Even after all this time, Bon Iver‘s Justin Vernon can’t quite conjure the words to describe how it feels to watch videos of tens of thousands of Swifties singing along to “Exile,” the Folklore song he co-wrote and recorded with Taylor Swift. “Out of body,” is how Vernon described the feeling on The Tonight Show on Wednesday (April 2) when host Jimmy Fallon asked what it felt like to see Swift perform it on her record-breaking Eras Tour.
“Sadly, I didn’t ever get to sing it with her on her tour… she got to come sing it with us, but I saw those clips and I’m like, ‘Gosh, they sound better than one of me can sound,” Vernon said. “No really, it was pretty powerful to just see that and to hear how that sounded. It was amazing.”
Vernon also talked about the “I Think About It All the Time” revamp he did for Charli XCX’s Brat and it’s completely different but also still brat remix album last year, which featured a sample of Bonnie Raitt’s 1989 song “Nick of Time.”
“My friend Danielle Haim told me, ‘you should sample ‘Nick Of Time’ the old Bonnie Raitt song and I was like: ‘That’s such a good idea’, because Charli’s song was about running out of time,” Vernon explained, noting that he and Raitt — who is his “number one” favorite artist — have been friendly over the years. “Our greatest living singer,” he said of Raitt.
Vernon said when he called Raitt to ask for her permission the answer was a quick, simple, “‘Yep… let’s do it,’ she just had to kind of give us her blessing on using the sample, but she was , of course, touched. And she’s a huge fan of Charli’s, as am I.”
The singer was on to promote next week’s release of his fifth studio album, Sable, Fable (April 11), which he described as being a kind of two-part journey. The first portion, Sable, he said, is “sad and hard to get through and kind of drudgy and a look at the past… a look back at this kind of cabin man, man in a cabin narrative that I’ve been absorbing over these years. [And] the rest of the record is me kind of doing whatever I needed to do right now to be happy for once.”
Watch Bon Iver on The Tonight Show below.
