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Jon Batiste Makes 'Americana Blues Statement' on Rootsy New Album 'Big Money' (Rolling Stone)
https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/jon-batiste-new-album-big-money-interview-1235383304/Jon Batiste Makes ‘Americana Blues Statement’ on Rootsy New Album ‘Big Money’
Batiste’s collaborators on his new album, due Aug. 22, range from Randy Newman to No ID
By Brian Hiatt
July 11, 2025
As a teenage musician, Jon Batiste used to call himself “a new-age blues artist.” Now, many genre-jumps later, he’s taking a deeply enjoyable left turn towards roots music on his seventh studio album, Aug. 22’s Big Money — and reminding the world he’s always been a bluesman at heart. “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.”
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 & 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.
”American history has oftentimes gone through this pattern of something being born and then it being transferred to anyone else other than Black folks,” Batiste says. “I had the honor to play with the Rolling Stones, and I know Paul [McCartney]. I love the Beatles, but how did this thing called rock & roll that was invented by a bunch of black sharecroppers and farmers in the South and then spearheaded by Little Richard and Fats Domino and Chuck Berry end up being [seen as] the result of the British Invasion? Rock & roll became our national music and became the face of our youth culture and national culture — and a white face at that — when, self-admittedly, they were playing songs and speaking to the ideas of these Black Americans.”
-snip-
Big Money‘s capitalism-tweaking title track (and first single) offers a broader mission statement for the album, as sung by Batiste and The Womack Sisters, who happen to be Sam Cooke’s granddaughters: “Might as well live for something you can feel/ Might as well live for something real.” As that lyric suggests, Batiste sees his organic approach as, in part, a rejoinder to the rise of A.I. music: ”I think about this album being a direct statement of the importance of people keeping these traditions alive,” he says. “AI is not going to ever replace this sort of practice. But I do fear that in the short term we’ll forget what this means, and why it’s important, unless artists make statements that are definitively of the essence of communal expression in the traditions of our music, and make them in a way that’s relevant to the contemporary mind and contemporary culture.”
Batiste’s collaborators on his new album, due Aug. 22, range from Randy Newman to No ID
By Brian Hiatt
July 11, 2025
As a teenage musician, Jon Batiste used to call himself “a new-age blues artist.” Now, many genre-jumps later, he’s taking a deeply enjoyable left turn towards roots music on his seventh studio album, Aug. 22’s Big Money — and reminding the world he’s always been a bluesman at heart. “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.”
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 & 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.
”American history has oftentimes gone through this pattern of something being born and then it being transferred to anyone else other than Black folks,” Batiste says. “I had the honor to play with the Rolling Stones, and I know Paul [McCartney]. I love the Beatles, but how did this thing called rock & roll that was invented by a bunch of black sharecroppers and farmers in the South and then spearheaded by Little Richard and Fats Domino and Chuck Berry end up being [seen as] the result of the British Invasion? Rock & roll became our national music and became the face of our youth culture and national culture — and a white face at that — when, self-admittedly, they were playing songs and speaking to the ideas of these Black Americans.”
-snip-
Big Money‘s capitalism-tweaking title track (and first single) offers a broader mission statement for the album, as sung by Batiste and The Womack Sisters, who happen to be Sam Cooke’s granddaughters: “Might as well live for something you can feel/ Might as well live for something real.” As that lyric suggests, Batiste sees his organic approach as, in part, a rejoinder to the rise of A.I. music: ”I think about this album being a direct statement of the importance of people keeping these traditions alive,” he says. “AI is not going to ever replace this sort of practice. But I do fear that in the short term we’ll forget what this means, and why it’s important, unless artists make statements that are definitively of the essence of communal expression in the traditions of our music, and make them in a way that’s relevant to the contemporary mind and contemporary culture.”