Jack Antonoff talks about Taylor Swift, his new album and the genre that's `about to blow'
LOS ANGELES >> Three rainy days before the 66th Grammy Awards, Jack Antonoff sits cross-legged — dry and toasty and sipping his second oat-milk latte — on an oversized sofa in the private recording studio he recently built on a grungy Hollywood side street.
“I hate this weather,” he says as he peers through a soundproofed window he claims would keep us from hearing two cars smashing into each other right out front. “I'm really basic when it comes to weather: I like sun and warmth, and anything besides that causes me dissonance.”
What Antonoff doesn't know at the moment is that at the Grammys he'll win album of the year for his work as a producer and songwriter on Taylor Swift's chart-topping “Midnights” and be named producer of the year for the third time in a row. The latter achievement will tie a record set in the mid-1990s by Kenny “Babyface” Edmonds, the groundbreaking RB auteur whose Tiny Desk Concert is a favorite of Antonoff's.
“I was just watching him do `Change the World,'” he says, referring to the rootsysoulful Eric Clapton hit produced by Babyface. “Crazy song, man.”
What Antonoff does know ahead of the Grammys — knows but can't talk about as we hide out from the rain — is that he's already completed another LP with Swift: “The Tortured Poets Department,” which she'll reveal onstage during the ceremony in a surprise announcement that promptly breaks the internet. Due April 19, it's the seventh studio album Swift and Antonoff have made together over the last decade (not counting her blockbuster rerecordings of her early work); it's also sure to extend his reign as perhaps the most in-demand producer in
pop music: a technical whiz with a knack for ear-grabbing sounds and a born coconspirator capable of making artists feel safe.
Among the albums he's helped shepherd to varying combinations of commercial success, critical acclaim and awards attention are Lorde's “Melodrama” and “Solar Power,” St. Vincent's “Masseduction,” Clairo's “Sling,” Florence and the Machine's “Dance Fever,” the 1975's “Being Funny in a Foreign Language” and Lana Del Rey's “Norman F—ing Rockwell!” and “Did You Know That There's a Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd,” both of which earned Grammy nods for album of the year. Each has its own quirks, yet all of them can make the intimate feel anthemic and vice versa.
“He's a genius,” says Natalie Maines of the Chicks, who drafted Antonoff to helm their 2020 comeback disc, “Gaslighter.” “Every day I couldn't wait to be in the studio with him.” She laughs. “He better work with us again, or I'll quit.”
For now Antonoff, 39, is funneling his talent into “Bleachers,” a self-titled album by the New Jerseybased rock group he formed in 2013, shortly before his contributions to Swift's ninetimes-platinum “1989” set him on a path toward pop ubiquity. In the beginning, Bleachers was a vehicle for the neo-new wave noodling Antonoff would do by himself on his laptop; later, he convened a handful of musicians — including two sax players — and the band became known as a fist-pumping, sweat-spraying, Springsteen-channeling live act.
This latest record, the band's fourth full-length, presents a further evolution: Though the album's lead single, “Modern Girl,” has a rowdy E Street vibe, the rest of the LP is lusher and more nuanced, with spacious arrangements that blend strummy acoustic folk, tender soft rock and glimmering `80s RB.
“To me it feels massively different,” Antonoff says in his studio, which wraps around a small garden designed by the same folks who maintain the grounds of Conway Recording Studios, his favorite place to work in Los Angeles until he got this spot up and running late last year. Decorated in cozy earth tones and lined with banks of vintage synthesizers, the room is new enough that he asks visitors to take off their shoes — “We're still treating it like a house,” he says — and takes clear pleasure in showing off the pictures and knickknacks on the shelves: a shot of his dad and his uncle in the `70s, a drawing by the late Daniel Johnston, a framed piece of hotel stationery scrawled with an initial sequencing idea for “Norman F—ing Rockwell!”
A Polaroid of a pair of cowboy boots — Del Rey's, it turns out — lies on a coffee table, one product of Antonoff's effort to start taking more old-school photos. “The phone kind of ruined pictures,” he says. “If I point a camera at you, you're like, `Picture!' If I point this at you,” he adds, lifting his phone, “you're like, `Am I gonna be canceled?'”
Jamie Oborne, who manages Antonoff's career and heads up the band's record label, Dirty Hit, says that “Bleachers” marks “the first time Jack's done for himself what he does for so many other people when he produces records.” And there might be something to that in the careful way he frames his singing, selecting just the right textures to draw out the rich emotion in his voice. Yet it's not merely the sound of “Bleachers” that distinguishes the album but Antonoff's newly expansive approach to writing for the band.
The first few Bleachers records, he says today, were almost entirely defined by his experience of grief, which began when his younger sister, Sarah, died of brain cancer when she was 13 and Antonoff was 18. He wrote about her memory and about survivor's guilt and about what happens as you get further away from trauma but still can't shake it — “the long COVID of survivor's guilt,” as he puts it.
“Bleachers” takes a wider view in songs that ponder the absurdities of pop culture and the renewing power of romance; Antonoff attributes the latter, as heard in songs like “Tiny Moves” and “Me Before You,” to his falling in love with the actor Margaret Qualley, whom he married last year in a star-studded wedding not far from where the couple live much of the year in New Jersey.
Was there a part of him that felt like addressing other themes in his music constituted a betrayal of his sister?
“Yeah, and I fought against that,” he says, pulling his knees toward his chest on the couch. “I don't think the highest version of keeping someone's memory alive is not living, you know?” Antonoff says that for years the enormity of Sarah's death led him to conclude that anything going wrong in his life — anger, anxiety, panic attacks — was a result of that tragedy. “And that's an almost impossible thing to realize isn't true,” he says. The depth of his connection with Qualley helped open his mind.
“Now I can finally prosecute the 20 years of things that I just swept under the rug of loss,” he says with a laugh. “I feel liberated by starting to take some of my things to the Container Store in my head.”
Antonoff grew up comfortably in New Jersey — his older sister, Rachel, is now a fashion designer — and played in a series of bands in high school and afterward; one of the groups, Steel Train, had a song inspired by his thengirlfriend, Scarlett Johansson. In 2008, he formed a trio called Fun., which went on to score with “We Are Young,” a major radio hit in 2012 that won a Grammy for song of the year; around the same time, he began a five-year relationship with the filmmaker Lena Dunham, which invited his first brush with tabloid celebrity.
Asked whose call he'd be more inclined to take, Antonoff says he doesn't have “a road map in my head for what I will or won't do.” He decides whether a potential collaboration is right based on a simple reaction: “Am I excited or not?”
Beyond Swift's “Tortured Poets Department,” about which he stays mum in a phone conversation after the Grammys, he's working on Del Rey's next LP, which she's said will be a country album titled “Lasso.” “We've been cooking,” he says. “It's f—ing brilliant.” (Of the current country craze that's also drawn Beyoncé and Post Malone toward the genre, Antonoff says, “The bubbling is about to blow — I feel it everywhere.”)