Sitting in the restaurant of a Denver hotel, in the middle of a US tour with his band Bleachers, Jack Antonoff shrugs. “There’s this intense need to figure me out,” he frowns, “and I don’t really know where it comes from, because I keep explaining all of it.”
He has a point. 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?”
double quotation markThere’s a difference between joyfully seizing the moment and something that’s predicated on anxiety
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.
“I’m in a very narrow group of people who truly do both, probably,” he nods. “Usually someone’s slumming it on one side: songwriters or performers who think they can produce a record but then have to really care about someone else’s work in a deep way, or producers who think: ‘Now it’s my turn!’ but don’t have that thing you can’t even describe that drew you to write your own songs and fucking sing them in front of people since you were a kid.”
Indeed, for all his protestations that he’s really terribly straightforward, Jack Antonoff seems anything but. 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”.
Jack of all trades … Antonoff with (from left) Phoebe Bridgers, Julien Baker and Lucy Dacus of boygenius and Taylor Swift at the 2024 Grammy Awards. Photograph: Michael Buckner/Billboard/Getty Images
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”). “One of the great misconceptions of how it works in my world is that I write songs and hand them to, like, a pop star, which I’ve never done once in my life,” he says, but declines to discuss how it actually works because “it doesn’t really matter”. Besides he’s sick of people constantly trying to explain everything online. “You’re on your phone all the time being explained something,” he says. “You’re being explained what’s happening in this country, you’re being explained how a train works, it’s like an information dump and it’s killing people’s imaginations. ‘Do you want to sound like Jack Antonoff? Here’s how he did it!’ It’s made me want to allow people to imagine the magic of it all.”
Certainly, in the context of 21st-century pop, he’s a very odd fish. He is obviously someone who moves with enviable ease among the pop aristocracy: he apparently ended up working on Kendrick Lamar’s multiple Grammy-winning 2024 album GNX when he popped into the studio to visit a friend and “didn’t leave for three years”; Bruce Springsteen isn’t just an influence but a friend, collaborator with Bleachers and mentor (best advice thus delivered 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 teens playing gigs in anarchist book stores on drugs than someone who co-wrote, say, Sabrina Carpenter’s Please Please Please – close-cropped hair, tattered skate pants, Sonic Youth T-shirt – and often sounds more like a chippy indie outsider than someone who recently enjoyed chicken nuggets with caviar at Taylor Swift’s wedding.
Certainly, he is more free with his opinions than you might expect from someone who operates at the top table of pop, a world where artists tend to have any capacity for controversy media-trained out of them. He’s currently engaged in a war of words with Live Nation over gig ticket prices (he is proud that Bleachers’ tickets are “as low as they can physically possibly be”). “Live Nation keep missing the point, because every time I say something, they’ll call my people and say: “Let’s have a meeting.’ You don’t get it, I don’t want to fucking talk to you people, I want to make it clear that I’m not fucking OK with you turning the most sacred thing into the world into some weird free-market piece of shit … 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 demoralising online experience where you get whacked and kicked and fucked around.”
When the Fun stops, stop … Antonoff (left) with Nate Ruess and Andrew Dost in his first major band. Photograph: Dave Hogan/Getty Images
When I meet him, his social media channels are filled with abuse from commenters angry that a Jewish artist has made a point of saying “free Palestine” onstage at Bleachers shows: he points out that he was saying it long before the recent Ed Sheeran/Macklemore controversy blew up but says he has “felt way more emboldened to say it now, because it’s not in any way a strange, uncomfortable or controversial thing to say, it’s a deeply human thing to say. If you think it is [controversial] you’re lost in some other sauce that is so crazy. They’re going to let some fucking promoter tell me what I can say? Don’t book me. I’ll play for free outside. [Ed Sheeran] missed a massive, beautiful opportunity there: just cancel the whole fucking tour, then play for free outside each venue, raise a bunch of money, rather than let a fucking billionaire tell you what to do. The reason it’s not an anomaly or niche issue is because we all live in a world where billionaires are constantly telling us what to do. So stand the fuck up.”
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Of course you could argue that Antonoff has more freedom to be unguarded than the artists he works with. Bleachers enjoy a curious kind of success – their albums sell respectably rather than astronomically and they’ve never come “even close”, Antonoff points out, to having a huge crossover hit. Yet they are capable of filling out Madison Square Garden with an audience that Antonoff says aren’t there to see “that producer’s band”. His own celebrity is largely by proxy, thanks to the company he keeps in the recording studio – his 2023 wedding to actor Margaret Qualley took place amid a scrum of fans and paparazzi, but that seemed to have less to do with the bride and groom than the fact that Taylor Swift was in attendance.
Recently, the gossip pages have been alive, first with his former partner Lena Dunham’s memoir Famesick, which suggested that one of the reasons their romance floundered was because Antonoff was more invested in shepherding Lorde through her Difficult Second Album than their relationship, and latterly with news of his marriage’s collapse. That came as a surprise given that Bleachers had released an album thick with loving peans to Qualley and to marriage a matter of weeks before their split was announced: one of them, You and Forever, even came with a video starring the couple together.
double quotation markThe deal I’ve made with my audience is I’m going to tell you honestly how I feel and I’m going to risk standing behind it
Antonoff thus currently finds himself on tour, singing songs about a relationship that’s now over. When I mention it, he first interrupts me – “Oh, I can imagine what you’re going to say: it’s bizarre” – then clarifies my point: “Songs which I wrote recently,” he nods. “I obviously was really worried about this specific thing, I sat long and hard with it and thought: ‘If I change the setlist …’ and in my gut there was a unanimous jury that said, ‘No, this is the deal. The deal I’ve made with my audience is that I’m going to tell you honestly how I feel and I’m going to risk at any moment having to stand behind it for fucking ever.’
“Anyone could relate to the terrible sadness and pain, but there’s a great power to it also,” he says. “It’s actually been really beautiful. I mean, for people to come together, to know what I write a song about, to know how that must feel for me now, to know what that song means to you as an audience member, to just hold it all and sort of celebrate. I don’t rewrite the past, I have no shame about the things I’ve said. My life has been dedicated to making it impossible for me to rewrite the past, because I’m standing there, singing about how I felt during the good times, so when the bad times hit I can’t look myself in the mirror and pretend that those times didn’t exist. I would rather live through something publicly than even escape it privately.”
After we speak, on stage at Colorado’s Red Rocks Amphitheatre, there is indeed a fraught emotional charge to Bleachers’ performances of Dirty Wedding Dress and You and Forever. Antonoff follows the latter by playing I Wanna Get Better alone on acoustic guitar. The audience – who, as he promised, are an odd combination of twentysomething women, middle-aged couples and a smattering of grizzled Deadheads in tie-dye T-shirts, none of whom look as if they’re there to see Taylor Swift’s producer in the flesh – bellow along, so loudly that they’re in danger of drowning him out entirely. For a moment, in the spotlight, Jack Antonoff does not need figuring out.
Bleachers are touring the UK and Ireland, 23 November to 4 December; tour starts Kingston upon Thames. Their album Everyone for Ten Minutes is out now.
