Last week, Paul Mescal posted what some might consider a cry for help on his Instagram Stories: a live recording of Bon Iver’s cover of “I Can’t Make You Love Me” by Bonnie Raitt. While we all know by now that the actor enjoys a sad bop, Mescal’s attraction to the musical stylings of Bon Iver feels especially apropos this time of year. The weather is changing, summer flings are dying out, and the country feels on the brink of political turmoil. Enter Justin Vernon.
After Brat Summer painted the world chartreuse, it seemed unclear, for a time, what would happen come autumn, when the hangover set in. As it turns out, Charli XCX had the answer all along: This month, the singer released her latest brat variant, brat and it’s completely different but also still brat, a remixed album overflowing with high-profile features—including one from Bon Iver on “I think about it all the time.” (Vernon told The New Yorker that agreeing to do the track was “a no-brainer.”) In its original state, the song is a rumination on Charli’s biological clock, and not wanting to sacrifice her career to have kids. But with a downtempo beat and some vocal modulation, its remix becomes a broader treatise on love and loneliness, as Vernon croons: “You’re lonely and you’re / And you’re asking, ‘When did it get so hard?’” Charli and Vernon also sample Raitt’s “I Can’t Make You Love Me” and interpolate Bon Iver’s “Nick of Time,” engineering a track that neatly bridges the two artists’ sonic universes.