Jon Batiste - BIG MONEY

 

Jon Batiste — BIG MONEY

Seventh studio album from the 7x Grammy winner includes collaborators Randy Newman, No ID and others!

Roots music underpins tracks included on Batiste's musical homage

7x Grammy winner Jon Batiste returns with a new album BIG MONEY. 

An exploration of the real currency of life as we know it today, Batiste melds classic and modern styles of R&B, Americana, soul, roots, jazz, gospel and more to create sounds of jubilee and diasporic expression. The soundtrack of a movement. Social music. With the heart of a bluesman at its core.

"I'm just now making an explicit Americana blues statement," Batiste says, "but for me, it's at the beginning. It's always the undercurrent. I think about everything that I have done, and it all is in some way a form of homage to the blues."

Rolling Stone notes that the album ranges from a full-on Sly Stone homage on the Andra Day duet "Lean on My Love" to the title track's mutated Chess Records R&B, to the entirely unexpected rockabilly romp of "Pinnacle," with Batiste playing at least as much guitar as piano throughout the album. As a whole, you could call it Americana, or simply rock 'n' roll — and Batiste sees the album as part of a recent wave of Black cultural reclamation, a "repatriation process" that also includes Beyoncé‘s Cowboy Carter (which he guested on while he was in the middle of recording this album) and even Ryan Coogler's Sinners.

The video accompanying the title track plants a sly dig at Americans' exhaustive quest for wealth but reminds listeners that true wealth lies as much with relationships and family as it does with size of one's bank account. 

"Money is valuable because we collectively have decided it to be so," Batiste says. "But the things that are eternally valuable and enduring last forever even when the currency changes. That's where the BIG money is."

The album was born in spontaneous moments on Batiste's 2024 tour, his first real outing as a solo artist. "I would run into people on the road and we'd go into sessions," he says. "Every song is a performance. It's me playing and singing at the same time with the band. All of us in the same room, breathing the same air, creating onto the tape."

Side A

1. LEAN ON MY LOVE (FEAT. AUDRA DAY)

2. BIG MONEY

3. LONELY AVENUE (FEAT. RANDY NEWMAN)

4. PETRICHOR

5. DO IT ALL AGAIN

Side B

6. PINNACLE

7. AT ALL

8. MAYBE

9. ANGELS (FEAT. NO ID & BILLY BOB BO BOB)

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