Aaron Dessner Talks Longevity in the Music Industry — and His New Label With Interscope

Aaron Dessner has been in the music industry for about 25 years as part of the acclaimed independent rock band The National , but the last few years have been his most ambitious yet.

He’s still part of the band, but he’s also become the go-to collaborator for some of the biggest acts in the world, from Taylor Swift to Noah Kahan , Gracie Abrams , Mumford & Sons and Ed Sheeran — shaping the sound of modern pop in the process.

Collaborators of Dessner often come to him and work from his studio and home, Long Pond, in the Hudson Valley of upstate New York.

“Long Pond feels like an instrument in itself, where there’s a lot of inherent magic there,” Dessner tells Billboard .

It’s become an almost mythological place in popular culture, thanks to Swift’s long pond studio sessions for her album Folklore, which was created with Dessner during the COVID-19 lockdown.

To build on the lore of the studio, Dessner is now launching a new record label, Long Pond Music, with Interscope Records, hoping to bring that same magic to more artists in need of a place for development.

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“If Long Pond is a place where people feel, for some reason, comfortable [and] can find their voice there, sometimes it’d be nice if there was a direct outlet for that.” His first signee, Hudson Ingram, is a frequent collaborator who has spent significant time at the studio, which Dessner says will become a norm for Long Pond Music signees.

“There’s so much music I can’t make because I don’t have time, or artists I want to work with — because I also have kids, and I coach the soccer team and, like, I have other things I like to do,” Dessner explains.

“So [it’s nice] having another outlet to be like, ‘Why don’t you guys come make a record here, you know and we’ll help put it out.'” It’s not the first time Dessner has founded a record label.

At the start of his music career, at the turn of the 21st century, Dessner co-founded the indie label Brassland as a means to put out early records from the National.

He has since left the outfit, which still continues today, after the band signed a deal with 4AD, but he experimented with another label in 2016 — 37d03d ( PEOPLE ), a collective made alongside Justin Vernon of Bon Iver, designed to do everything from events, label services and overall artistic support.