SSitting in the restaurant of a Denver hotel, in the middle of an American tour with his group Bleachers, Jack Antonoff shrugs his shoulders. “There’s this intense need to understand myself,” he says, frowning, “and I don’t really know where it comes from, because I keep doing it. explaining all this.»
He’s right. Over the past 12 years, Bleachers has released a succession of albums filled with Antonoff’s surprisingly personal and candid songs. Being surprisingly personal and candid was the goal. Antonoff was previously the guitarist for Fun, a pop-rock band that went supernova with their 2011 single We Are Young. Although he co-wrote a song that sold 10 million copies in the United States alone, Antonoff says he “hated” the experience “because I wasn’t the frontman, they weren’t my lyrics, and I needed to write a song that, if I died tomorrow, would be the story of my life.
He says he insisted that his then-label release the song I Wanna Get Better as the first single from Bleachers “to let people know what was in store for them.” It depicted Antonoff literally screaming in anguish, “losing his mind” with grief following the death of his younger sister, aged 13, from a brain tumor. You can tell this sets the confessional tone of Bleachers’ work just by looking at some of their other song titles: I’m Ready to Move On, Everybody Lost Somebody, Stop Making This Hurt, Self-Respect, I Can’t Believe You’re Gone, We Should Talk.
Their latest album, Everyone for Ten Minutes, offers its audience what you might call Jack Antonoff’s origin story: there are songs about his teenage years spent driving across the United States in his parents’ minivan, touring rundown punk venues with an emo band called Outline, which, in its own right, was a pretty scary experience (“Teenagers, in a van, drinking a lot, smoking weed, doing psychedelics, smoking what we thought was hash but turned out to be black). opium, “I’m surprised we survived”), which his parents only agreed to because his sister’s illness meant “they didn’t care about anything that didn’t really matter. When something serious, existential happens in your life, you’re a little less stressed about a traffic ticket or grades, you know?”
If the stands were the only thing Jack Antonoff did, then everything would seem awfully simple. But of course, they are not everything. Around the same time he founded the group, he met Taylor Swift at an awards show, bonded over a shared love of ’80s synth duo Yazoo, and embarked on a creative collaboration that ultimately led Antonoff to become perhaps the most in-demand pop producer in the world: He worked not only on 11 Taylor Swift albums, but with Sabrina Carpenter, Lorde, Lana Del Rey, St. Vincent, Kendrick Lamar, and Gracie Abrams, among others. He occupies the vaunted position of being a top-notch pop megaproducer who also produces angsty, Bruce Springsteen-influenced rock, and insists that no one activity takes precedence over the other in his career.
“I’m in a very select group of people who probably really do both,” he agrees. “Usually someone puts things on one side: songwriters or performers who think they can produce a record but then have to care deeply about someone else’s work, or producers who think, ‘Now it’s my turn!’ but don’t have that thing that you can’t even describe that has driven you to write your own songs and sing them in front of people since you were a kid.
Indeed, for all his protests that he’s terribly blunt, Jack Antonoff seems just the opposite. On the contrary, he appears as such a mass of complexities and contradictions that it sometimes seems as if he is trying to resolve them himself, in front of you. He’s clearly highly motivated, but he worries that his drive is linked to “survivor’s guilt” over his sister’s death, “about not doing things or using my time when someone you love hasn’t had any, which is not the best way to live – there’s a difference between joyfully seizing the moment and something that relies on anxiety.”
He decries the constant chatter of opinions on the internet: “I don’t care anymore, it’s like just engaging negatively on the internet is without a doubt a fucking low-vibe joke, and I think artists for too long in the last decade have read it and there’s nothing in it.” But he also says he enjoys making “very high-stakes albums…helping design and guide something that everyone will have an opinion on, that people like to have the hottest opinions on.”
He believes his role in making some of the greatest records of the century so far is widely misinterpreted as dark and Machiavellian (“He’s annoying, inevitably, exasperating throughout … “One of the big misconceptions about how it works in my world is that I write songs and perform them, like, a pop star, which I’ve never done once in my life,” he says, but he refuses to discuss how it actually works because “it doesn’t really matter.” he’s tired of people constantly trying to explain everything online. “You’re on the phone all the time. explain something,” he says. “They tell you what’s going on in this country, they tell you how a train works, it’s like an information dump and it kills people’s imagination. “Do you want to be like Jack Antonoff?” Here’s how he did it! » It made me want to allow people to imagine the magic of it all.
Certainly, in the context of 21st century pop, it’s a very strange fish. He’s obviously someone who moves with enviable ease among the pop aristocracy: he apparently ended up working on multi-Grammy winner Kendrick Lamar’s 2024 album GNX, when he walked into the studio to visit a friend and “didn’t leave for three years”; Bruce Springsteen is not just an influence but a friend, Bleachers collaborator and mentor (best advice given by The Boss: “Don’t live in the dream, let the dream live in you”). But Antonoff both looks noticeably more like someone who might have spent his teenage years playing gigs in anarchist bookstores on drugs than like someone who co-wrote, say, Sabrina Carpenter’s Please Please Please – short-cropped hair, tattered skate pants, Sonic Youth T-shirt – and often seems more like a dynamic, independent outsider than someone who recently enjoyed chicken nuggets with caviar at Taylor Swift’s wedding.
Certainly, he’s freer in his opinions than you might expect from someone operating at the highest levels of pop, a world where artists tend to have a certain capacity for controversy thanks to their media training. He’s currently engaged in a war of words with Live Nation over concert ticket prices (he’s proud that Bleachers tickets are “as low as they can physically be”). “Live Nation keeps missing the point, because every time I say something, they call my people and say, ‘Let’s have a meeting.’ You don’t understand, I don’t want to talk to you, I want to be clear, I don’t agree with you turning the most sacred thing in the world into some weird free market crap… the idea that if you’re rich any ticket you want is yours at any time and if you’re not you have to go through this demoralizing online experience where you get beat up, kicked and fucked.
When I meet him, his social media is full of insults from angry commenters because a Jewish artist insisted on saying “Free Palestine” on stage at the Bleachers shows: he points out that he was saying it long before the recent controversy between Ed Sheeran and Macklemore exploded, but says that he “feels much braver to say it now, because it’s in no way a strange, uncomfortable or controversial thing to say, it’s a deeply human thing to say. (controversial) you are lost in another sauce that is so crazy. They’re going to let a fucking promoter tell me what I can say? Don’t reserve me. (Ed Sheeran) missed a huge, great opportunity there: just cancel the whole fucking tour, then play to every venue for free, raise a lot of money, rather than let a fucking billionaire tell you what to do. a world where billionaires are constantly telling us what to do, so stand up.
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Of course, one could argue that Antonoff has more unsupervised freedom than the artists he works with. The Bleachers are enjoying a curious type of success: their albums sell respectably rather than astronomically, and they’ve never been “even close,” Antonoff points out, to having huge crossover success. Yet they’re able to fill Madison Square Garden with an audience that Antonoff says isn’t there to see “this producer’s band.” His own fame is largely vicarious, thanks to the company he keeps in the recording studio: his 2023 marriage to actress Margaret Qualley took place amid a melee of fans and…
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