Taylor Swift brought Big Red Machine duo Aaron Dessner and Justin Vernon into her Folklore/Evermore universe in 2020. Here in 2021, the roles have been reversed, as Swift features on a pair of new Big Red Machine songs, from the upcoming album How Long Do You Think It’s Gonna Last?. One of them, “Renegade,” was shared recently, and now it has secured Big Red Machine its first placement on the Billboard Hot 100 chart: On the chart dated July 17, “Renegade” debuts at No. 73. As Pop Crave notes, the song is Swift’s 137th song on the chart, which adds to her record for the most all-time among female artists.
.@BRMadjv's "Renegade," featuring @taylorswift13, debuts at No. 73 on this week's #Hot100.
It earns Big Red Machine their first career entry on the chart.
— billboard charts (@billboardcharts) July 12, 2021
This comes after Swift helped Vernon secure his first top-10 single last year, with her Bon Iver-featuring Folklore cut “Exile,” which peaked at No. 6. Vernon’s previous Hot 100 high came as a guest on Kanye West’s “Monster,” which topped out at No. 18 in 2010. Similarly, Swift also boosted Dessner’s other band, The National, to its sole Hot 100 appearance with the Evermore collaboration “Coney Island,” which achieved a peak at No. 63.
Dessner recently said of “Renegade,” “It’s as good as anything [Swift and I have] made together, I think. It’s also something that I, emotionally, was really struck by the first time I heard it, just the way she talks about how anxiety and fear get in the way of loving someone or create an inability for someone to love. And I think it’s incredibly relatable, but it’s expressed in the context of this fairly experimental sound world, although I think we leaned into the… The way it came together as a song, it just really, I think, sums up the whole the Big Red Machine record.”
How Long Do You Think It’s Gonna Last? is out 8/27 via Jagjaguwar/37d03d. Pre-order it here.
