Jon Batiste Announces Ninth Studio Album ‘Big Money’
Batiste will kick off the ‘Big Money’ tour on August 27th.
Grammy and Academy Award winner Jon Batiste has announced his ninth studio album, Big Money, out August 22nd. Alongside the news, Batiste has released the album’s title track and official music video—available now. The record, released through Verve/Interscope, will be available in a number of formats, including exclusive signed CDs and signed hot pink vinyl.
Big Money is Batiste’s vision of New Americana. A press release shares that “beneath the rhythm, [Big Money is] a layered meditation on capitalism, survival, and what we choose to value.” As he told Rolling Stone, “I’m just now making an explicit Americana blues statement, 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.”
Batiste co-produced the album with longtime creative confidant Dion “No ID” Wilson. Other collaborators include Andra Day, Randy Newman, and a tight-knit group of musicians, songwriters, and engineers.
He wrote the title track on guitar after a spark of inspiration following his 2024 performance at The Ryman Auditorium. On the record, it features vocals from The Womack Sisters—a rising trio and granddaughters of soul legend Sam Cooke—who echo the refrain: “Might as well live for something you can feel… something that’s real.”
That lyric speaks, among other things, to the rise of A.I. music. Batiste told Rolling Stone: ”I think about this album being a direct statement of the importance of people keeping these traditions alive. 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.”
Batiste will support the album with a national headlining run, The BIG MONEY Tour: Jon Batiste Plays America, kicking off August 27 in Kansas City, MO. The tour will stop at more than 30 venues across the country, including Red Rocks Amphitheatre, the Grand Ole Opry, and a co-headline date with Diana Ross at The Muny in St. Louis, MO. Full tour dates and ticket information are available on Batiste’s website.
