on a page, and trust the listener to lean in. That permission is the part worth keeping.