The producer and songwriter Jack Antonoff could be described with equal accuracy as a self-sufficient front man or a restless serial collaborator, a high-strung nebbish or a hyper-confident rock star, a flinty ironist or an earnest try-hard, a musician’s musician or a crowd-pleasing hitmaker. Some critics complain that his sound has become predictable; others find him too protean. He makes hyperpop synth loops, crooner piano ballads, woozy hip-hop beats, operatic pop hooks, minimalist folk tunes, maximalist funk bangers, and a whole lot of hefty kitchen-sink rock anthems. Sometimes he writes and performs these songs himself; just as often, he makes them for, or with, another artist. “It’s called one thing—‘being a musician’—but it’s actually a few different things,” he told me recently. “There are people who will go into a zone writing songs alone in their bedroom but have no interest in performing. There are people who will play the shit out of a song in the studio but don’t wanna sweat the details of how it’s produced. There are people who will make a killer record but can’t stand touring. I happen to like all of it.”
Since 2013, Antonoff has been the lead songwriter, guitarist, and singer in the band Bleachers. Objectively, it’s a pretty successful band. In January, Antonoff and his bandmates were the musical guests on “Saturday Night Live”; on tour this summer, they will play the Forum, in Los Angeles, and Radio City Music Hall. “The dream, when I was eighteen, was to get a couple hundred people to come out to the shows, and to sell enough merch to be able to eat and keep buying gas for the van,” he said. “That was the absolute mountaintop. Anything else is bonus.”
This sentiment seems genuine, and it would be uncomplicated enough if not for the fact that Antonoff now spends much of his non-Bleachers time collaborating with some of the most acclaimed pop musicians in the world. Taylor Swift fans know Antonoff, who has produced ten of Swift’s Top Thirty singles, as the approachably rumpled guy who’s often in the background of her videos, just out of focus. (A representative reaction from a Swiftie subreddit: “I love his face and especially his glasses, just in general.”) Lorde fans know Antonoff, who has produced and co-written two of her three albums, as her go-to muse, although the boundaries of the muse-bard relationship are the subject of ongoing, gender-inflected debate. (“I haven’t made a Jack Antonoff record,” Lorde told the Times, of her 2021 album, “Solar Power.” “I’ve made a Lorde record and he’s helped me make it and very much deferred to me.”) Antonoff has produced two albums for Annie Clark, who performs as St. Vincent, and two for Lana Del Rey—all quite different, all critically lauded. “Jack is special,” Del Rey told me. “His chords are so classic that I could sing anything to them.”
Antonoff is now thirty-eight and well past keeping-the-van-gassed-up status—more like keeping-the-studio-stocked-with-his-preferred-brand-of-bottled-water, owning-property-in-multiple-states status. As a producer, he has worked with Diana Ross, Harry Styles, Sia, Grimes, Carly Rae Jepsen, Kevin Abstract, the (formerly Dixie) Chicks, and plenty more—not quite every pop star with artistic inclinations or artist with pop aspirations, but not far off. He has been nominated for seventeen Grammys, but it can’t have escaped his notice that none of those nominations has been for his work as a front man. When Antonoff puts out a Bleachers album, the world responds nicely: decent, if occasionally snippy, reviews; enough sales to make a living. When he produces an album by one of his heavy-hitting collaborators, the world wobbles on its axis, and admirers throw around words like “genius” and “icon” and “king.” It’s hard to imagine receiving that much praise for something and choosing to do anything else. Yet Antonoff continues to record and tour with Bleachers, which could indicate, depending on how you look at it, either intransigence or fortitude.
The third Bleachers album, “Take the Sadness Out of Saturday Night,” was released last summer. It’s filled with allusions to interpersonal squabbles and intergenerational trauma, but Antonoff told me that the most confessional track on it may be “Big Life,” which is about an intrapersonal struggle; namely, the struggle between the generative kind of ambition and the corrosive kind. “I’ve worked on things that were small and ignored, things that were big and divisive, things that were big and universally adored,” he said. The latter category includes Lorde’s “Melodrama,” from 2017, and Lana Del Rey’s “Norman Fucking Rockwell!,” from 2019—albums that topped both pop charts and best-of-the-decade lists, on which he produced and co-wrote nearly every track, but that did not, ultimately, bear his name. “Obviously, it’s intoxicating to get that unanimous high five from the culture,” he went on. “But if that’s why you’re doing it—if that’s what you’re thinking about when you’re in the studio—then you’re fucked.”
Last year, in a greenroom with a few hours to kill before a Bleachers performance, Antonoff sat on a couch, fiddling with an orchestral remix of a Taylor Swift song on his laptop. When he was done, he stood up, stretched, skeptically regarded a lukewarm Dunkin’ Donuts breakfast sandwich, made several jokes at the sandwich’s expense, then picked it up and ate it anyway. He attended to a few stray details about album promo (including, for reasons not worth getting into, the rollout of a custom Bleachers tomato sauce), ducked into a private room for a telephone therapy session, and then joined his bandmates in another greenroom.
They were crowded around a phone watching a YouTube review of “Sling,” the first major-label album by the singer-songwriter Claire Cottrill, who performs as Clairo. To make it, she and Antonoff, who produced the album, spent a month living at Allaire, a remote mountaintop studio in the Catskills. The first time they had lunch, they talked about their experiences with depression, and he listened so intently that she cried. (Cottrill wrote “Blouse,” the album’s lead single, about all the music-industry gatekeepers who’d sexualized her; central to Antonoff’s allure was the fact that he never did.) “He makes you feel seen,” Cottrill told me. “You’d be toying around on piano, or fiddling with guitar, and he’d be the first person to hear its potential.”
The review was by Anthony Fantano, a YouTuber whom the Times has called “the only music critic who matters (if you’re under 25).” It wasn’t an unmitigated swoon, but it was precise and admiring. Fantano referred to one track’s horn and flute arrangements as “heavenly,” and concluded that the album “feels like growth, it feels like advancement.” Antonoff, standing in the doorway, nodded and smiled faintly. Half a minute later, Fantano added, “And, of course, on the production side, Jack Antonoff totally kills it.” The band members glanced toward the doorway, hoping to share the moment. But Antonoff was already gone—back in his greenroom, mussing his hair, getting ready to take the stage.
Traditionally, there has been a fairly solid boundary between producer and pop star. George Martin may have been called the fifth Beatle, but no one was clamoring for his solo record, and there was little confusion about his role: the boys arrived at the studio with a new song, and Martin, sitting in the control booth in a suit and tie, helped them bring it to life. An Antonoff session is a looser, more intimate thing. You walk into a studio and sit and schmooze for a while, on the same side of the glass. You drink or smoke whatever you feel like drinking or smoking. (Antonoff, who has a history of drug-induced panic attacks, is more of a matcha-latte-and-oatmeal sort of guy.) At some point, without drawing too much attention to it, he might drift toward a Wurlitzer, or start messing with a drum machine. Maybe you lean back on the couch and share a feeling you’ve been having, or a throwaway lyric, or a general vibe, and he builds on that. “There’s craft and there’s magic,” Antonoff said. “I’ve got craft out the ass, but all that really matters is finding those rare magic moments.”
Late last spring, Antonoff sat behind a drum set in a rehearsal space in Brooklyn, tapping out snare fills with his fingers and evaluating his bandmates’ clothing. “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon” had just brought back its studio audience, and Bleachers would be the first musical guest since the beginning of the pandemic to play in front of a live crowd. Lined up against a wall were a few suitcases brimming with thrifted outfits selected by Carlotta Kohl, a photographer and director who introduced herself to me as the band’s “unofficial stylist.” (She was also, at the time, Antonoff’s girlfriend.) Kohl dressed Mikey Freedom Hart, a multi-instrumentalist, in a double-breasted navy blazer and wide-legged khakis. Hart, long-haired and agreeable, glanced in a mirror and grinned. “I dig a loose pant,” he said.
Antonoff squinted a bit before issuing his verdict: “Too zoot-suit-y.” He didn’t solicit any opinions about his own outfit—Doc Martens, Edith Head-style glasses, and a gray T-shirt, tucked into his pants, advertising a motel in Needles, California. This was the third day I’d spent with Antonoff, and he’d worn the same shirt each time. I couldn’t decide whether to interpret this as a sign that he did a lot of laundry or that he didn’t. Lorde once said, fondly, that Antonoff “wears the worst clothes.” When I brought this up, he smiled and said, “I know how she means it. But, if I’m being honest, I think my clothes are awesome.”
Kohl tried again: Western shirt, cuffed jeans, Converse All-Stars. “Like, don’t love,” Antonoff said. He used a rising intonation, but it wasn’t a question. It was a testament to his innate likability that he could issue stark appraisals of his friends’ appearance and his girlfriend’s taste—a situation practically designed to piss everyone off—without eliciting more than a few strained glances. In an industry dominated by dead-eyed connivers, Antonoff comes off as unusually personable—mostly well adjusted, and winningly open about the ways in which he isn’t. (He was a germophobe before it was cool.) He is described by almost everyone, including people who might have reason to resent him, with accolades like “a legitimately nice person,” if not “the nicest.” Somehow, even this has become a knock against him: last year, Pitchfork ran a think piece called “Jack Antonoff, Polarizing Nice Guy.”
I had a hard time imagining that my enjoyment of the “Tonight Show” performance would be much affected by the cut of the bass player’s pants. And yet forming strong opinions about small details—whether a vocal should be stacked and panned, whether a gated snare is the right or the wrong kind of cheesy—is the essence of a producer’s job. Antonoff applies this sort of discernment to everything Bleachers-related: the group’s album-cover typeface, its Instagram color palette, its between-songs banter. He sweats the small stuff. “People have come to expect the rock-star pretense of ‘Oh, I just effortlessly shit out my songs, and I don’t give a fuck, and it all just falls into place,’ ” he said. “My wavelength is more ‘I’m not hiding how much I care or apologizing for how good I want it to be, and I really hope you like it.’ ”
For all this self-awareness, Bleachers is an unironic rock band. The front man of such a band, Antonoff said, gesturing toward himself, “doesn’t usually come in a package like this.” His build, by his own description, is that of “a guy who goes to the gym, like, very occasionally.” He has variously characterized his look as “your Jewish camp counsellor” and “Rick Moranis’s more congested son.” All the same, Antonoff wears muscle shirts onstage and jumps off stacks of amps and pumps his fist in the air and plays windmill chords on his Gretsch Princess guitar. Most up-tempo Bleachers numbers are straightforward rock songs—four or five chords, a shout-along refrain, maybe a saxophone solo—about love and loss, ennui and transcendence, and, more often than not, New Jersey, where Antonoff grew up. The whole shtick may sound suspiciously Springsteenian; Antonoff’s tactic has been to lean into that. The first single from Bleachers’ latest album is “Chinatown,” a duet with Bruce Springsteen. In the video, which Kohl directed, Antonoff drives a Cadillac convertible around the Jersey suburbs, wearing a leather jacket, while the Boss sits shotgun.
The band members put in earpiece monitors and started running through “How Dare You Want More,” the song they would play on “The Tonight Show.” (“How Dare You Want More” is also about ambition.) They were joined by Rick Antonoff, Jack’s father, on acoustic guitar. “Dad, you keep missing that downbeat right at the end,” Jack said, demonstrating on his own guitar. Rick nodded, then took an incoming call on his cell phone. “Seriously, Dad?” Jack said. “Now?” Between takes, to keep themselves amused, the musicians played parody covers: “A Hard Day’s Night” in the style of Lou Reed, “Just Can’t Get Enough” in the style of the National, Megan Thee Stallion’s “Body” in the style of Eric Cartman.
In addition to the performance, Antonoff was scheduled to join Fallon for a chat segment. If writing about music is like dancing about architecture, then interviewing a musician can be like trying to tango with a block of concrete. Antonoff is a rare exception: eager to talk about the work, able to take a joke, adept at reading the room. He set his iPhone down on a folding table, waiting for a producer to call him for a pre-interview. “They’re gonna ask something about Taylor and the Grammys for sure,” he predicted. A few weeks earlier, Swift, Antonoff, and others had won Album of the Year, for Swift’s record “Folklore.” “And they’re gonna want to talk about Bruce.” He affected a bright-eyed Fallonesque lilt: “ ‘You did a track with the Boss! Oh, my God! How did that happen?’ ”
Antonoff, despite his professed aversion to rock-star pretense, rarely answers such questions directly. “Bruce and Patti are really important people in my life,” he might say. “I played them a rough version of ‘Chinatown,’ just to see what they thought, and Bruce ended up wanting to sing on it. It was the most organic thing.” A magician never reveals his tricks, and Antonoff’s business depends on keeping A-listers’ secrets. But such evasions can also seem like humblebrags. For the song “91,” which appears on the latest Bleachers record, Antonoff collaborated with the writer Zadie Smith. “I bumped into Zadie and asked her to come by the studio,” he told me. “I showed her some lyrics I was struggling with, and she fixed them for me because she’s a genius, and she actually ended up laying down some background vocals, too.” This is a just-so story that might strain credulity if it showed up in one of Smith’s novels, but she confirmed it.
The “Tonight Show” producer started with an open-ended query about recording during quarantine. Antonoff attempted a high-level overview of his creative process which included a few unconnected abstract similes. “I don’t feel like I’m articulating this very well,” he said.
“No, you are!” the producer responded, but she didn’t ask a follow-up question. Antonoff muted his phone. “So far, none of this is usable,” he said.
Her next question was about Springsteen. Antonoff looked up and raised his eyebrows: Told you so. The following question was about Swift. Another eyebrow raise, and a triumphant finger point. When the clip of Antonoff chatting with Fallon made its way to YouTube, it was called “Jack Antonoff Reacts to Taylor Swift Folklore Grammy Win.” “I can be a cynic and a purist all I want, but these people have a TV show to make,” he told me. “Album of the Year is something anyone can understand.”
With the possible exceptions of Springsteen, Kevin Smith, and Philip Roth, no one has made more of a meal out of being from New Jersey than Jack Antonoff has. Every summer, he organizes a music festival, Shadow of the City, in Asbury Park. He hosts an intermittent podcast, “God and New Jersey,” on which he and other notable members of the diaspora process their feelings about having cast themselves out of the Garden State. He recently bought land in Monmouth County with plans to turn it into some kind of farm, though he hasn’t worked out the details. When Spotify offered to live-stream a Bleachers performance and provided a generous budget, Antonoff used the money to rent a bus and fill it with instruments, and the group played a set while being driven, through jerky George Washington Bridge traffic, to Jersey—some people’s idea of a Sartrean nightmare, Antonoff’s idea of a Proustian reverie.
He grew up in Bergen County, where his mother, Shira, the daughter of a rabbi, sent him to a Jewish day school. “My family had the classic three-generation immigration arc,” he said. “Grandparents flee oppression, come here with nothing, scrape to get by. Parents work their asses off to provide what seems to them like security—suburbs, lawn, all that. Then they turn to my generation and go, ‘You’re free to do whatever you want, just don’t fuck it up.’ ” What he wanted to do, always, was play music.
In tenth grade, he and a few friends formed a hardcore-punk band called Outline. Antonoff wore T-shirts that read “Meat Is Murder” and wrote lyrics like “Let’s follow the hopes and dreams that I once dreamt of”—as high-school juvenilia goes, it’s not as embarrassing as it could be. Daniel Silbert, an Outline bandmate, said, of Antonoff, “He just ended up being the one everyone listened to, because everything he touched got better.” Outline toured the South in Antonoff’s parents’ minivan, playing a strip mall in Virginia and an anarchist bookstore in Florida. “We would drive fourteen hours, and no one would show up,” Antonoff recalled. “Not, like, five or ten people—I mean literally no one.”
He didn’t take the hint. Instead, he started a new band, Steel Train, which transitioned away from punk and toward fingerpicking psychedelia. “I don’t disavow any of it, but I will say that I was smoking way too much weed at the time,” he told me. By then, he had transferred to the Professional Children’s School, in Manhattan, for kids who spend most of their time onstage. Steel Train’s first single was “Better Love,” a raw breakup song: “Scars are in her name / And she scars me in blame / Hey, Scarlett, you’re not the same.” It was written for—or, really, at—Antonoff’s high-school girlfriend, a rising movie star named Scarlett Johansson. (His standard explanation for the unlikely, “Licorice Pizza”-style pairing is both self-deprecating and hyperbolic: “I was the only straight guy at our school.”)
The second Steel Train album opens with the lyric “When I was eighteen, everything was alive. Then the planes hit the towers, then she died, then he died.” “He” is Antonoff’s cousin Mark, a marine who was mortally wounded in Iraq; “she” is Antonoff’s sister Sarah, who died of brain cancer at thirteen. “They say the grief is supposed to get smaller over time, but in my experience that’s bullshit,” he said recently. One of the ways he deals with it is to draw his remaining family members closer. He lives in Brooklyn Heights; his older sister, Rachel, a fashion designer, lives in the apartment above his. Rick and Shira call him several times a day, and I never saw him screen their calls. During the most recent Bleachers tour, Rick and Shira went to every show in the tristate area, then tagged along for the Pacific Northwest leg, spending nights in bunks on one of the band’s sleeper buses. One summer morning, Rick showed up at Electric Lady, a studio in the East Village, to pick up some weed from one of Jack’s collaborators; another day, he sat on the studio roof, shirtless, while Jack gave him a haircut. “I don’t really get the whole ‘I’m not close with my family’ thing,” Jack told me. “Unless you have a good reason, like you’re a queer kid and they’ll never accept you for who you are, my feeling is: Whatever’s keeping you from being close, you should probably work that shit out before it’s too late.”
In 2008, while on tour with Steel Train, Antonoff met a multi-instrumentalist named Andrew Dost and a tenor named Nate Ruess. They formed a band and called it fun. (lowercase, period); Antonoff was the guitarist with the faux-hawk, not quite in the spotlight. The group’s hit “We Are Young” became the unavoidable earworm of 2012. Radio d.j.s loved it. Tastemakers did not. (“Their style is triumphalism without a subject,” a critic wrote in this magazine.) These days, Antonoff almost never brings up fun. unprompted; when asked, he tends to talk about it at a remove—“You never forget your first big break”—avoiding the subject of whether he thinks the music has aged well. He is often asked how he manages to be so prolific, and has come to resent the question. (“Some people have hobbies. My hobby is taking a break from music to work on other music.”) It’s possible that, consciously or not, his frenetic productivity is an attempt to decrease the chances that fun. will be mentioned in the first paragraph of his obituary.
In 2013, while on tour with fun., he started Bleachers as a side project. At the time, it consisted only of Antonoff, on his laptop, chopping up bass samples in an airport or laying down vocals from a hotel room. The first Bleachers album, “Strange Desire,” came out in 2014, to mixed reviews. (Rolling Stone: “The bright ideas keep coming like mosquitoes at a backyard BBQ.”) The same year, Taylor Swift, who had worked with Antonoff on a song for the film “One Chance,” invited him to produce two tracks for her eighties-inflected album, “1989.” “I’d been trying to produce for a while, but there was always some industry herb going, ‘That’s cute, but that’s not your lane,’ ” he said. “Taylor was the first person with the stature to go, ‘I like the way this sounds, I’m putting it on my album’—and then, suddenly, I was allowed to be a producer.”
Not long ago, I spent a rainy Saturday afternoon at Antonoff’s Brooklyn Heights apartment, which includes a home studio. An elevator opened directly into a big, airy space with wide, low tables and a grand piano. Rachel let herself in and out, first arriving in Lycra to use Jack’s Peloton bike, then returning in a sweater to stand in the kitchen and eat handfuls of leftover challah. She told me, “He’ll be in the studio with someone like Taylor, they’ll pop out for a break, and the vibe is just pure excitement and coziness, like two kids on a playdate.”
Antonoff put on “New Morning,” the 1970 Bob Dylan album. “We usually think of the sneering, cynical Dylan, or maybe the sixties, political Dylan, but I’m interested in this version, where he’s not too cool to be hopeful,” he said. (In the background, Dylan sang, “Build me a cabin in Utah / Marry me a wife, catch rainbow trout.”) “Obviously, the world is a garbage fire right now,” he went on. “Instead of always taking that head on, clinically, my feeling is you let it percolate and keep focussing on the smaller, more human stuff.”
There were no traces of the apartment’s former occupant, the filmmaker Lena Dunham, whom Antonoff dated for five years. (Dunham had said that she and Antonoff wouldn’t get engaged until same-sex marriage was legal. In 2015, after the Supreme Court decided Obergefell v. Hodges, she tweeted, “@jackantonoff Get on it, yo . . .” In 2017, they broke up.) In conversation, Antonoff was evasive about Dunham, referring to her only as “my ex.” Yet the relationship, particularly its ending, is all over the most recent Bleachers record. The song “91” is about “my relationship to three women: my mom, my ex, and the person I was with when I wrote it,” Antonoff said. “Originally, in my head, I was calling it ‘Mother, Ex, Lover,’ until I said that out loud and realized it sounded like I was referring to my mother as my ex-lover, which—I mean, I dig Freud, but that’s too much even for me.”
As Antonoff’s relationship with Dunham was ending, he produced the album “Masseduction” with Annie Clark. The cover featured a photograph of a woman in a leotard, shot from behind. Some fans assumed that the woman was Clark, but she corrected the misconception on Instagram, thanking a friend, who modelled professionally, “for use of her wonderful ass.” The model was Carlotta Kohl, who soon started dating Antonoff.
Last summer, after Kohl and Antonoff broke up, I started to notice the actress Margaret Qualley stopping by the studio. By August, she and Antonoff were tabloid-official; this past winter, when Qualley was in Panama shooting a Claire Denis film, Antonoff joined her there. Her co-star in the film is Joe Alwyn, Taylor Swift’s boyfriend.
In a scene halfway through “Miss Americana,” a documentary about the creative life of Taylor Swift, she and Antonoff are alone in his home studio. (Swift is filming, in grainy selfie mode, on her phone.) They’re writing what will become “Getaway Car,” a single with a propulsive eighth-note bass line and a swirl of expansive synths. But, for now, they’re just trying to come up with a four-line stanza that will help them get from the bridge to the chorus. He sings a wisp of an idea over a rough track, trying out a fragmentary lyric: “I’m in a getaway car / And I’m losing my . . . something.” She gasps—that could work. He lunges for the space bar on his computer, pausing the track so that they can both spit out whatever they’re thinking before it slips away. She counters with a cleaner idea: “I’m in a getaway car / You’re in the motel bar.” She starts to second-guess herself (“or, like . . .”), but he presses on in that direction: “Left you in the motel bar / Took the money . . .” She immediately completes the quatrain, slapping her knee with breathless finality: “Put the money in the bag and I stole the keys / That was the last time you ever saw me!” The whole creative breakthrough takes about twenty-five seconds. Cut to Swift, in full makeup and purple sequins, belting the finished song onstage at MetLife Stadium, as more than fifty thousand fans sing along.
“I’m so glad that moment was captured,” Antonoff told me. “Most of the time, you’re just fumbling around in the dark, waiting, chipping away at it—and then you get these rare magic moments where something snaps into place.” In a Times video about the making of the title track of “Solar Power,” Lorde says, “There is no better feeling than pop alchemy building in real time.” According to the metaphor, Lorde can mine base metals on her own, but she needs Antonoff to help her turn them into gold. The idea for the song came to her in the summer of 2019: she worked out a few of the chords on a Yamaha keyboard, recorded a voice memo on her phone, and then played it for Antonoff, with such directives as “It has to sound like skateboarding.” But it wasn’t until Antonoff played it on a 1965 Fender Jaguar, which she said “sounded like sunshine,” that the song came together.
Antonoff often relies on vintage synthesizers, which can’t make a fraction of the sounds that digital plug-ins can. Like a Dogme 95 director, Antonoff finds such constraints liberating; some of his detractors, though, hear not consistency but homogeneity. Last year, after he co-wrote the Lorde song “Stoned at the Nail Salon,” listeners complained that it was similar to “Wild at Heart,” a song he’d co-written with Lana Del Rey. This led to a flurry of derisive memes (a panicked shopper facing empty shelves, captioned “jack antonoff at the new ideas store”).
The criticism of Bleachers can be even harsher. In the hours before “Take the Sadness Out of Saturday Night” was released, Antonoff did a live-streamed interview with Fantano, the online music critic. As a conversationalist, Fantano was easygoing, even a bit fawning. Closing his laptop afterward, Antonoff said, “It would be kinda funny if he was super sweet to my face and then trashed me after the album came out.”
Fantano reviewed “Take the Sadness Out of Saturday Night” on his YouTube channel a week later. “Look, there are some great tracks on this thing,” he said. “But the full potential of this LP is still severely kneecapped by a complete and utter lack of focus, consistency, and quality control.” He gave it a 6 out of 10. One of the YouTube comments read “I wonder if Jack will ever agree to an interview again.”
“I’ve been writing and performing songs since I was fifteen, and for the first decade I absolutely ate shit,” Antonoff told me. “I really—and the tax returns supported this—did it because I felt compelled to, not because the universe was sending me any signal that it was ever going to work out.” He added, “It’s great if people like my stuff, truly, everyone’s welcome—but there were a lot of records before people gave a shit, and there will be a lot after people stop giving a shit.”
“Not to neg myself—I’m pretty good at the guitar—but I’m not the best guitar player in the world,” Antonoff told me one day, crossing the Brooklyn Bridge in a chauffeured S.U.V. “I’m less good at bass or keys, even less good on the drums.” His first-take instrumental style has become something of a trademark. “Solar Power,” the Lorde record, is full of Antonoff’s fingers squeaking across frets. On “Sling,” the Clairo album, he is credited with playing eighteen instruments, some of which he’d never picked up before. The Lana Del Rey song “Venice Bitch” has a shaggy, thrown-together feel; its ending includes seven minutes of Antonoff noodling semi-arrhythmically on various guitars and monophonic synthesizers and drumming in the style of a twelve-year-old who can’t quite reach the pedals. (The song is almost universally considered a masterpiece, and this does not constitute a dissenting opinion. Del Rey told me in an e-mail that Antonoff intuitively understood how to “give it that California sound or that I don’t give a fuck sound.”) “If what an artist wants in the studio with them is someone with off-the-charts technical shredding ability,” Antonoff said, “that’s not my value-add.”
So what is? Most of the musicians Antonoff produces could work with anyone. Why him? Last summer, when “Solar Power” was released to relatively lacklustre reviews, a skeptic tweeted, “jack antonof must be an incredibly good hang.” This was meant to be a backhanded compliment, if not an outright insult, but it was actually an astute guess. During our time together, I saw Antonoff navigate an impressive range of social situations—with famous rappers, jaded roadies, overeager high-school students, aloof retirees—always finding a way to charm the room, to act like himself without upstaging anyone else. “Other producers want to squeeze you into some mold based on what has worked before,” Carly Rae Jepsen told me. “He wants to hear you come up with something that’s never been done, something that could only come from your brain.” Natalie Maines, the lead vocalist in the Chicks, said, “He’s one of the great conversationalists. You feel totally safe and comfortable sharing anything with him.”
This may sound like faint praise, but it’s not. Novelists and poets work in solitude. Film directors hone a vision and enact it by means of lights, lenses, locations, and other people. Standup comics use the crowd as an editor. There are musicians who work in similar modes, and then there are musicians who do something else—who go into the studio with a bunch of rough ideas, reveal those ideas to a trusted partner, and don’t leave until they’ve emerged with something that sounds like what they were hearing in their head. For these musicians, an adept collaborator isn’t nothing. It’s everything. “Making records, even at their easiest, is a journey through some kind of personal-ego hellscape,” Clark told me. Antonoff—having made many records, including his own—is the ideal companion: “He knows the journey so well.”
Recently, at Electric Lady, I sat in on one of Antonoff’s sessions with Sam Dew, a singer with such a euphonious falsetto that Antonoff has taken to calling him Angel Boy. Before he met Antonoff, Dew was a top-liner, writing hooks for Usher and Rihanna, among others. “With someone like Claire or Ella,” Antonoff said, using Lorde’s offstage name, “the process usually starts with a lot of talking, seeing where they’re at emotionally, before you start writing or recording anything. With Sam, we just hit the ground running.” In 2016, Antonoff, Dew, and Taylor Swift came up with the hook for “I Don’t Wanna Live Forever,” a chart-topping duet that Swift recorded with Zayn Malik. Songs from other sessions ended up on “Moonlit Fools,” an alternative-R. & B. album by Dew that came out last year. The session at Electric Lady would be open-ended, Antonoff explained: “We just see what we come up with, then later we decide where it wants to live.”
They were booked for 10 A.M., and started right on time. (One of Antonoff’s most unfashionable quirks is that he schedules his life as if rock stardom were a normal job; most nights, he’s in bed by ten-thirty, drinking tea and watching a documentary on Netflix.) Also in the room was a sound engineer named Laura Sisk. She and Antonoff communicate with a near-telepathic concision (“Kill that wonky one, then punch me in on that high thing?”) that resembles the shorthand language of twins, or of surgeons in an operating room.
Antonoff fooled around with some simple keyboard voicings on a warm-sounding vintage synth, then programmed a spare, mid-tempo track on a drum machine. “Could be the start of a vibe,” he said. After a few minutes, the synth chords began to jell into a languorous progression. Dew sat on a couch, eyes closed, humming under his breath.
The magic moment happened about fifteen minutes into the session. Dew started with descending triads—pleasant, but not particularly surprising. Then he switched to a stepwise melody, up to the minor third and back down to the root. “It’s so good,” he sang, using words for the first time all morning. It was a simple line, but there was something about it—the slight syncopation, the flash of dissonance—that made Antonoff’s eyes go wide. “That’s sick,” he said.
“I like the idea of it being, like, a come-to-Jesus moment, but about revenge,” Dew said. Antonoff threw out some revenge-themed lines in a pinched falsetto: “ ‘You’re not safe! In your home!’ That’s the cheesy version, but something in that zone.” After that, the session seemed to flow effortlessly. The two didn’t need sentences anymore—they just sang little overlapping phrases, editing themselves as they went (“No, but . . .”; “Closer”; “That’s the one”). Sisk recorded twelve bars and looped them. Dew leaned back on the couch, typing out lyrics on his phone. Then he laid down his vocals—the main melody, followed by stacks of improvised harmonies. “Are you tuning that?” Antonoff asked Sisk. She said, “Nope, that’s just his voice.” “Angel Boy,” Antonoff said.
For the next hour, Sisk kept recording as Antonoff darted from instrument to instrument—Mellotron, twelve-string guitar, live drums. He treated the looping track like clay on a potter’s wheel, tweaking some tiny elements, removing others, proceeding by intuition, guiding the song as it changed shape. By the end of the session, all the instruments he’d started with were gone; the tempo and the chords remained the same, but the feel of the song had transformed almost entirely. He told Dew, “I think this is actually going in a more Jeff Lynne, George Harrison, English-countryside kind of direction, which I like for you.”
I left the studio humming the melody, and I woke up with it in my head the next day, and the day after that. My instinct was to find it on a streaming service and play it right away. Each time, it took me a few seconds to remember that a rough draft of the song existed on one of Antonoff’s hard drives, and nowhere else.
In April, Antonoff and I went for a walk in Brooklyn Heights. He told me that the song was still in a folder with a few dozen other tracks that “fit into the category of ‘There’s something about this I love, this will be out in the world eventually, it’s just a question of the when-where-how.’ ” He’d recently finished producing a record by Florence and the Machine, which comes out this month, and he has been working with Zoë Kravitz on her first solo album. He’d just been in Los Angeles, recording with Lana Del Rey at Henson Studios. “We were tuning 808s, messing around,” he said. “And then we had this one weird live take where she was singing along to a voice memo on her phone, with her headphones on, and I was playing piano latent to what she was singing, and we just both went, ‘Yep, there it is—our one magic moment.’ ”
The previous weekend, he’d been in Las Vegas, at the Grammys. For the third year in a row, he’d been nominated for Producer of the Year, Non-Classical; this year, he’d finally won. On Instagram, Del Rey posted “Congrats from us!” beneath a photograph of herself, Antonoff, and Swift embracing. Del Rey drove from L.A. to Vegas to celebrate with Antonoff, Sisk, Qualley, and Annie Clark. “We rented out a place—my family, my band, Annie and her family, Lana and her family,” he said. “We really did it right.”
Antonoff knows that after a peak, almost by definition, there tends to come a dip. “Not saying I deserve to be in the same breath as these people, but you look back even at the greats—Bowie, Prince, Bruce—and you see lags, sometimes decades long,” he said. “Living through it, I’m sure, is a much scarier thing.” Some people insist that he’s already entered a fallow patch. There are the perennial gripes about his production, but, as always, the criticisms about Bleachers cut closest to the bone. “Antonoff remains a curious case for a solo artist,” Jeremy D. Larson wrote in his Pitchfork review of “Take the Sadness Out of Saturday Night.” “His leather jacket says rock star, but his songs are mostly without danger or angst.” Larson gave the album a 6.2. Pitchfork has given lower scores to records by Bowie, Prince, and Springsteen, but all three have also received perfect tens; by critical consensus, Antonoff hasn’t yet made his “Heroes” or his “Nebraska,” at least not for himself. Springsteen had Jon Landau in the studio with him, shaping his ideas. Bowie had Brian Eno and Tony Visconti. Maybe Jack Antonoff needs his own Jack Antonoff, someone to help him transform his ore into gold.
Last September 11th, after two pandemic postponements, Shadow of the City, Antonoff’s music festival, made its triumphant return. On the outdoor stage at the Stone Pony, in Asbury Park, there would be five opening acts, including Claud and Japanese Breakfast, followed by the headliner: Bleachers. “I’ve been dreaming of this day for two and a half fucking years,” Antonoff said backstage. His parents were there, and his sister, and a few of his closest friends. Qualley had travelled from Budapest. “I wanna show you something,” he told her, half whispering. “It’s . . . well, it’s a lot, but I think you’ll like it.”
He led her through a security checkpoint, flashing his badge, then slipped through the crowd and into a cordoned-off area next to the stage. “My childhood bedroom,” he said. Not a simulacrum of his childhood bedroom—the actual bedroom, cut out of his family’s old house in Woodcliff Lake, loaded onto a trailer, and dropped off in the parking lot, as an interactive art exhibit. Qualley smiled and said nothing. “It was more on-theme with the last album,” he said.
They opened the door and walked in. Twin bed, mint-green carpet, stacks of CDs, posters taped to every visible surface (the Beatles, the Get Up Kids, Outline, Steel Train). “Were these your actual clothes?” she said, riffling through a drawer.
“Oh, yeah,” he said.
“I actually spilled salad dressing on the shirt I’m wearing,” she said.
“Take one,” he said. She picked out a “Where’s Waldo?” T-shirt. “So sweet,” she said.
The sun set over the boardwalk, and Bleachers took the stage. There was a crowd of more than four thousand blissed-out kids, some in Bleachers gear, some in Taylor Swift or Clairo T-shirts. “This is the first Bleachers show in almost three years,” Antonoff shouted. “This is a show that you will never forget!” ♦
