Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon Details How Taylor Swift Collabs Came About

Justin Vernon is in the middle of a promo blitz for the new Bon Iver album SABLE, fABLE. Today it continues with a Zane Lowe interview for Apple Music. During the chat, Vernon offered new details about how he ended up collaborating with Taylor Swift on the songs "exile" and "evermore." We all already intuited that it was related to her work with the National's Aaron Dessner, Vernon's bandmate in Big Red Machine, but now we have some more concrete background details on how it played out.

Take it away, Zane:

Justin Vernon: I mean, I actually haven't really said this out loud before this aspect to this story because all the glory goes to Taylor.

Zane Lowe: Yeah, of course.

Justin Vernon: For her courage to reach out to Aaron. But right in February there, we were going to go on a tour. This is 2020, so the timeline's a little fuzzy, but stay with me.

Zane Lowe: Right on the cusp of quarantine.

Justin Vernon: Exactly. And so Andrew Fitzpatrick, who was playing guitar in Bon Iver, was going to have a baby in April, did have a baby. And we were out a guitar player for our big European run that we were going to do for i,i. And I asked Aaron, so Aaron was flying out to gigs, he was listening and rehearsing. He was in. And what we were going to do is have Aaron go out to the middle of these arenas and just play demos of Big Red Machine, new stuff. Just play them and-

Zane Lowe: Before the Bon Iver show?

Justin Vernon: Just kind of DJ. And I was like, "Aaron do that." He's like, "Oh buddy, that makes me nervous." But this was in the spirit of Big Red Machine. Just go out there and just play, dick around. I'll go up there too. We'll all just go up there and do the Big Red Machine thing. And of course we play our last show, I think March 7th. And then March 12th the NBA season is cancelled and Covid really trips up. And so that tour pretty quickly gets cancelled. And it's a brick wall for everybody, especially in music. For everybody but to have the tour stopped and to have that, especially for Aaron was working really hard on opening these shows with these demos, these songs. I just was like, "Let's just let him breathe and you can come and then you'd play in our set. You'll do double duty."

Zane Lowe: How fun.

Justin Vernon: And somewhere around that time, like everybody, like me, Aaron was going on Instagram Live and just playing stuff he's been working on because I think we just needed to share. And Taylor heard it. Again, all the glory goes to Taylor for hearing, as a songwriter, what music she wants to make. But those songs are Big Red Machine demos.

Zane Lowe: Amazing.

Justin Vernon: At their core. You know what I mean? And then her genius was working with the genius of Aaron Dessner on making the strongest set of lyrics and songwriting that she's ever had, really. And so during that process, I'm just sort of like watching it happen. And to me it was very much like seeing Taylor enter our whole universe. Of course there's no one bigger and we all bowed down to her. But to see her come into that, it was almost like I couldn't stop blinking. It was like, this makes so much sense. The love and community that Aaron had showed me over these years and what we'd done with Big Red Machine and people, and all the events that we had done, Taylor was just stepping right into it and flawlessly taking it. And then Aaron hits me up and is like, "So Bud-o, I think there's a song that Taylor would like you to sing." And I was like, "Taylor?" He's like, "Yeah, I haven't told you yet, but I'm taking some of the songs and she's writing to them." I was like, "Awesome." I'm not doing anything today. So I just, they sent it and I ended up adding a couple of little bits, but that's how Aaron and Joe and Taylor wrote the song, and I just sang it on an SM7 in my little makeshift studio.

Zane Lowe: Just quarantining kind of on your own, just figuring it out.

Justin Vernon: And it felt level to everything else. I mean in, it's an exceptional song and an exceptionally popular song for a good reason. But it felt just so natural and I'm so thankful for that opportunity just to have, yeah, to have worked with such an amazing artist.

Swift later guested on two songs from Big Red Machine's How Long Do You Think It's Gonna Last? and "The Alcott" from the National's First Two Pages Of Frankenstein. She is not on SABLE, fABLE, but I bet she would've been down. Splitting hairs hear: Although many of the instrumentals from Swift's folklore and evermore may well have started as Big Red Machine tracks, Dessner has previously said "cardigan" and "willow" were first earmarked for the National.

Video of the interview is viewable below, where you'll also find some scenes from Saturday's Bon Iver basketball tournament. (If you want more details on the basketball, Stereogum contributor Nate Rogers reported from the event for GQ.)