For the past quarter century, Aaron Dessner has been a transformative figure in the evolution of popular music, occupying a singular space at the intersection of indie rock, avant-garde composition, and pop. As a founding member of The National, Dessner forged a path from the fabled Brooklyn DIY music scene of the early 2000s to the Grammy Awards stage, earning Best Alternative Music Album honors for 2018’s Sleep Well Beast, and amassing an arena-filling fanbase that includes such luminaries as Bruce Springsteen, Michael Stipe, and Barack Obama. Outside The National, Dessner further refined his cinematic indie-rock aesthetic through acclaimed collaborations with Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon (in Big Red Machine) and Sharon Van Etten.
 
However, as a producer, Dessner has also imported The National’s melancholic mood and intricately textured aesthetic to generation-defining albums by the biggest pop artists on the planet. In 2020, he steered Taylor Swift into more musically meditative and emotionally vulnerable territory on the Grammy Award-winning Folklore and its 2021 companion release, Evermore. Their close creative relationship would continue on the subsequent Midnights and The Tortured Poets Department, with Dessner making a number of onstage cameos during Swift’s record-shattering Eras tour over 2023-24. That association would position Dessner as the a go-to studio auteur for A-list hitmakers who want to get nudged out of their comfort zone: He produced and co-wrote the majority of songs on Ed Sheeran’s 2023 global chart-topper, – , while guiding the ascent of new-school stars like Gracie Abrams and Mustafa. 

And yet, even as Dessner occupies a rarefied space in the world of pop music landscape, he’s held onto the tenets of community and creativity that propelled The National’s rise. His curation of the Eau Claire and Boston Calling festivals helped turn them into national destination events, while his establishment of 37d03d (a.k.a. PEOPLE)—a collective, site-specific event, and label—provided musicians on all of the strata of the industry ladder with a safe space to freely nurture their wildest ideas. Aaron Dessner is a one-man conduit between the top of the pops and the depths of the underground, ensuring that both remain artistically fertile places where anything can happen.