JACK ANTONOFF ON HIS “F&*#%@ CRAZY YEAR”

(Photo: Alex Lockett)

“The Valley is the best part of L.A.,” proclaims Jack Antonoff, when I tell him where I’m calling from. “I really understand why a lot of the people that I relate to the best live there.”

New Jersey-born and raised, and still a proud resident of the Garden State, Antonoff exudes outsider empathy, as an artist with his alt-rock band Bleachers and as the songwriter/producer/main-pop-girl whisperer behind Taylor Swift, Lana Del Rey, St. Vincent, Lorde and Sabrina Carpenter, among others. This year, for his work with Swift on her juggernaut THE TORTURED POETS DEPARTMENT and with Carpenter on her chart-topping Short ‘n Sweet (most notably on her first #1 song, “Please Please Please”), he’ll likely be vying for a record-breaking fourth consecutive win for Grammy producer of the year, non-classical. (Babyface won from 1996-1998.) Add to that probable nominations alongside Swift and Carpenter for album, song and record of the year, as well as potential nods for Bleachers in an assortment of alternative and rock categories, and Antonoff is sure to be, once again, an on-screen fixture of February’s Grammy telecast.

Fresh off of his band headlining the All Things Go festival, we spoke to Antonoff about his jam-packed year, that crazy key change in “Please Please Please” and the eternal verities of the E Street Band.

With his Producer of the Year, Non-Classical award at the 2022 Grammy Awards Premiere Ceremony
(Emma McIntyre/Getty Images for The Recording Academy)

In 2024, you released a Bleachers album and toured behind it, hit the top of the charts with your work on Taylor’s album and Sabrina’s album, wrote the score for your first Broadway musical, got married to actor Margaret Qualley and turned 40. Did this feel like a more consequential year for you than most?

Yes. It was a fucking crazy year. It was very strange and wonderful, but it felt like a lot of seeds that I had planted for a long time in many areas of my life were finally starting to be visible little trees or whatever. Obviously in my personal life, but then also a lot of things in work just started to make a lot of sense to me.

Did you have feelings about turning 40?

Not really. I was mostly excited. I've always seen age as, I don't mean this as a joke, but as a marker that you're still alive. That sounds really basic and maybe even reductive, but it isn't because, typically, when we talk about age, it's always from a strange lens. I remember when I turned 18, someone in the room was like, "Oh, now you're an adult, now you're accountable." You turn 23 and someone's like, "Ooh, this is when it gets real." You turn 30 and someone's like, "Oh, I bet you miss your 20s." And I've always just been like, "No, I'm really happy to be here."

I think turning 40 is similar to releasing an album. There's so many feelings that people expect you to have and then project onto you. And the truth is, you can't know what it is until you just live with it. I was just talking to a friend who just put out an album, and they were talking about how everything's a whirlwind, blah blah blah. And I was like, "I know this is annoying advice, but just be cool to yourself.” These bodies of work that we spend years making all of a sudden get launched into the world, but you can't really wrap yourself around what's happening with it for months. So that's how I feel about turning 40. Maybe when I'm 45, I can give you a better answer, but for now, I feel good.

With Mark Ronson, Troye Sivan and Leland at the 2024 Grammys
(Kevin Mazur/Getty Images for The Recording Academy)

As you get older, do you ever feel nostalgic, or is that an emotion that you don't get caught up in?

I don't get overly caught up in it, but I do think that the generation that grew up with cell phones is more prone to nostalgia because it's thrown in their face. I open my phone in the morning and it's like, "Here are memories from 2018," and for me it's like, oh, cool, sweet. But if I was 20 years old and my phone was servicing me video clips of me and my friends from when I was 15, that might be a lot to handle at that age.

You're not one of those "In my day we had to go to record stores and search out vinyl” types?

No, because -- and you might think this is a stupid perspective -- the more time I'm around, the less I feel like the heart and soul of things really changes. There's always someone shouting in your ear about what's changed. And usually that person is selling us something. When I look at music—as someone who was around before the Internet and then during the explosion of it, around for the death of the music industry and the reigniting of it—I can pinpoint everything that's changed. I mean, I used to go to Tower Records. Now, I just open my phone. I can pinpoint all these things and yet the experience of loving an album, loving an artist, listening to music feels very unchanged to me. This whole thing is just about expression, right? It's about songwriting and performance and connecting with a specific group of people with your work. Technology and capitalism want to push things and grow and grow and grow and grow. But music and performance and songwriting and record-making, it's like there's no difference since the dawn of recorded music or since the dawn of performance. It's vibrating from the same thing.

Your band just played at the All Things Go festival. How was that for you?

That festival is so good. This was our third time doing it. We've been lucky enough to watch it grow and then this year we got to be one of the headliners. I feel like I understand the people that are going, I know who they are.

How so? Who's going?

To me, it's the audience that understands the specific corners of pop and alternative and songwriter music, and what I define as the stuff that I really like in those worlds. There seems to be a Venn diagram of my band and the things I work on and that festival.

Do you think that the relationship between fan and artist has taken a turn for the worst in the last few years?

It's pretty hard for me to have thoughts on that because I really only know my experience and the truth is it's so different for everybody. Any deep feelings I have about the artist’s relationship to the audience is strictly a meditation on the Bleachers' audience.

With Sabrina Carpenter, engineer Laura Sisk and songwriter Amy Allen

Let’s talk about a couple of your projects from this year. You co-wrote and produced Sabrina's “Please Please Please.” There’s a key change from the first verse to the second verse in that song that is absolutely bizarre and completely disarming. How did that come about?

Not only is it bizarre, but it’s double bizarre because it goes from A to C, which is very strange. And then, once you make a leap like that, you've asked a lot of the listener, you obviously stay there and then the next chorus goes back down to A. It's very strange that that works. It happened because we were fucking around, which is why a lot of great things happen, and we asked ourselves, why does this sound cool if we modulate and then go back down? It’s because the second verse leaves the reality of the song. It becomes a dream sequence. Sabrina stops speaking about real life events and goes into a what if: I have a fun idea, what if we don't go outside? What if we just look at the ceiling fan? So it makes this sort of cockeyed change actually work. It reminds me of Ween, in a crazy way, which is probably not a reference that Sabrina gets a lot. And then, the even weirder part, which is to go back down to the chorus, which usually you'd want to lift into a chorus, it's almost like the crashing reality of the narrator being present again. The truth is it was a weirdo accident from messing around, but in hindsight, there's a lot of theory to it. But it’s not lost on me how cool it is to have these kind of chord changes and modulations and structures in a successful pop song. I really get excited about that.

Was there any hesitation or pushback for including that weird modulation in what was her big follow-up to “Espresso?”

Not that I know of. I mean, she's just a brilliant writer. And when you're a brilliant writer, you have very clear, distinct feelings about what you want to say to your audience. From the second I started making music with her, it was always, I'm going to do this, I'm going to do this. It was very clear.

I don't know if you think about things in these terms, but does it feel like this has been an amazing year for pop music and for the main pop girls, both new and established? Heading into the Grammys, it just seems like there's so much great music to choose from.

To me, the giant takeaway from this year is development and expertise. Everything that really happened this year are all long-term stories. Charli xcx, Sabrina, Chappell Roan. Taylor doesn't stop. The big breakout moments of this year all came from people who have been perfecting their craft for a really long time. And how glorious to come at a time when we've been sold this lie that it's only a viral moment that makes things happen. Well, it's not true. That's more like throwing gas on a fire, but there has to be a fire, and there has to be a serious artist who is going to make that work either way.

With Taylor Swift at the 2023 Grammys
(Kevin Mazur/Getty Images for the Recording Academy)

With regard to Taylor, critics and fans tend to concentrate so much on her lyrics that they rarely mention her vocals and her phrasing. How have you seen those two things evolve over the years?

First, anyone who's writing on that level, of which there's very few people in history, it's obvious that people are going to focus there. But yeah, she's one of my all-time favorite singers and one of my all-time favorites when it comes to phrasing and how to deliver something. The ultimate goal is to be so masterful that you can be conversational. She has the ability to say things and impart entire concepts and emotions in a way that is so seamless, it's utterly masterful.

You created the score for a new stage production of Romeo and Juliet. The show is now in previews. Has the preview process been weird for you?

It's interesting. It reminds me of touring. It's like the thing is alive and it’s breathing and it's changing. I like knowing how malleable it is, because I had an idea in my head that it was going to be way more strict. Shit shouts at you when it's not working. You just know. And when something is working, it just makes total sense.

What’s most different about writing for the stage?

Since it’s a score, it reminds me a little of when I wrote the music for that Lana poetry album we did. You don't want to be the focal point. However, the presence of music is a massive emotional focal point. So how do I express despair and heartbreak without it being obvious that I'm trying to do that? It's a remarkable blend of subtlety and then massive, massive emotion. And I liked that about score, that you're trying to capture a feeling without taking up all the space.

What’s the last musical rabbit hole you went down?

My friend made a playlist of bass-drum sounds that have squeaks in the hardware of the bass drum. And this is everything from the Bee Gees to The Beatles to modern things. I never heard them before, but as soon as it was pointed out to me, I can now never unhear it.

Which Beatles song has a squeaky bass drum?

Oh my God, there's so many. There are Reddits about this stuff. It's a weird corner of the Internet, the squeaky bass drum pedals.

I want to ask you about two other projects. Is there anything you can tell me about the upcoming Lana album?

No.

OK. Is it a country album, as rumored?

I don't divulge anything about things until they come out. With nothing but respect towards you and your publication, the only upside for me to reveal anything is for you guys. I think that fans deserve to hear things strictly with the context that the artist gives them.

Fair. I read that you worked with Kendrick Lamar on his track “6:16 in L.A.” How did that come about?

Also, stories for another time.

With Miles Anazaldo, Kevin Weatherly and Karen Glauber

How about: Did you see Springsteen on this tour time around?

Early-ish in the tour, I saw the Barclays Center show, and it was just brilliant. The band is playing better than I've ever seen them play in my lifetime. This shit's just on fire.

Why do you think they’re playing better than ever, given their ages and how long they've played together?

I feel that way about The Bad Seeds too. I felt that way about The Heartbreakers. I'd seen them a couple of times up until Tom Petty's death and I thought, Jesus Christ, this band gets better every time I see them. Wilco, too, is just fucking killing. I think what happens is that bands either a) rarely stay together or b) stay together for the wrong reasons. But if bands keep it together in a healthy way—and obviously the E Street Band a prime example of this—it just gets better and better and deepens and deepens. One of the great glories of Bruce and the E Street Band is that there's nowhere else they can be. It's like it's the last night on earth every time.

It's the same thing that keeps Bleachers on the road. It's a joy.