Fear, hope and Jack Antonoff

It's not a question of if you’ve heard Jack Antonoff, but when. The story of 21st century pop music could not be told without his influence. For over a decade, he has led the bombastic charge of Bleachers: romance writ large; a coming-of-age epic that plays on, the end credits still yet to roll. It took many sketches and iterations to arrive at Bleachers, his highest ideal and final form. There were empty rooms in New Jersey, grassroots eruptions and months in the van sustained by little more than brotherhood and the next show. And then there was Fun, the side project turned pop-rock powerhouse which eclipsed it all when he co-wrote “We Are Young”. Amassing more than 1.3 billion views on YouTube since its release in 2011, it has become a refuge of millennial nostalgia for those who were never so young again.

Bleachers was Antonoff’s freak-out against the success he found but did not choose. Their first song, “I Wanna Get Better”, is a white-knuckled scream of grief following his younger sister’s death, aged 13, from a brain tumour. “[The success] caused me a lot of anxiety, and the anxiety caused me to feel like I’ve got to define myself outside of it,” he reflects. “I don’t want to get lost in the bigness of it. I still feel that way sometimes.”

It was around this time, following the multi-platinum supernova of Fun’s album Some Nights, that Jack Antonoff met Taylor Swift at an awards ceremony and bonded over a shared love for Yazoo’s 80s synth-pop classic “Only You”. This serendipity sparked a creative collaboration which spanned a decade of Swift’s career, beginning with Antonoff at the helm of the era-defining 1989. He shaped landmark albums including Lorde’s Melodrama, Lana Del Rey’s Norman Fucking Rockwell and Kendrick Lamar’s GNX, winning Producer of the Year three consecutive times at the GRAMMYs. “I always, wholeheartedly, did both,” Antonoff insists: pop’s architect and star in his own right.

We swelter in an empty pub in Hampstead Heath on an ungodly August afternoon. He greets me with a fist bump; Antonoff avoids shaking hands. After the death of his sister and having a near-fatal reaction to pneumonia while he finished Fun’s Some Nights, he adopted cleanliness rituals rooted in OCD, a coping mechanism for his extreme fear of mortality. His outsized influence on 21st century pop culture makes his presence as an ordinary man hard to reconcile.

Here is Jack Antonoff, who “dulls the edges” of pop stars, according to a tweet from culture journalist Jill Krajewski. Jack Antonoff, poisoner of the well and, as Pitchfork decried in their essay, “…annoyingly, inescapably, maddeningly… Everywhere.” Jack Antonoff, the anti-hero of Lena Dunham’s memoir Famesick released earlier this year, its pages dissecting their relationship in unflinching detail like a public trial. Jack Antonoff, the man who announced his separation from Margaret Qualley only a month before our conversation takes placa, after three years of marriage; the woman in white he fell in love with as immortalised in Lana Del Rey’s “Margaret”, and the muse of the love songs he must still perform.

The glare of the public has always been punishing for Antonoff, his reputation polarising – this year more so than ever. Bleachers’ new album everyone for ten minutes captures the compulsion to run away from the circus, the droves and their demands, and toward what matters: “I just want one conversation with my people and my home / I just want one conversation with my people and my past”.

“I feel like on this album, there’s a big narrative about chasing myself back to a kind of simplicity,” he says. “But that’s where the wealth of writing is, to me. When I feel like I’m reaching for something, songs start to happen. Unknown spaces make songs. I want to tell the story of what chasing is.”

The album is a tale of hometown glory and a reclamation of his origin story: the facts and the people that define him. “It’s a desperate plea to be in concert with my people,” says Antonoff. “I keep feeling torn apart by it, this need for a reset or something. Just because your music reaches a lot of people doesn’t mean that brings you peace. It’s also what I want the future to look like. I’m not trying to convert people; I’m trying to be in a longer conversation.”

Rather than bemoaning life in the public eye, Antonoff returns to ideas of “dignity”. He says, “I think a lot about how I want to move through the world. Dignity is possible for me with my family and my personal life. It’s possible for me on albums. It’s possible for me on tour with my audience. I don’t feel very interested in the broader way communication is happening. I don’t go online and feel inspired – I feel the opposite. I think the hardest part about existing right now is to be able to compartmentalise what we care about and what we don’t, because we all spend so much time being targeted on our phones to keep reacting. 

"For a second, you have to question, ‘Well, what do I actually care about?’ We’re all in this desperate tug of war to take back our hopes and dreams.”

Hopes and dreams are the stuff of Bleachers. Even though Antonoff is raw-lunged with screamed confessions, his music is wreathed in widescreen optimism and big-band jubilance which rejects a cynical world. On the runaway train “take you out tonight”, a track which encapsulates the story and spirit of the album unlike any other, jaded observations (“I asked a friend how he was doing, he showed me his monthly listeners / Oh don’t get cheap, don’t get caught, don’t get lost in all these kisses”) are tempered with the impulse to kick it all to the curb and surrender to the romance which costs nothing to ride. 

“There’s a lot of hope on the album. I wouldn’t have been able to write it if I was talking shit about the state of things,” he says. “That song is my little anthem of putting it all down for one second and leaving it all behind.”

Moments of fear and unrest lead Antonoff to write. “If I understand something too well, I don’t feel the need to write about it,” he notes. “Every album I have ever made, I look back on it and I’m like, ‘God, it’s all right there, but you didn’t know what you were saying’. The ones that are too knowing of something, they feel insincere. If you know it, you don’t have to share it.”

“The Van” is a meandering, harmonica-driven yarn in the spirit of Bob Dylan and the chronicle of Antonoff’s formative experiences on the road with his band. “That song, right? It’s about three things,” he says. “It’s about leaving home. It’s about being with a group of people who, for different reasons, are bound by not wanting to be lonely. And it’s about the connection you share with your audience. 

"The last show Bleachers played was at The Garden [Madison Square Garden]. But when we were in the van, we’d play in Ohio to probably five people. Those two experiences on a soul level are the same. At The Garden show, it was a nicer car – and the van was just a shitty van – but we were driving somewhere to get onstage and play a show. One is for five people, the other is for ten thousand, but our bodies are doing the same thing: we’re singing music, trying to connect. It’s not about anything but this repetition of needing to share and connect with strangers.”

The teenage Jack Antonoff who set out in the van one day and never came home is faithful to the man he became. “I was super idealistic, very clear about what I wanted to do and how I wanted to do it,” he recalls. “I was buzzing like a fucking freak at that point. I mean, I would talk a mile a minute and I couldn’t really handle myself physically the way I can now. The music was faster. I was talking faster. I was sleeping less. I was just so eager to start the journey. But that person is very much intact.”

Steel Train was the band Antonoff poured the most transformative decade of his life into: from ages 17 to 27. The five-piece shared a deep stylistic and lyrical DNA with Bleachers with their anthemic choruses and white-knuckled delivery, and many consider Steel Train’s biggest hits as the earliest Bleachers songs. What is striking, even though they reflect the fashions and sensibilities of the 2000s which are now a novelty to rediscover, is how Antonoff has remained relatively unchanged in his ideals.

“I wanted to hear myself clearly, and I was really learning how to do that at the time and live with that buzzing feeling,” he says. “We were a band which were adjacent to bigger bands, but we weren’t having any success, so it became a really interesting decade of hard fucking learning on the road. We did thousands of shows; we just lived on tour. It also became our armour. We didn’t define ourselves through success because we certainly didn’t have any. We defined ourselves only by, ‘This is what we do’. We show up in your town and we play every night like it’s our last on earth. And sometimes there was no one there, sometimes that’s just what it was, and I loved it.”

The relentless touring was as much a need for escape as any self-invention. His younger sister Sarah was dying of brain cancer, an illness she had contended with since birth, finally passing away when she was thirteen and Jack eighteen. “So basically, from the time I was five until I started touring, there was this dissonance in the house,” he shares. “I think that made me want to run. I think that filled me with stories and feelings of being deeply misunderstood. So I started writing a lot. There’s a thing that happens when you write alone where you have this big secret and sometimes you feel compelled to share it with strangers. I didn’t find myself talking to a lot of people, but I loved putting it in songs and playing it. It’s weird when you have intense stuff going on at home. There’s a lot of freedom in leaving, and then you get to tell your story on your own terms.”

The immeasurable impact of that grief can be felt across Antonoff’s entire discography, a heartbreak on a greater magnitude than a single song could ever reckon with. Stemming from “I Wanna Get Better” at the start of Bleachers’ journey to “Everybody Lost Somebody” (Gone Now, 2017) and “91” (Take the Sadness Out of Saturday Night, 2021), Sarah’s loss reverberates across a decade of songwriting and right back to the beginning of it all with “The Van”. Antonoff shares, “Some of the saddest songs I’ve ever written, I’ve had the most joyful experiences playing. Then every once in a while, you’ll play it and you get hit by a tonne of bricks. The experience comes rushing back. I don’t know, there’s no map there.”

What developed in those early years was a deep sense of purpose. “At the time, the rules were fucking rigid,” he says. “I mean, we had really intense feelings on how we carried ourselves and the level of dignity we presented ourselves with. Like, are you out there trying to make a buck, or are you trying to make a connection?”

The community Steel Train inherited was perhaps the most impactful experience, and something Antonoff continues to hold as an ideal. “You’d go to a show, and that’s where you’d found out about music, organisations, politics – it was a complete ecosystem,” he shares. “It’s how my whole worldview was shaped. What you were taught in school was narrow, and what you could research was even more narrow. So here were all these radical thoughts and feelings you were encountering for the first time. It wasn’t just the end result of finding new things, but the culture of who you bought it from, how you got it – it was such a community, and we had very specific rules of what was the right thing to do and what was fucked; how much was too much for a show or too much for a t-shirt, the charities we supported. Although there were very harsh edges and rules, it was a great education. We didn’t know it then, but it was a swan song before the internet became what it is.”

The concept of what was bullshit was far more prescriptive than it was personal back then. The standards you held yourself to were higher and the success of a band was measured in what you could give back. “You didn’t put on a show which wasn’t also a benefit, which is something we still do,” he recalls. Antonoff’s Ally Coalition Talent Show hosted annually in New York City raised over $2 million for unhoused and at-risk LGBTQ+ youth, calling upon special appearances from his friends Florence Welch and Hayley Williams. “Every show was $5 with a can of food,” he continues. “And you don’t fucking treat your like shit. No one’s above anyone else. The most central rule of that time, which completely carries over now, is that the goal is to create something bigger than the audience or the band. This work isn’t simple, and it’s important, so go about it with intensity.”

Bleachers is merely a refinement of what he knew about himself as an artist all along, and the band is an essential part of that expression. “The biggest north star I’m following is just saying what I’m going through, whether it’s attractive or not, and coupling it with the band to celebrate that honesty. Leading a band is like – you know, I wrote this down because I loved it, hold on - being in charge of a vehicle that might explode. I felt that way my whole life. It hasn’t exploded yet, but this thing might fucking blow. Everything I’ve ever done has that feeling, and if it doesn’t have that feeling I don’t engage. That’s how the record sounds, that’s how I want to play the shows, that’s the character in me who is writing all this stuff.”

This frenetic, livewire energy so essential to Bleachers is also an essential quality to Antonoff’s creativity. “Well, I think nerves and anxiety come from hope, right?” he says. “You want to stay like a baby looking at the sky.”

His child-like curiosity has never dulled, and it’s this headfirst immersion in the music which goes some way to answering why Antonoff is so favoured by pop’s greatest heroines. “I’ve never worked with anyone,” he insists. “I just see it as flying a plane together.” When recording Norman Fucking Rockwell, Lana Del Rey noted in an interview how relaxed the process was: "Some days I would come in with something fully formed, and some days Jack would have a couple of chords that he really wanted to play for me. And some days we had absolutely nothing going on and we just would sit around and kind of work on stuff for him... or just hang out.”

Lorde had practically moved into his home studio apartment during the turbulent growing pains of Melodrama, and there was an unspoken musical shorthand between Antonoff and St. Vincent because between the two of them, as multi-instrumentalists, they could play anything. “Making records is hard enough,” he says, “and whether you should be making it with someone else is the easiest decision to make in the world.”

Antonoff’s latest work as a producer is Phoebe Bridgers’ long-awaited new album Lost Weekend working alongside Alex G, Tony Berg and Ethan Gruska; the record has been met with some of the highest praise of her career. Antonoff is characteristically aloof about sharing any details of its creation. “I don’t like talking about stuff when it’s too fresh,” he says. “Because I like it to hit the world as out of context as possible, especially nowadays. I like to talk about albums when they’re really, finally cooked. I never really talked about making the Kendrick album, and maybe in a few months it will have been long enough to start talking about it. But you really want it to live, especially the way people are these days where there’s this useless need to understand something right away. I don’t want to play any part in it. I want to just let it float and colour in the mysteries later.”

If the future of pop excites him, Antonoff is, again, wilfully vague. Though the barrier of entry for making music is lower than ever, he counters that by that same token the barrier for great music is higher than ever. “The future in general is becoming harder and harder to imagine, for better or worse, which is strange. But I believe there’s a future, and I’d like to be a part of it,” he answers. “But I can wholeheartedly comment on the people I know, love and care about – myself included – and our desire is more intense and more real than ever.”

I wonder how he keeps his humanity, and his wonder, intact. “I mean, for all the fucking wellness industry explosion pointing to the air, the water, your diet – it’s not that, it’s community," he replies. “That’s what keeps people alive. That’s what keeps people happy. That’s what keeps people feeling like there’s a reason. My community has been about music since I was a very young person, and I don’t intend to change that.”

He describes finding his community, his fans, like going to a new high school and looking around and, at first, no one relates to you: “And then, all of a sudden, you see one person who has some characteristic – whether physical or not – and you’re just like, ‘Oh, I know you.’” Though his band’s listeners are in the tens of millions, it’s still the cafeteria table. And you’re welcome to sit with them. “I know them when I see them,” he says of his audience. “I don’t know if I can describe it, but they’re on the edge of something and I’m right there with them. You really weed out anything casual when you’re pretty direct, and I relish that. There’s something really powerful to me about articulating who my people are on this album. It’s almost like planting a flag you can’t unplant.”