Big Red Machine have shared a new track called “The Ghost Of Cincinnati” – listen below.
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The collaborative project from The National’s Aaron Dessner and Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon announced their second album How Long Do You Think It’s Gonna Last? earlier this week (June 29) with the song “Latter Days”, which features Anaïs Mitchell.
Yesterday (June 30) the band dropped the second preview of the record, an acoustic solo number from Dessner, along with an artistic official lyric video.
“I park at this spot and stare at the water/ Try to remember I’m somebody’s father/ Dawn commute across Covington Bridge/ Get lost in my head, just looking at it“, Dessner sings in one verse.
Announcing the single on Instagram, Dessner explained: “‘The Ghost of Cincinnati’ is one that I play and sing all by my lonesome. It was inspired by a screenplay called Dandelion by the filmmaker @nicriegel (who co-wrote the lyrics with me), which my brother @brycedessner and I are working on.
“It’s about someone who feels like a ghost, stalking the streets of their hometown, interrogating the past and contemplating their fate – something I can deeply relate to. I imagine this could be a little bit about myself, or friends I’ve lost or someone who has overextended and overspent themselves to a point where they’ve lost everything, empty and hollow like a ghost.”
Set for release on August 27, How Long Do You Think It’s Gonna Last? includes two guest spots from Taylor Swift (on “Birch” and “Renegade”). It comes after both Dessner and Vernon worked with the singer-songwriter on her surprise 2020 albums, Folklore and Evermore.
Dessner said in a Facebook post that he had been working on the songs on the album with Vernon and their collaborators – including Fleet Foxes’ Robin Pecknold, Ben Howard and Sharon Van Etten – for “a large part of the last three years”.
“These songs are connected by emotional threads, especially nostalgia for the innocence of childhood before mistakes have been made and relationships have faltered and the feeling of investigating the past in search of a remedy,” he explained.