Beyond a beat and a tune
Jack Antonoff ’s passion for infusing infectious songs with emotion carries over to his band at NXNE: Bleachers
The pursuit of the perfect pop song involves trying to make something sound simple, and yet anyone who has actually created one knows that it is anything but.
“I think the perfect pop moments are when you have this tight little thing, that seems like a tight thing, but you actually open the door and it’s a f-----’ universe,” says Jack Antonoff. He’s the lead singer of Bleachers, which is coming to town for North by Northeast (NXNE), but he has also been a part of some of the biggest hits of the past few years.
Referred to as a “pop music Svengali” or hitmaker to the stars, Antonoff, 33, has had a few of his own, notably “We are young” with his other band Fun., and “I Wanna Get Better,” from Bleachers’ first album, but there’s also Lorde’s “Green Light,” “I Don’t Want to Live Forever,” by Zayn Malik and Taylor Swift (who he collaborated with a number of times, including on “Out of the Woods”), Sara Bareilles’ “Brave,” and more. He’s also worked with Canada’s Carly Rae Jepsen, who he is still effusive about: “Carly was the first person who let me actually work on their music and I will never forget that.”
Antonoff bristles at those who dismiss his chosen field.
“I think pop music is bigger. It’s always been, to me, about accessing really emotional and important stories and then funnelling them into a three-minute song where you only have so much space. That’s the most exciting art form to me,” he says.
“I don’t have any reservations about the power of pop music. When pop music is at its absolute best, it can convey so much so simply. That (is) my life’s work.”
“You know what phrase I hate? ‘It’s not like curing cancer.’ That drives me crazy. I don’t think we’re curing cancer literally, but when you’ve had the number of people coming up to you, and how they didn’t kill themselves, or were suicidal or were cutting themselves, then this lyric or this music stopped them, you start to realize that you’re an idiot if you just brush it off under the irrelevant popmusic umbrella.”
Bleachers recently released its second album, Gone Now, and performs at NXNE on Saturday night at the main stage in the Port Lands, just before Kaytranada. Gone Now’s single “Don’t Take the Money” is said to be about Antonoff’s girlfriend, Lena Dunham, but the album channels plenty of his New Jersey roots. While Antonoff’s been touring in bands since he was 16, he lived in his childhood room until he was 27. It’s where he wrote most of his songs. He’s taking that room on the road, having it painstakingly moved into a trailer to bring along on the first leg of the tour.
“There are a number of reasons, but the most basic reason is the album is really my heart and soul,” he says.
“I’ve been touring my whole life and I’m running and running, and there’s another part of me that’s frozen, because I never really moved out of this room. You know, home freezes when you go on tour — it’s almost as if nothing changes. So, I thought I’d do this insanely surreal version of this concept that you can’t take it all with you by literally trying to take my childhood bedroom on tour with me.”
Antonoff says that the theme of this album is trying to make a clean break with his past and he jokes that he might blow up his bedroom trailer at the end of this. His process has always been about mining the emotional traumas of his past — most notably, his 13-year-old sister dying of brain cancer when he was18 — but he’s ready for the next steps.
“There’s a deep connection to the album in terms of really trying to move on,” he says. And after working on it for two years, he’s ready to go on the road and share it.
“The show is a celebration and for a long time, I saw the show as, ‘Oh, this is so hard, I have to revisit all these things,’ because writing is so hard, you have to go to deep place and that makes you complicated or scared, and when you finally get it right, you get your dessert. You finally did it right, so now you get (to) travel around the world and celebrate it with people who feel just like you.”