aaron dessner
Hear The National’s Mournful New Song With Bon Iver
As tipped here last week, The National has released the new song “Weird Goodbyes” featuring Bon Iver, which the band has already been playing live minus Justin Vernon during its summer world tour. “It’s about letting go of the past and moving on, then later being overwhelmed by second thoughts,” says frontman Matt Berninger of “Weird Goodbyes,” which will appear on the band’s in-progress next studio album. [embedded content][embedded content] The National’s Aaron Dessner says “Weird Goodbyes” is one of the first new song the band worked on in the wake of the 2019 album I Am Easy To Find. “I was misusing drum machines, as usual, and stumbled onto this beat that got stuck in my head — it felt like something only [drummer] Bryan [Devendorf] could naturally play,” he adds. “We built the song a...
Taylor Swift Heads to ‘Carolina’ on Song for Crawdads Movie
Taylor Swift‘s latest new song is arriving at midnight (ET) tonight, according to the artist’s social media platforms. “Carolina” will play over the end credits of the upcoming movie Where the Crawdads Sing, which was produced by Reese Witherspoon and hits theaters on July 15. Like Swift’s most recent studio albums of original music, the 2020 projects folklore and evermore, “Carolina” was produced by The National’s Aaron Dessner. “I wanted to create something haunting and ethereal to match this mesmerizing story,” Swift said of the song in March. Witherspoon and director Olivia Newman revealed last week in an online roundtable discussion that Swift not only wrote the song without being commissioned to do so but also turned it into them without warning. Swift recorded “Carolina” in one take...
Big Red Machine Announce New Album With Appearances by Taylor Swift, Fleet Foxes, Sharon Van Etten
Big Red Machine has announced their second album How Long Do You Think It’s Gonna Last, releasing Aug. 27 via 37d03d. The folk-indie band is somewhat of a supergroup formed by Aaron Dessner of The National and Justin Vernon of Bon Iver. The new album was produced by Dessner himself at his Long Pond studio in New York. The announcement of the 15-track LP also comes with its first single and lyric video, the album-opening “Latter Days,” featuring Anaïs Mitchell. Check out its lyric video below. [embedded content] About the single, Dessner says, “It was clear to Anaïs that the early sketch Justin and I made of ‘Latter Days’ was about childhood, or loss of innocence and nostalgia for a time before you’ve grown into adulthood — before you’ve hurt people or lost people and made mistakes. She def...
Taylor Swift’s Evermore Is an Undeniable Folk-Pop Masterpiece
Somehow. Somehow, as the most psychologically daunting year of our lives refuses to loosen its grip, Taylor Swift continues to create with abandon, relentlessly surprising a fan base that hangs on her every tweet and emoji. Somehow, the pop monolith has done it almost entirely in isolation, sharing heaps of digital files with her latest songwriting soulmate, The National’s Aaron Dessner (as well as long-favored collaborator Jack Antonoff), and remotely patching together some three-dozen fully realized tracks from a makeshift home studio. Somehow, she’s polished off two career-redefining projects in five months. And somehow, despite the mastery and universal acclaim of July’s Folklore, its new sister album, Friday’s Evermore, is even stronger. Released two days befor...
The National’s Aaron Dessner Teases New Big Red Machine Music
Aaron Dessner’s making the most out of quarantine. The National multi-instrumentalist played a huge part in the making of Taylor Swift’s new (and pretty damn good) surprise-album folklore, with a co-writer or producer credit on 11 of its 16 songs. But that’s apparently not all he’s been up to. Dessner recently took to Instagram to tease new music with his other project, the Justin Vernon-assisted Big Red Machine. “5+ month studio bender continues,” he wrote alongside a photo of working song titles. “Thank you to everyone who has reached out about folklore….so glad you’re enjoying it as much as I do. Still feels surreal to me. Profoundly grateful to have time and space to work and finish things — and so thankful for the many friends contributing to that music and this new @bigredm...
The National’s Aaron Dessner on Finding ‘Magic’ Chemistry With Taylor Swift
The National’s Aaron Dessner, who co-wrote and/or produced 11 of 16 tracks on Taylor Swift’s folklore, detailed the “magic” collaborative chemistry that helped spark her newly issued eighth LP. “It was a very surreal moment when she first contacted me, because we’d met before, twice in the past, mutual kind of admiration,” Dessner told Apple Music’s Zane Lowe. “I knew she was a fan and we’ve always been fans of hers. But it was sort of like she reached out and said, ‘Would you ever be able to… or be interested in working on songs together?’ And I was like, ‘Sure. Like, wow.’ And then we just started to bounce around ideas.’ The musician, who had already been writing a lot of music during the COVID-19 lockdown, quickly sent Swift a folder full of ideas. “It just kind of was crazy instant ch...
folklore Is Taylor Swift’s Smoldering Pop Rebellion — Finally
The great fascination enveloping folklore, Taylor Swift’s mossy, surprise eighth LP, lies not within the album’s steadfast execution but the attempt itself — that during a global crisis which has paralyzed entire nations, a pop monolith would venture to swerve from her honey-soaked Lover’s lane and rumble deep into the forest, fixated on sonic reinvention. Hell, Swift’s fans would’ve been satisfied with a simple music video for her 11-month-old synth-bop “Cruel Summer.” Instead, she’s written furiously in isolation, launching an organic rebellion far beyond the pseudo-defiance of Reputation (nine Max Martin co-writes don’t exactly scream disobedience) and churning out the quickest album turnaround of her career. For studio expertise, she tapped the National’s indie-rock svengali Aaro...
