Aaron Dessner and Taylor Swift have become enamored with collaborating. After Dessner helped Swift bring Folklore and Evermore to life, she visited his world and featured on a couple of Big Red Machine songs. The first was “Renegade,” and the second one, “Birch,” was released today alongside the band’s new album, How Long Do You Think It’s Gonna Last?.
On the track, Swift does something she doesn’t often do: play a support role, as her job on “Birch” is to complement Justin Vernon’s vocals with her own, a task she handles wonderfully.
Dessner tells Apple Music of the song:
“It’s actually a beat that The National’s drummer, Bryan Devendorf, made in his basement. He will make these kind of loopy, trippy beats in his basement on a drum machine, and then send them to me as a Voice Memo. I wrote music to it and developed it and played all the parts to it and made it. It was during a time where I wasn’t doing that well, actually — maybe in fall 2019. I sent it to Justin, and good friends sometimes know when you’re going through something and maybe he felt that. He wrote the words and melody to it and as we recorded and developed it, we played it for Taylor at some point, towards the end of Folklore. She really loved the song, and heard harmonies, and then kind of helped to lift further into some heavenly place.”
Listen to “Birch” above and check out our review of How Long Do You Think It’s Gonna Last? here.
How Long Do You Think It’s Gonna Last? is out now via Jagjaguwar/37d03d. Get it here.
