BIG RED MACHINE
UP WITH THE 37d03d
Deep in Upstate New York, The National’s AARON DESSNER is masterminding the next phase of BIG RED MACHINE – the musical collective he founded with Bon Iver’s JUSTIN VERNON. Friends and contributors – including Fleet Foxes’ ROBIN PECKNOLD and ANAÏS MITCHELL – join Laura Barton to discuss community, collaboration and creative “mess”… Reveals Dessner, “We’ve never had a master plan!”
Main photo by JOSH GOLEMAN
Heart gallery: Aaron Dessner with some of the voices on the second Big Red Machine album –
RYAN PFLUGER; GRAHAM TOLBERT; BETH GARRABRANT, SHERVIN LAINEZ
Sharon Van Etten
Justin Vernon
Taylor Swift
Robin Pecknold
LATE November, 2019 in downtown Eau Claire, Wisconsin and lines of wellwrapped people snake through the cold night, stretching from the Masonic Ballroom on Graham Avenue to the Unitarian Universalist Chapel on Farwell Street. This is Eaux Claires Hiver, an event that hovers somewhere between a festival and an artistic residency. Musicians and artists have spent several days experimenting and working with one another and are now presenting their collaborations to small audiences in intimate locations across the town. The event’s curators, Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon and The National’s Aaron Dessner, have stood on the Ballroom stage and welcomed us. There have been sets by Jon Hopkins and Shahzad Ismaily and a Q&A with Ani DiFranco. Later, there will be a tribute to Prince. On the third night, meanwhile, Big Red Machine take over the main hall at the Pablo Center –a large, modern arts building on the Chippewa River. The band, made up of Vernon and Dessner, play as if they are not so much performing as deep in conversation with one another. This is not a set of crowd-pleasers – only one track appeared on the band’s first album. The rest are new works, semi-formed, their edges still sketchy and blurred. Still, the audience is rapt.
Next month, many of those songs appear, fully fledged, on Big Red Machine’s second album, How Long Do You Think It’s Gonna Last?. It is an extraordinary record: contemplative, tender, strikingly vulnerable, pulling in collaborations with Fleet Foxes’ Robin Pecknold, Taylor Swift, Sharon Van Etten and Anaïs Mitchell among others. “I can’t think of another record like this, where it’s not really a band, but tons of lead singers,” says Vernon.
The album is the product of four years’ worth of recording sessions, live shows, dabblings, halfthoughts and conversations. “At some point, Justin and I got in the habit of getting together and bouncing off each other,” Dessner says, down the line from Long Pond – the studio in Upstate New York where he’s recorded everything from The National to Swift’s two lockdown albums,
Folklore
and Evermore, and where Big Red Machine songs are largely put together. “We were talking a lot about community and collaboration and the fabric of voices, about music that is meaningful. But we’ve never had a master plan. It’s kind of like we just kept making things.”
Justin Vernon (left) and Aaron Dessner do “loose and fun”. Below: the first BRM album
GRAHAM TOLBERT
It would be easy to dismiss Big Red Machine as merely a National-Bon Iver spin-off, but the way that Dessner and Vernon work, the community they gather, the space they make and safeguard for creativity, comes close to representing a musicians’ ideal.
“I think both of them are working really hard to create spaces for creative communion, that don’t have to do with ‘How are we going to market this music?’” says Mitchell. “It’s just a reprioritisation of art itself, making space for the vulnerability of it, that is separate from your career. It’s been a total blessing in my life.”