To use an internet term, Jack Antonoff is booked and busy. NME catches the Bleachers frontman in his dressing room at London’s O2 Forum Kentish Town, where he’s about to play a second sell-out show. Bleachers are touring in support of their self-titled fourth album which dropped in March. Featuring musical nods to Bruce Springsteen, R.E.M. and Joni Mitchell, it’s the band’s most exuberant and effusive effort yet. “Something happened with this album – I feel like it kind of fell out of the sky and landed at my feet,” he says. “And something about it feels super-conversational; it feels like you’re in the room with me or something. I’ve never felt like that before.”
In October, Bleachers will cap a banner year by playing New York’s 20,000-capacity Madison Square Garden. “It’s really crazy [because] so much of my writing is about the shadow of the city – being from New Jersey,” Antonoff says. “And Madison Square Garden, if you believe in all the mythologies, is kind of artistically the castle on the hill.” It’s also, Antonoff adds emphatically, “such a wild mindfuck of what I dreamed about when I was young”.
Of course, Antonoff also pours his seemingly bottomless creative energy into co-writing and producing hits for some of today’s defining artists, including Lana Del Rey, The 1975, St. Vincent, Florence and the Machine and Lorde. Perhaps most significantly, he’s worked on every Taylor Swift album since her 2014 pop breakthrough ‘1989’ and has numerous co-writes on her latest, ‘The Tortured Poets Department’, out today. Given how prized his time has become, it’s surprising to hear Antonoff say his schedule is “much less planned” than we might imagine.
“I try to keep it pretty open. I mean, I like to book studio time so I can go into the studio or whatever, but I don’t like being boxed in [or feeling like] I have to do this,” he says. “I want to see how I feel, and that’s good for the other people I work with. I’m available; I’m not just there because I’m there.” It’s an approach that clearly works for him: in February, Antonoff became only the second person in Grammys history – after R&B innovator Babyface – to win the coveted Producer of the Year award for three years in succession.
In a revealing and often philosophical In Conversation interview, Antonoff talks about his creative impulse, his collaborations with Nick Cave and Florence Welch on the soundtrack to ’50s-set TV series The New Look, and his inability to “fake it” in the studio.
NME: On ‘Self Respect’, a song from the new Bleachers album, you sing: “I’m so tired of having self-respect / Let’s do something I’ll regret.” What was going through your mind when you wrote it?
Jack Antonoff: “I think a lot about this version of self-respect as defined by, like, everyone else in the world. It feels like there’s a real black and white thinking of how to function, [whereas] I think most humanity is more in the middle. Especially when it comes to writing songs and art, I got obsessed with the way that we speak online. It’s so definitive: ‘I’m devastated.’ ‘[I’m] so sad about this.’ But most people feel a lot of pain and a lot of joy and they’re hungry. They do this, [then] they do that, because your mind moves so quickly.
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“And because your brain moves so quickly, it just feels exhausting to have any version of self-respect that isn’t your own. I think we live in a time when wellness is so commodified… and the opinions we’re meant to have are commodified. So I just feel fucking tired of having anyone’s version of self-respect that it isn’t my own. You know, Nick Cave put it perfectly when he said how boring it is to comment on things that are morally obvious. I think about that a lot, especially when I’m writing.”
What is your version of self-respect now? How do you quantify it?
“To do what I love. You know, I live my life in the studio and on tour – that’s how I communicate and feel myself. [But] everyone has a different version of it. I think maintaining it as you define it – and not as it’s defined in a moment and culture – is pretty vital to maintain dignity and our own human experience. Especially as more and more of our lives become like other people’s reflections.
“It’s really important to reject that, especially as an artist or someone in the public eye [where] there’s so much pressure to toe any kind of party line thinking. And the truth is, I have thoughts that aren’t really quantified by any person or community; they’re just my own. And so I don’t want to be, I guess, as readable or predictable as I’d be celebrated [for] if I were to be.”
It’s been 10 years since Bleachers’ debut single ‘I Wanna Get Better’. How has the band evolved in that time?
“It’s kind of miraculous. It’s really crazy to look back. I’ve had this a number of times in my career [where] you realise the kind of rarefied zone you’re in – like, a lot of the people you came up with aren’t there anymore. And you just sort of think: ‘Wow, we got something right here.’ It’s so amazing, and so weird.”
You’re also known for producing records for so many incredible artists. At this point, how do you choose who you want to work with?
“If there’s ever something that sounds interesting to work on, I try to meet people and see if I can imagine doing things with them. You know, the ability to make something with someone is so delicate that you could like someone, you could love their work, but it might not work. You just have to try and be very honest when it happens and when it doesn’t. And I tend and intend to follow the things where I feel a lot of inspiration and excitement. It’s all kind of gut feeling, but yeah, it can be a bit awkward if it’s not there. Because you can’t really fake it.”
If you get in the studio with an artist and it’s not sparking creatively, can you work through that?
“No, I think it’s there or it’s not. I don’t think it’s really fakeable – at least not for me, I’ve never been able to. It’s almost like, in the same [creative] process, you could find yourself so distressed or in such joy. It’s kinda like a sacred place, so I don’t think you should push it too hard.”
What made you want to produce the soundtrack to The New Look? It’s quite a unique proposition: modern artists covering songs from the early and mid-20th century.
“Well, I had this conversation with Adam Kessler, who created the show – he’s brilliant and made so many things that I love. And we just talked a lot about that time period and these great wartime propaganda songs: how they were beautiful and trying to put a spin on it, but in a weird way, kind of told the truth through their dissonance.
“And so I started thinking about artists I love who have voices that exist in any time period. That’s why [I thought of] people like Florence, Nick Cave, Bartees Strange and Perfume Genius. I really loved working on that [soundtrack]; it was very inspiring. I like doing these film projects that I sometimes do that feel a little bit separate from having to like, like, rip my guts out on my own records. I can just sort of go over there and have a little more fun in the studio and mess around with, like, reimagining a classic song with these other great artists.”
Where does your urge to create come from?
“I don’t know, never really have. I have always felt, like, really misunderstood. It’s like this driving, pounding [feeling] in me. But I don’t know why I feel that way. I’ve had a nice life.”
Do you still feel misunderstood?
“Yeah. Most people I know who write do. It’s like this weird search for something inside you that is undefined. It’s the one thing that I can sort of sew between all of us – this, like, general feeling that you have to express something that’s urgent. You just have to get it out but you can’t really put a name to it. It’s this feeling, this thought, this distant thing that you’re constantly chasing after.”
Does that feeling always exist at the same level of intensity? And never goes away?
“It hasn’t for me – maybe it will one day? Maybe that’s when I write my tell-all book. I don’t know, I think there’s this looming fear that it goes away [some day], but then it just sort of carries on.”
The album ‘Bleachers’ is out now via Dirty Hit