Jack Antonoff is tired of being decoded. Speaking to The Guardian midway through a Bleachers tour, the musician and producer said people seem determined to figure him out, even though, as he sees it, he keeps explaining himself.
He has, after all, spent 12 years putting his life into Bleachers songs. The band's new album, Everyone for Ten Minutes, works almost as an origin story, revisiting his teenage years touring rough punk clubs in his parents' minivan with an emo band called Outline, a stretch he described with a laugh as one he was amazed to have survived.
Grief as the engine
Before Bleachers, Antonoff played guitar in Fun, whose 2011 single We Are Young sold 10 million copies. He told The Guardian he hated that period because the words were not his and he was not the one leading. He pushed his label to release I Wanna Get Better as Bleachers' first single, a song about the grief that followed his younger sister's death from a brain tumor at 13.
That loss still shapes how he works. Antonoff said his drive may be tied up with survivor's guilt, a fear of wasting time when someone he loved never got enough of it. He drew a line between seizing the moment out of joy and doing it out of anxiety, and said the second is not the best way to live. His parents agreed to those teenage tours, he said, because his sister's illness had made everyday worries seem trivial.
The producer question
Antonoff met Taylor Swift around the time he started Bleachers, and he has since worked on 11 of her albums, along with records by Sabrina Carpenter, Lorde, Lana Del Rey, St Vincent, Kendrick Lamar and Gracie Abrams. He insists neither side of his career outranks the other, and said he belongs to a very small group of people who genuinely do both.
He pushed back on the idea that his production work is shadowy. "One of the great misconceptions of how it works in my world is that I write songs and hand them to, like, a pop star," he said, adding that he has never done that, though he declined to explain how the process does work. He also dismissed online negativity as meaningless and said artists have spent too long reading into it.
Bruce Springsteen, he said, is a friend, collaborator and mentor as well as an influence, and Antonoff said he ended up on Kendrick Lamar's GNX after dropping by the studio to visit a friend and staying for three years. He is also feuding publicly with Live Nation over ticket prices, and said he is proud that Bleachers keeps its own prices as low as possible.
Reporting sources: Culture | The Guardian, “‘I’d rather live through something publicly than escape it privately’: Jack Antonoff on survivor’s guilt and still singing love songs after his breakup”.