Big Red Machine – “Renegade” (Feat. Taylor Swift)
Aaron Dessner and Justin Vernon have gone into full onslaught mode to promote their sophomore Big Red Machine album, How Long Do You Think It’s Gonna Last?. Even though the whole thing isn’t due out until the end of August, they’ve already shared two songs from it since announcing it earlier this week. On Tuesday, we heard “Latter Days,” featuring Bonny Light Horseman’s Anaïs Mitchell, and on Wednesday we got the Dessner-only “The Ghost Of Cincinnati.”
And today there’s another BRM track out there in the world, this one featuring a global superstar as a guest vocalist. Taylor Swift — who Dessner and Vernon both collaborated with on her own albums folklore and evermore — shows up on two songs on How Long Do You Think It’s Gonna Last?. The first we’re hearing is “Renegade,” the same one that Vernon teased a few months back. Here’s Dessner’s statement on the collaboration, which was recorded earlier this year the same week as the Grammys in Los Angeles:
While we were making folklore and evermore last year, Taylor and I sometimes talked about experimenting and writing songs together some day for Big Red Machine. Making music with your friends just to make it — that’s how Big Red Machine started and has grown — and that’s how Renegade came about too. This song was something we wrote after we finished evermore and it dawned on us that this was a BRM song. Taylor’s words hit me so hard when I heard her first voice memo and still do, every time. Justin lifted the song further into the heavens, and my brother [Bryce Dessner]’s strings and drummer Jason Treuting add so much. The feeling and sound of this song feel very much at the heart of ‘How Long Do You Think It’s Gonna Last?’ I’m so grateful to Taylor for continuing to share her incredible talent with me and that we are still finding excuses to make music together.
Listen below.
How Long Do You Think It’s Gonna Last? is out 8/27 on Jagjaguwar/37d03d. Pre-order it here.