{"id":771104,"date":"2026-02-17T19:49:26","date_gmt":"2026-02-17T19:49:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/771104\/"},"modified":"2026-02-17T19:49:26","modified_gmt":"2026-02-17T19:49:26","slug":"jack-antonoff-interview-on-new-bleachers-marriage-and-writing-for-pop-icons","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/771104\/","title":{"rendered":"Jack Antonoff Interview on New Bleachers, Marriage, and Writing for Pop Icons"},"content":{"rendered":"

written by<\/strong> ALEX FRANK
photography<\/strong> BOBBY DOHERTY
styling<\/strong> JULIAN LOUIE<\/p>\n

Even from 3,000 miles away, Jack Antonoff<\/a> is a jittery presence. He\u2019s FaceTimed me from a car in the parking lot of a Los Angeles studio; when his sweetly nerdy visage surfaces on my cold New York screen, he\u2019s looking not at the camera but instead scanning the contents of a paper bag in the passenger seat. Before I\u2019ve even asked my first real question, he gets out of his car to meet who he thinks is a Caviar driver with a coffee delivery. It turns out to be a colleague heading in to meet him at the studio. He sits back down, his neck swivelling like a bird every 15 seconds to check for the Caviar driver, then, spotting someone, gets up again. This time it is a delivery driver, but for someone else in the building, so he points him in the right direction and gets back in his car, the slender tip of his index finger swiping our screen to check for notifications. Some version of this Larry David-esque interaction goes on for quite a while\u2014Jack grabbing his phone and exiting the car, Jack reentering the car and propping the phone back on the dashboard, Jack craning his neck to search for his Caviar\u2014and by the time our conversation is over, he still hasn\u2019t even gotten his coffee.<\/p>\n

Yes, this is the man who\u2019s had perhaps the most focused run of successful music of any producer in the last decade. Taylor Swift, Lana Del Rey<\/a>, Lorde<\/a>, Sabrina Carpenter<\/a>\u2014Antonoff has worked on these defining giants\u2019 most popular and critically-acclaimed albums, known for coaxing deeply introspective and passionately probing songs about inner turmoil and broken hearts and exciting nights and new relationships, songs that have become anthems for every music lover under the age of about 50. Producers like Antonoff do any number of things for artists, depending on the specifics of a project, from helping co-write from scratch to just polishing what is almost finished. And though it\u2019s hard to say what, exactly, has made Antonoff such a powerful force\u2014a recurring theme of our conversation is his insistence that he has no fucking clue why his work succeeds\u2014his restlessness seems part of it: the animating intensity of always seeking, always searching, never quite comfortable enough to rest on your laurels or, in both a literal and figurative sense, relax fully into the driver\u2019s seat. \u201cI think a large part of what I do,\u201d he says, \u201cis just feeling like I\u2019m on the edge of\u2026 something.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Aside from his production work\u2014which includes a recently-announced new single from Lana called \u201cWhite feather-hawk tail deer hunter\u201d\u2014Antonoff has his own project called Bleachers, for which he will release a new album this spring. The collection of 11 songs is a deeply felt meditation on the messy days of yore, a brooding journey through the big decisions and important relationships of his younger years. His lyrics drift back towards the first time he left his parents\u2019 home in New Jersey to go on tour, and then further still; on the opening track \u201cSideways,\u201d he alludes to the legacy of his ancestors, Eastern European Jews, \u201cthe ones that survived and got out.\u201d Here is the dizzying way he describes the heart of the album:\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t feel part of the past, and I feel part of a version of the future, but not necessarily this one. When you write, you\u2019re not writing things you know\u2014there are these strange feelings, and then all of a sudden you start to realise, \u2018Oh, I\u2019m really humming on a thing here, and I got to figure that out,\u2019 a lot like [psycho]analysis. And so, I started realising I\u2019ve just been obsessively trying to figure out\u2026 all the cornerstones. It\u2019s like, I\u2019ve presented this mountain of issues, but at the end of the day, it\u2019s mostly love songs about the few key figures in your life\u2014all different, all the same\u2014who make it bearable.\u201d<\/p>\n

If that seems like a lot to take in, it can be helpful to slow down and trace the more concrete facts of Antonoff\u2019s life. Born and raised in New Jersey\u2014where he still lives today with his wife, the actress Margaret Qualley<\/a>\u2014he had a loving family but an innate sense of dread: When he was 5, his younger sister Sarah was born and quickly developed brain cancer. (Antonoff also has an older sister, Rachel, a fashion designer.) \u201cWe lived what seemed, from the outside, a normal life, because she didn\u2019t appear different. But there was something in the household which wasn\u2019t the most normal. There was a lot of dissonance.\u201d She died when he was 18. \u201cThere\u2019s a long period in my life where I was working on the grief puzzle. It\u2019s really interwoven into this album.\u201d Indeed, these new Bleachers songs\u2014with titles like \u201cJust Don\u2019t Wanna Be Lonely\u201d and \u201cCan\u2019t Believe You\u2019re Gone\u201d\u2014are haunted by an unmistakable melancholy, and Antonoff has said in the past that everything he makes is in some way about his sister, the pain of reaching for answers to unanswerable sorrow. \u201cThe ghostly part, this thing that you chase forever,\u201d he says, \u201cyou go through these things, and then you chase them down, and then you get there, and you\u2019re like, \u2018Alright, I guess I\u2019ll go to lunch.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

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An avowed Bruce Springsteen fanatic, Antonoff came up in noisy, messy rock bands, playing tiny venues and driving around New Jersey in a van. But even then, he possessed a sense of aspiration. In 2011, he and his then-band, Fun., sought out producer Jeff Bhasker\u2014already famous for his work with Kanye West and Beyonc\u00e9\u2014and convinced him to collaborate on a song called \u201cWe Are Young.\u201d It became an unexpectedly massive hit, and in its fidgety pulse, you can hear the blueprint of Antonoff\u2019s future genius: a braiding of indie textures with pop instincts, capped by the sentimental swell and crash of a huge, irresistible chorus. Just as Antonoff began flirting with a more straightforward pop sound, he met Taylor Swift at an awards show, where the two bonded over a shared love of the 1980s new-wave duo Yazoo. In 2014, the connection led to a production credit on 1989, Swift\u2019s glossy, massively successful collection of synth-pop that wiped away the last vestiges of country from her sound. That same year, Antonoff released Strange Desire, his first album with Bleachers, and told podcaster Marc Maron that he was largely disappointed by the mainstream music of the moment; he wanted, he said prophetically, to be \u201cthe person who changes it.\u201d<\/p>\n

A goal like that might\u2019ve sounded absurd in 2014, but with the benefit of 12 years, it\u2019s wild to realise he\u2019s largely accomplished it. Antonoff has since helped Swift finesse epoch-defining albums like folklore and Midnights, and specifically many of her most popular and addictive singles, including \u201cCruel Summer\u201d and \u201cAnti-Hero.\u201d (He is absent from Swift\u2019s most recent album, The Life of a Showgirl, a fact his publicist preemptively requests that I not ask him about, despite the fact that I had no intention of doing so anyway.) If the scattered post-monoculture landscape of pop can be said to have a defining \u201csound,\u201d it\u2019s somewhere in the heavy drums and synthy sheen and folky reverb of Antonoff\u2019s collaborative masterpieces: Lorde\u2019s sleek, sincere Melodrama; Sabrina Carpenter\u2019s wry, winking Man\u2019s Best Friend; and, most notably\u2014at least for this writer\u2014Lana Del Rey\u2019s mythic Norman Fucking Rockwell!, which, in its graceful blend of zeitgeist and poeticism and awesome beauty, occupies a space for Millennials that, say, Joni Mitchell\u2019s Blue might for Boomers. \u201cSometimes you make things to escape to, and sometimes you make things that explain what it\u2019s like to be here now\u2014Lana has a very specific gift for that,\u201d he says. \u201cWe have something in common, a dedication to searching for it. Loving all the meandering paths you take to finding that thing.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\u201cThere\u2019s so many people out there yelling how the sausage is made that it\u2019s increasingly hard for people to imagine that it is just magic.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

jack antonoff<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And what is Antonoff\u2019s particular thing, the one that allows him to do such sorcery with this roster of (mostly) female icons? Listening to those Lorde and Lana and Taylor albums back-to-back, there are some unifying principles: a pop-ness that\u2019s always interspersed with something indie-er; a sincerity in the lyrics that, handled without care, could border on schmaltz; a genius for structuring choruses like cresting ocean waves, each one swooning sparklingly towards the sun, giving everything the warm, sing-along quality of an anthem. Collaborators like Maren Morris have said that he brings a good vibe to the studio, and, as a woman in the misogynistic world of music, that he\u2019s the rare man who never condescends\u2014who gives women space to feel vulnerable and raw and experimental. \u201cI think he reminds me of why I wanted to make things with other people in the first place,\u201d Hayley Williams, the Paramore lead and Antonoff\u2019s longtime friend and collaborator, tells me. \u201cHis frenetic studio energy is a comfort to me, and it shields me from my own creative seriousness. In fact, it\u2019s kind of hard to stop being idiots and just work. But then we reenter the vortex and come back out with another song.\u201d Whatever Antonoff\u2019s singular gift, despite my repeated attempts to get to the bottom of it, he\u2019s unable, or at least unwilling, to share the recipe. \u201cThere\u2019s so many people out there yelling how the sausage is made,\u201d he says, \u201cthat it\u2019s increasingly hard for people to imagine that it is just magic.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

Still, even inadvertently, I\u2019ll discover by the end of our conversation one aspect of that \u201cmagic.\u201d The new Bleachers album is laced with references to Qualley, and when I ask what married life has given him (a sense of security, perhaps?) Antonoff gently turns the question back on me, the way he might in a studio, luring a song out of someone else.\u00a0<\/p>\n

I tell him I\u2019m heartbroken, still lingering in the bittersweet afterglow of a relationship whose comfort I haven\u2019t yet learned to let go of. He says that he knows exactly how I feel and then puts into words, better than I ever could, the exact easement I\u2019m seeking in my own neurotic dating life. \u201cThe second I met my partner,\u201d he tells me, \u201ca cynical part of me died\u2014the very Jewish, analytical, endlessly-weighing-everything part.\u201d What replaced it, he reassures me, wasn\u2019t certainty so much as peace, the relief of no longer having to argue with himself about whether he\u2019ll end up where he needs to be. Then, as we say goodbye, the jitteriness of FaceTime and the 3,000 miles between us briefly fall away. He looks straight into the camera and offers a small, sincere note of solace: \u201cI hope you get through it all, okay?\u201d And as the FaceTime dies, those are the words that linger, less like advice than the quiet echo of a lovesick pop song, one that I\u2019d be happy to have gotten stuck in my head, on loop until it starts to feel like it was made just for me.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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\n\t\t\tSWEATER HERM\u00c8S, TOP CARTER YOUNG, JEANS, GLASSES AND SHOES JACK’S OWN\t\t<\/p>\n

in the lead image:<\/strong> sweater HERM\u00c8S; top CARTER YOUNG; jeans and glasses JACK\u2019S OWN<\/p>\n

groomer<\/strong> HIDE SUZUKI
set design<\/strong> CATHERINE PEARSON at JONES MGMT
photography assistant<\/strong> ZACH HELPER
styling assistant<\/strong> DAVIEL CASTA\u00d1EDA
production<\/strong> THE MORRISON GROUP
location<\/strong> SPLASHLIGHT STUDIOS<\/p>\n