Sitting in the restaurant of a Denver hotel, in the middle of a US tour with his band Bleachers, Jack Antonoff shrugs. For the last 12 years, Bleachers have released a succession of albums packed with Antonoff’s strikingly personal and frank songs. Being strikingly personal and frank was the whole point.
Antonoff had previously been guitarist in Fun, a pop-rock band who went supernova with their 2011 single We Are Young. Despite co-writing a song that sold 10m copies in the US alone, Antonoff says he “hated” the experience “because I wasn’t the leader, they weren’t my words, and I needed to write a song that if I fucking died tomorrow would be my life story”. He says he insisted his then-record label release said song I Wanna Get Better as Bleachers’ debut single “to let people know what they were in for”.
It depicted Antonoff literally screaming in anguish, “losing my mind” with grief in the wake of his younger sister’s death, aged 13, from a brain tumour. You can tell it set the confessional tone of Bleachers’ oeuvre 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 his audience what you might call the Jack Antonoff origin story: there are songs about his teenage years spent traversing the US in his parents’ minivan, touring down-at-heel punk venues with an emo band called Outline, which by his own account was a pretty hair-raising experience (“Teenagers, in a van, drinking a lot, smoking pot, taking psychedelics, smoking what we thought was hash but turned out to be black opium,” he laughs, “I’m amazed we survived”), to which his parents only agreed because his sister’s illness meant “they could not give a fuck about anything that didn’t really matter.
When something serious, existential is going on in your life, you get a little less stressed about a parking ticket or grades, you know?” If Bleachers were the only thing that Jack Antonoff did, then it would all seem terribly straightforward. But, of course, they aren’t the whole story. Around the same time he started the band, he met Taylor Swift at an awards ceremony, bonded over a mutual 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 on Earth: he’s worked not just on 11 Taylor Swift albums, but with Sabrina Carpenter, Lorde, Lana Del Rey, St Vincent, Kendrick Lamar and Gracie Abrams, among a host of others.
He is in the vaunted position of being a blue-chip pop mega-producer who also makes soul-baring, Bruce Springsteen-influenced angst-rock, and insists neither activity takes precedence over the other in his career. Rather, he seems like such a mass of complexities and contradictions that you sometimes get the impression he might be trying to puzzle them out himself, in front of you. He’s clearly very driven, but he worries his drive is bound up with “survivor’s guilt” over his sister’s death, “about not going for things or using my time when someone you love didn’t get time, which is not the best way to live – there’s a difference between joyfully seizing the moment and something that’s predicated on anxiety”.
He decries the constant chatter of opinion on the internet: “I don’t give a fuck any more, it’s like, the very act of engaging negatively on the internet is inarguably such a fucking low-vibrational joke, and I think artists for too long over the past decade have read into it and there’s less than nothing there.” But equally he says he enjoys making “super high-stakes albums … helping to architect and guide something that everyone is going to have an opinion on, that people love to have the hottest opinions on”. He thinks his role in making some of the biggest records of the century so far is widely misconstrued as shadowy and machiavellian (“He’s annoyingly, inescapably, maddeningly everywhere … the designated steward of Tasteful Pop,” protested one piece on music website Pitchfork, which went on to accuse him of “musical manspreading” and suggest he had “extreme Main Character Energy”). Besides he’s sick of people constantly trying to explain everything online.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
