Pop star whisperer Jack Antonoff on why Bruce Springsteen had to be on his new record

When he’s not producing hits for Taylor Swift and Lorde, US hit maker Jack Antonoff is trying to exorcise the demons of his past on his own records as Bleachers.

Jack Antonoff is the guy you want on your pop team.

He’s the American performance enhancer who has collected Grammys with Taylor Swift, hits with Lorde and critical acclaim for assisting the artistic vision of alternative music darlings including St Vincent and Lana Del Rey.

Antonoff is also that rare studio wizard who keeps some of his best work for his own records, hitting the top of the charts with fun. and their pop anthem We Are Young a decade ago.

And since 2014, on three records with Bleachers, a solo project with a touring band.

Bleachers is the solo project with band for Jack Antonoff. Picture: Tim Hunter

He kicked off the campaign for his latest record, titled Take The Sadness Out Of Saturday Night, with the single Chinatown, featuring fellow New Jersey native Bruce Springsteen, whose songs had taught him to dream of one day conquering Manhattan, that mythical music metropolis across the Hudson River.

Chinatown, a love song undoubtedly inspired by his model girlfriend Carlotta Kohl, is very much in the vein of Springsteen’s The River or Thunder Road.

“If I thought I’m going to sit down and write a song and Bruce will sing it with me, I wouldn’t get two notes in,” Antonoff says.

“But I’d written that love song and I played it to him and he was messing around on it, it was all fun and I remember hearing it back a couple days later and thinking, ‘Jesus Christ, against all odds, against all the cynicism in me, this works’.

“And then I was filled with this feeling, the one thing you look for, which is ‘I want to release it’. And you rarely say that, publicly, but when you do, you’ve really got something good.”

Taylor Swift, Jack Antonoff and Lorde hanging out at Coachella in 2016. Picture: Instagram

The third Bleachers record is packed with all of Antonoff’s musical loves, from stadium-sized anthems to jangly indie pop, and like almost every pop song these days, the glittering synths and testosterone-fuelled rock riffs of the ’80s.

It could be the soundtrack to a John Hughes movie had Antonoff recorded it in the era of The Breakfast Club and Pretty In Pink.

When asked which of the characters of the Hughes films he identifies with, Antonoff picks The Breakfast Club’s hooded introvert exile Allison.

Antonoff fears every song he writes could be his last. Picture: Tim Hunter

“In the John Hughes character universe, I’ve always felt really connected to Ally Sheedy, her character was clearly emotional and passionate, coming a little from left field on how to express that and then not really understood until the very end,” he says.

“And I always felt that way, misunderstood … until I wasn’t. It always takes a minute … but when it clicks, it clicks. I’ve felt that way in my love life, with my family and with my audience.”

Trying to understand himself by processing the events of his childhood which have shaped him is the prevailing theme of the Take The Sadness record.

It opens with the song 91, which paints the picture of the Gulf War screening on the family television while his mother dances around the loungeroom, and serves as a metaphor for the dysfunctions of his family.

Some of that flawed familial dynamic stems from the death of his younger sister Sarah of brain cancer when she was 13 and he was 18.

The song also features a credit for acclaimed novelist Zadie Smith, courtesy of bumping into her one day near his home and would help him frame the lyrical narrative.

“If you see a co-write on a Bleachers song, they’ve usually helped me with music or some melody stuff but the lyrics usually come out of me from a pretty isolated place so I rarely write lyrics with other people,” he says.

“91 was a weird song; I knew I had to tell the story of my childhood, my mother, my ex (Girls creator Lena Dunham), the beginnings of my ‘adult life’ and then my future – I wanted a micro version of the whole album in this intro piece but I was having a real hard time getting it.

“Like I know Zadie is a genius but I thought to work with an artist who isn’t in my exact world might be freeing and it was; in an afternoon she helped me put it together in a way where the lyrics were totally right.”

Novelist Zadie Smith co-wrote a Bleachers track. Picture: Dominique Nabokov/Supplied.

As Antonoff ushers the Bleachers record into the world, he’s already chasing the next song, for him, for Swift, for Lorde, for whoever it should belong to.

He says he feels particularly creative right now but fears the day he writes his last song.

“Every song you write, you kind of forget how you did it, and you’re flooded with the feeling that it could be the last song,” he says. “That’s not being pessimistic … it happens to most artists … one day you will write your last great song and you’ll never know that it is.”

Take The Sadness Out Of Saturday Night by Bleachers is out on Friday.

Originally published as Pop star whisperer Jack Antonoff on why Bruce Springsteen had to be on his new record