In the past it wasn’t uncommon to look at a team-up and wonder what was in it for the people involved; roping Sting in to mumble his way incoherently through your eco-ballad told the world that you had a celeb-filled WhatsApp group whilst he was still saving the rain forest one private jet trip at a time.
Nowadays things are different. For starters, Big Red Machine is a partnership itself, Justin Vernon and The National’s Aaron Dessner taking time out from their day jobs and numerous other projects to work with each other. On top of that, How Long Do You Think It’s Gonna Last? is really a compilation of collaborations, occasionally interspersed with the duo’s guest-free work.
Thematically, Dessner has explained that it explores the suspended animation in which childhood experience and memories sit whilst giving space to some of the characters no longer with them.
When alone together there’s a grace and serenity in play, as you might expect, on the pattering Magnolia and animatedly strummed The Ghosts of Cincinnati, originally written by Dessner for Taylor Swift but on which he contributes vocals publicly for the first time.
The most affecting though is Brycie, a poignant tribute to his twin brother and bandmate who in a depression-blighted adolescence was the rock on which his troubles broke.
A project littered with such high-profile consorts will mean inevitably more focus on the stars but, unfairly ranked maybe, the ‘lesser’ names add balance and arguably help produce the more interesting end product.
June’s A River, featuring Ben Howard and folk mavens This Is The Kit, revolves almost entirely around the former’s against-the-grain voice, a recycled piano loop and skittering lo-fi beat, whilst the experimentally treated vocals of Naeem (formerly known as Spank Rock) make Easy To Sabotage a sweetly structured oddity.
Swift and Dessner are reunited after their work on both Folklore and Evermore brought such positive results; likewise, Vernon and her share vocal duties again on the skittering Birch which wanders through the background in an achingly low-key way. Swift’s other contribution, Renegade, places her in front of the mic again, waiting for an alignment which may never come; ‘Get your shit together/So I can love you’.
Elsewhere Hutch, which features Sharon Van Etten, Lisa Hannigan and Shara Nova in chorus, is a tribute to Frightened Rabbit singer Scott Hutchinson, whose suicide is dealt with tenderness and no little empathy via, ‘So I can relate/With the action of need to erase me/I know you weren’t faking or making it up’.
Possibly the greatest trick Dessner and Vernon pull off though is that whilst this is a record coherent in atmosphere and pacing, it’s still easy enough to mark these songs apart.
Opener Latter Days is austere but has a world-weary chorus that belongs to a thousand quiet rooms and still lives. Anaïs Mitchell steals the show there but – as would anyone – has difficulty in upstaging Fleet Foxes’ Robin Pecknold on Phoenix, its assured, small town bandstand horns bolstering what is, relatively speaking, the album’s best moment.
That’s the thing with collaborations, sometimes you can’t feel which ego wants to step back. There’s however no battle of wills ruining How Long Do Think It’s Gonna Last?.
Instead, the players play and the stories are for everyone. Apparently, Sting was otherwise engaged.
