Jon Batiste To Release New Album Featuring Randy Newman — ‘Big Money’

Academy Award® and multi-Grammy® winner Jon Batiste is set to release his highly anticipated new album Big Money on August 22 via Verve/Interscope Records. This bold project marks a significant artistic statement, rooted deeply in American musical traditions from gospel and soul to blues, folk, and rock & roll.

The album’s second single, “Lonely Avenue,” features the legendary Randy Newman and is a standout track that offers a stripped-down, intimate reinterpretation of the Doc Pomus classic made famous by Ray Charles. The official music video, directed by David Henry Gerson, captures Batiste wandering through a quiet, timeworn apartment, drawn toward Newman’s soulful voice from another room. Their meeting at the piano becomes a beautiful moment where music bridges memory, imagination, and connection.

Recorded live in a single take in Newman’s living room, “Lonely Avenue” was born out of an organic conversation about life, family, and music, captured spontaneously on a handheld recorder. Batiste shares, “Ray is my patron saint. Just as the Big Money songs are in conversation with each other, I’m in conversation with Randy and Ray.”

The album’s title track, “Big Money,” is a groove-forward anthem featuring Batiste’s guitar work alongside soaring vocals from The Womack Sisters — granddaughters of soul legend Sam Cooke — who echo the refrain: “Might as well live for something you can feel…something that’s real.”

Co-produced by Jon Batiste and longtime collaborator Dion “No ID” Wilson, Big Money spans nine tracks showcasing a wide range of moods and styles. Highlights include the vintage soul-inspired duet “Lean on My Love” featuring Andra Day, and the genre-defying closer “Angels,” performed by Batiste’s alter ego Billy Bob Bo Bob.

Batiste describes the album as an “explicit Americana blues statement” and part of a larger “repatriation process” in Black American artistry — reclaiming heritage and authorship across genres born from the Black experience.

Coming off a landmark year that included a Super Bowl performance, two GRAMMY® wins for American Symphony, and the success of Beethoven Blues (which topped Billboard’s Classical Albums chart for nine weeks), Big Money promises to be a deeply serious and fun artistic milestone.

Big Money Tracklist:

1. Lean on My Love (feat. Andra Day)

2. Big Money

3. Lonely Avenue (feat. Randy Newman)

4. Petrichor

5. Do It All Again

6. Pinnacle

7. At All

8. Maybe

9. Angels (feat. No ID & Billy Bob Bo Bob)