Jack Antonoff hopes the music industry has been taking notes
“You know who I miss right now?” Jack Antonoff asks. “Nancy Meyers. I feel like she’s been on a bit of a break.”
The Grammy-winning producer, songwriter and frontman of the rock band Bleachers is standing in the lush garden outside his private recording studio in Hollywood, which — come to think of it — looks like a spot out of one of Meyers’ sumptuously designed romantic comedies. There are gently arcing palm trees, a gleaming built-in barbecue, a refrigerated drawer full of chilled sparkling waters.
“I think we’re cresting out of the moment of film needing to be a harsh slice of reality, and I love that,” Antonoff continues. “With Nancy Meyers” — the director’s most recent feature, for the record, was 2015’s “The Intern” — “a lot of the criticism was always: ‘No one has a kitchen like that.’ And I’m like, Yeah, that’s why it’s cool.”
As a guy who came up in New Jersey’s scrappy punk scene, Antonoff, 40, is perhaps an unlikely Meyers stan. Yet he’s undoubtedly in his high-gloss blockbuster era: This year alone he had a major hand in Taylor Swift’s “The Tortured Poets Department” and Sabrina Carpenter’s “Short n’ Sweet” — both widely tipped for multiple Grammy nods when nominations are announced on Nov. 8 — and co-produced a track by Kendrick Lamar (“6:16 in L.A.”) as part of Lamar’s world-stopping beef with Drake. He also toured behind Bleachers’ latest LP, composed music for a new Broadway production of Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet” and settled into married life with actor Margaret Qualley, to whom he got hitched last year near their home in New Jersey.
For the sibling pop savants, work and family have long been intertwined. They’ve proved it with their most autobiographical album, ‘Hit Me Hard and Soft,’ a strong contender for the 67th Grammy Awards.
Antonoff looked back on it all on a recent afternoon at his studio before heading to a Bleachers gig at the Greek Theatre, where his dad joined the band for a rendition of “How Dare You Want More.”
Do you have a place in L.A. or do you stay at a hotel when you’re here?
No, I love hotels. I live so much of my life in hotels that I’ve really crystallized my experience — I know how to do it. But I also love being home. My partner and I, our life is pretty tight — like a 60-mile radius between New York and New Jersey. You know you’re home based on the feeling you have when the plane lands. When I get to L.A., I feel excitement: What could happen? I land at Newark or JFK or hopefully LaGuardia and my shoulders drop. I love this studio, but Margaret and I do not sit around and dream about living anywhere else. We’ve reached the point in our life where we’re both working pretty hard, filled with ideas and ambitions, but the magical place we go to in our minds is just being home.
Alas, you’re on tour.
I love playing shows. But it’s funny that I ended up doing this for a living because I dislike travel greatly. I like cars a lot. We’re actually not doing buses anymore. For this tour, I looked at it — there’s a real tour manager in my head because I did it for so long — and I’m like, OK, let’s structure this so if the drive is under five hours, you go to bed in the hotel, you wake up at 9 and you get there in time for soundcheck. I love sitting in a car listening to music, having to pee so bad, then you finally stop and you get to pick out some cool snacks.
You’re known to jump into the audience during a Bleachers show. You ever get skeeved out being touched by so many people?
One of the reasons I do what I do is because when I’m playing, that’s about the only two hours in my life when I don’t think about that. I’ve been described as a next-level germaphobe. Still wear a mask on the plane — I’m not worried about COVID, I just think they’re disgusting. Haven’t touched a doorknob since, you know, 1990. But I have a great relief of my demons when I get onstage.
You turned 40 this year.
I feel really excited about it. I don’t wish for my life to be over, and I don’t enjoy how fast it all goes — that fills me with the existential dread that we all live with. But a lot of my artistic heroes have furthered a vision through age. My favorite artist of all time when I was really young was Tom Waits. And it was about the journey: What was he thinking when he did “Foreign Affairs”? How did he get to “Mule Variations”? Who is the pirate? Who is the crooner? Same with the Beatles or Joni Mitchell or Bruce [Springsteen] or [Martin] Scorsese or Fiona Apple. These are all people that made a value of the concept of carrying on.
When “The Tortured Poets Department” came out, you identified yourself in a tweet as a “Down Bad” head. What is it about that song?
It just captures this vacillation of the human experience so perfectly for me — like, I’m dancing, I’m driving in the dark. Am I crying? Am I making out with someone? It does a thing that a lot of my favorite songs do, where it just puts me in a place.
Nominations for the 67th Grammy Awards will be announced on Nov. 8 with the ceremony itself taking place on Feb. 2.
Is there a particular sound you’re proud of?
Just the totality of it: the LinnDrum; the tremolated, wobbling synth; the shimmering guitars. I could dissect it, but it just grabs me as soon as I hear it. It’s like a born universe.
That’s a vivid phrase.
I feel that way about “August.” I feel that way about “Cruel Summer.” I feel that way about [Lana Del Rey’s] “Venice Bitch.” They just put you there in that universe. And you can’t believe them when they happen, because they’re the hardest to try to plan. They kind of come out of thin air, whereas some songs are these mountains that you work on forever.
“I Can Do It With a Broken Heart” feels very non-thin-air-ish to me. That’s one where I can hear the thinking in your production.
It’s all about the juxtaposition between the sadness of Taylor’s lyrics and the humor and the joy of the music. It’s a person singing about how hard it is to be in the spotlight all the time but also about how strong they are. On a production level, I wanted the literal voices of people fluttering around in the song because I want people to be like, “Who are all these people in the room?” That’s the experience of what she’s talking about. I love that type of song that re-presents to the audience the glory of the job and how destructive it can be.
Because you can relate?
I know that feeling so well. You’re up there and there’s no tomorrow and there’s no yesterday. Then you’re done: Oh my God, tomorrow. Oh my God, yesterday. Have I rung a bell I can’t un-ring? Am I too far down a path to turn around — and if so, what are the implications? When I have kids, what will happen?
Do those intrusive thoughts ever happen while you’re playing?
Never.
You’re fully in it till you’re offstage.
Till about 10 minutes after being off, which is actually a dangerous time because I can eat like a whole pizza in that 10 minutes. It’s a little bit like sleepwalking. I’m still not really present in my body when I’m in that heightened place, and I can consume an amazing amount of food.
What do you do instead of eating a whole pizza?
I get offstage and go right back to the room with the band. We talk about the show, maybe do a bit of a celebration. We need to come down together. After that I’ll see a few people. But when I’m done, I want to go to bed. It’s before the show that I like to be social. I remember Bruce came to see us at Radio City [in 2022], and he got there early because he played some songs with us. He was just sitting in my room and people were kind of coming and going. At one point, he looked at me and was like, “I don’t know how you do this, man — I need to be alone before the show.” For the first time, I was like, am I doing this wrong?
Back to “Tortured Poets”: By Taylor’s standards, this album was somewhat coolly received by tastemakers when it came out. Yet I sense a burgeoning reappraisal. Some prominent folks seem to be coming around to it.
Story of my life, baby.
Why do you think that is?
Not to be esoteric or poetic about it, but time is my only critic. Myself and everyone I work with feels that way. All that matters is how the stuff ages. I’ve been a part of or personally made so much work at this point that hit a certain way when it came out, only to see what happened with it eight months later, a year later, three years later. So when I say I don’t care about reviews, it’s not an ego thing. It’s like, how can you care?
Beyoncé’s complicated history in album of the year means that all eyes will be on that prize when Grammy nominations are announced in November.
It’s worth noting that, until “Tortured Poets,” the reviews were pretty uniformly positive.
Totally. But, you know, we’re artists — we’ll find the one bad comment. The system is very clearly designed so that if I have a moment of universal acclaim, then a think piece on the other side comes out. So the lesson is clear, which is that it’s the work and how it ages. I never want to win a moment.
That’s kind of what the band Fun. was, huh? Big deal at the time — “We Are Young” at No. 1, song of the year at the Grammys, yadda yadda. Now nobody talks about Fun.
I think you’re illustrating why I chose to not do that much longer. I know when something will age well, and that’s why I stay with the things that I want to do. There was something very accidental about Fun., which is also what stressed me out about it. It wasn’t my band.
Why was that stressful?
Because I’m a bandleader and I’ve always been a bandleader. I like singing my lyrics. I like telling my story. My attraction to being on the road — would “proselytizing” be the right word for it? — comes from explaining a point of view that I come from and inviting people into it. So if I’m not getting that, I don’t really want to do it much. There’s a lot of people in my life who, when Fun. was this massive band and I was obsessively making the first Bleachers album, they were like, “What are you doing? What is this? Is this ego?” And I was like, “No, you have to feel yourself. And I don’t feel myself.” It’s that simple.
Question about Sabrina: You and she have both suggested that “Sharpest Tool” is your favorite song on “Short n’ Sweet.” Why?
I guess it’s that “born universe” thing. When we made it, we were kind of like, “What is this?” The tone of it’s kind of odd. I can’t tell if it’s uptempo or downtempo. It puzzles me and delights me. I feel that way about “Please Please Please” too. If you think about that song before it became a hit, it doesn’t really slide into anything that’s happening in any way. I’m not being a douchebag and trying to make the story sound cooler. But no one sat around and was like, “This is gonna ride up the charts!”
Sabrina wasn’t the only pop act to break out in a big way in 2024. It was also the year of Chappell Roan and Charli XCX. Why did so many people want to hear from new voices?
I don’t think people wanted to hear from new voices as much as some new voices came with the f— goods. And the thread between Charli and Chappell and Sabrina is that they’re artists who’ve been killing for a long, long time. I’ve been aware of Sabrina for years and years and years. Charli has been redefining and crystallizing her sound for over a decade. I hope that on the industry side, all the notes are taken.
Is this a moment for the record industry to pat itself on the back and say, “Hey, look, artist development is alive”?
It’s a moment for the record industry to consider who they’ve been dropping and ignoring. It’s a moment for people to remind themselves that artists get better the more space and freedom they’re given to barrel down their path. The lesson from a label point of view is: Don’t chase something that’s having a moment online. Chase something you love and believe in.
Do you ever play Monday morning quarterback with records that don’t work?
Nah. I’m so wrapped up in my universe that I don’t listen to a lot of other things, and I certainly don’t have opinions on them.
I feel like I half-believe you.
I mean, I hear things here and there, and I can talk my s— if I’m alone with friends. But I’ve never heard something and been like, “Here’s what they should’ve done.” My Spotify Wrapped every year is hilarious because I’m really only listening to what I’m working on. My No. 1 song last year was the theme from “Nacho Libre” because when I’m on a plane with anyone in my family, I do a bit where I play it on a loop really loud on my phone.
The end of Taylor’s Eras tour is almost upon us. Will you go to at least one more show?
I think I’ll definitely make that happen. I don’t want to miss another chance to experience it. It’s an incredible thing to behold. You have to see it so many times because you have to vacillate between watching the show and watching the audience. I could cry watching some of these people. What they’re going through — it’s beautiful.
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