Bonnie Raitt Discusses Being Sampled On Charli XCX Remix Album

Charli XCX recently capped off Brat summer with Brat and it’s completely different but also still brat, a track-by-track remix album. It’s absolutely worth listening to in full, but some highlights include: Ariana Grande on “Sympathy Is A Knife,” the Japanese House on “Apple,” Julian Casablancas on “Mean Girls,” and certainly not least, Bon Iver’s revamped “I Think About It All The Time.” That last one is a song Charli initially wrote after her close friend had a baby, and she found herself trying to decide if she wanted a little infant XCX of her own. That theme also appears in Bonnie Raitt’s 1989 song “Nick Of Time,” which Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon cleverly sampled for his remix.

Bon Iver have covered “Nick Of Time” before, and Vernon isn’t the first artist to sample Raitt. But this unexpected crossover feels particularly special, and Raitt told Rolling Stone how she felt about it:

Justin said, “I’m working with this artist you may or may not know.” [She] had written a song about being cognizant of maybe running out of time, and thinking about having a baby, and is this the right time, and how that impacts her? And he said, ‘I turned her on to your music, and we really would like to use part of “Nick of Time.”

Raitt was already familiar with Charli’s music after all, and thought the final result was “fantastic”: “It mostly sounds like [Charli], but it has a different tone to it, and I know there’s one isolated part of my voice. But they did a really artful job — I was very honored.” Listen below.