Taylor, Lana, Lorde: How Jack Antonoff became a generation’s greatest pop producer

It’s taken a few decades, but Jack Antonoff is almost at the point where he doesn’t feel like an underdog any more.

Describing a musician and producer who recently won his third consecutive Grammy for producer of the year, non-classical as some kind of also-ran is a wild premise. Especially when you consider those trophies are on top of the three for album of the year he’s picked up as Taylor Swift’s go-to songwriting and producing partner since her 2016 pop crossover 1989. (Then add to those the list of other wins and nominations for his contributions to records by Lorde, St Vincent and Lana Del Rey that’s so long it would send you cross-eyed.)

But while Antonoff prepares to release his fourth album as Bleachers, the indie-rock project best known for its confessional, ’80s-inspired anthems, he’s coming around to seeing himself through a new lens.

Jack Antonoff with his Grammy for producer of the year – non classical.Credit: Getty

“It is important to sit back and remember, in the way I interact with the world, that I’m not really someone, any more, who can pile around being like, ‘You don’t get it. You don’t get it. You don’t get it.’ Because a lot of people are telling me they get it.

“I’ve been thinking a lot about recognising where I’m at,” he says, and while “you can’t adjust your soul”, it’d be false at this point to behave like a misunderstood shitkicker, even if it stems from a legacy truth. “We all have our levels of feeling othered and misunderstood that we bring all over the place.”

Bleachers, like Antonoff, was born in New Jersey. Much of his output and outlook can be boiled down to the fact that both he and his birthplace are often defined as much by what they are (clear-eyed, dyed-in-the-wool Springsteen territory, searching up and out, clamouring for some opaque more) as what they aren’t. Both his record label and the summer music festival he curates are called Shadow of the City – close to, but not quite there. On The Waiter, a track from Bleachers (March 8, Dirty Hit), Antonoff sings of “[everybody] always telling you what you’re not”.

It’s rooted in more than just nebbish self-deprecation. Before Swift co-signed his work, songs Antonoff wrote were often snatched away and offered up to more established, legitimate producers – a scenario he mentioned in one of his recent Grammy speeches.

“A lot of my DNA is very much built on all the years [of thinking] ‘I’m not defined by how many people come to my shows. I’m not defined by how many people buy my record. I’m not defined by how famous I am’,” he says, over Zoom, as he flits between rooms and couches and poses around Electric Lady Studios in New York City, fidgeting and readjusting every few seconds. “I don’t know how you reckon with that … when you start to realise that this outfit you’ve worn doesn’t really fit any more.”

Lana Del Rey, Taylor Swift and Jack Antonoff at the Grammy Awards in February.Credit: Getty

As his stature in pop music has grown, more and more critics, fans and naysayers have tried forcing Antonoff into specific and often ill-conceived outfits. At this point, as many words have been written about his work as have been used to proselytise about what larger, more nefarious ideas his success signals.

To some, his work for predominantly women artists is cause for interrogation. To others, he is unavoidable, and criticisms of him (as a producer, artist or person – it’s unclear) hint at some frustration with that ubiquity. The fact he produced not one but two of the records nominated for album of the year at last month’s Grammys might be seen as either evidence of his Midas touch, or more fuel for the fire.

Duplicated sounds or sentiments across songs he’s touched is another sticking point for doubters; that the sonic palette of Out of the Woods – that first record with Swift – could have been a Bleachers B-side in disguise seemed proof of some trademark Antonoff-ism. More recent records made with rapper Kevin Abstract, country legends The Chicks and Motown icon Diana Ross have turned the volume down on those accusations of sameness.

Listening to Sling, the latest, Antonoff-produced album by Clairo – a delicate, deeply felt collection of confessional torch songs – suggests less that Antonoff offers a replicable shortcut to pop mega-success, and more that he lays out a borderless map for them to explore in their own time.

Our interview reflects that unhurried nature inherent in Antonoff: he compares his gold-rimmed Gucci reading glasses to my own, follows an offhand reference into discussions about the state of music criticism (“Maybe this isn’t what you think I would say, but I think [critics are] more important than ever … I’ve noticed myself yearning more for voices that I believe in or trust … even if I’ve felt at odds or hurt by them at points in my career”), and reminisces about a specific time of his life in New York, a decade ago, when we briefly crossed paths. While I’m watching the clock, he’s asking for follow-ups and digging in deeper.

Talking about songwriting is, to paraphrase that oft-misattributed maxim, like dancing about architecture. But that openness and willingness to quietly follow a thought or idea until it deposits him somewhere creatively fruitful seems to be one of the secrets to Antonoff’s success, no matter which artist is in the room with him.

Margaret Qualley and Jack Antonoff at last year’s Critics Choice Awards.Credit: Getty

“Talking about how you get to a song is forever a fascinating thing,” he says, describing them in the same vein one might talk about lady beetles: living creatures, anomalies that find you just as easily as they disappear. “It’s just so f---ing random. And I like doing a kind of work that can’t be mastered because I think it forces you to be very hopeful. The act [of songwriting] is like going to church. I’m not a religious person, but when I see people going to church I think, ‘Well, those people haven’t given up.’ ”

The “feral rant” of feeling the pieces click together while making a song has a time limit on it, Antonoff says. “It’s like this language that some people speak in for a period of time,” or a short-term guest that packs up and leaves when the mood strikes. “It’s like artistic mortality, in a way. On one hand it’s terrifying, but the other hand it’s beautiful.”

For Antonoff, he began speaking this new dialect at age 13 or 14. He can barely remember, after each song he finished, quite how he did it – but he remembers the feeling of first becoming fluent in that language as a teenager.

Bleachers performs on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon in 2023.Credit: Getty

“At that point, my younger sister – who was born with brain cancer – was going in and out of remission, and mostly lived a normal life. But she died when I was 18. I really felt obsessed about capturing a lot of what I was going through. And then in my early 20s, I was obsessed about capturing the aftermath of it.”

While his production work clears a runway from which artists can take flight and follow their own course, with Bleachers, Antonoff’s efforts are worn on his chest, as if he’s unzipped his skin and is asking you to peer in, like a sidewalk hustler selling counterfeit Rolexes. The first three Bleachers albums track Antonoff, by then a man approaching – and then well into – his 30s, looking either back at this enduring loss or into the troubling, unknowable future.

“I still write a lot about that loss, how it’s affected my life, but [on Bleachers] I’m not blasting off about this future and past obsession. I just feel, even as I talk to you, I feel right now. This was a very still moment for me.”

Jack Antonoff and Taylor Swift hug as they are announced winners of the in 2021 Grammy Award for album of the year for Folklore.Credit: AP

The album carries all the Bleachers trademarks: the loving Springsteen pastiche; the band that features not one but two saxophones, and includes members whom Antonoff regularly recruits to play on records by Swift, Del Rey and St Vincent; and the urgent, overlapping lyrical phrases offered up at rapid pace, as if he’s worried his mic will be snatched away if he sits in one thought too long.

It’s a sensation he brings to life on the song Self Respect, where attempts to put his finger on a specific, psychically troubling time and place: “I think it was the … day that Kobe fell from the sky / or the day that Kendall Pepsi smiled / Or the day that I had held her last / These days of our lives … they’re rough and they’re fast and unfair”.

Pop culture, he tells me, is as relevant to his excavation of his emotion psyche as anything else, considering how embedded it is in “everything”.

“In the same thought I can be thinking about some distant figure who I don’t know, in this tragic accident, some stupid commercial that feels like speaks volumes about how debased parts of culture have become, and the death of my sister. All these things. I got a little tired of assuming that things had to be compartmentalised.”

Elsewhere on the record, he references a golden era of New York City nightlife, name-checking James Murphy’s DFA record label and the club night Misshapes. In another breath, he smirks at the perception of himself as a “pop music hoarder”. But it’s quickly onto the next.

Jack Antonoff performing in 2022.Credit: AP

“The truth is, your brain is [slingshotting between]: ‘Mortality. This great loss. I lost my sister at this age. I’m hungry. Why isn’t Starbucks very good and why do I still like going? What the f--- is going on with the presidential race? Do I feel sick? When will I die? What’s for dinner?’”

In the past, Antonoff darted between bands and projects just as actively, from the rock outfit Steel Train to the bombastic, platinum-selling and annoying-to-google fun. (lowercase f, full stop).

Seven years after he was quoted in The New York Times saying he didn’t want to still be playing fun.’s mega-hit We Are Young when he was 35, I ask Antonoff, who’ll turn 40 at the end of this month, what his relationship to ambition is now.

“I get really ambitious and defiant about what I want to do and how I want to do it. I don’t get overly ambitious or defiant about what happens with it because … sometimes, when everyone’s loving something, it feels good. And other times you’re like, ‘Why am I so understood right now?’ And then when something is a slow burn or not totally understood, you’re like, ‘Great. Yeah. I’ve always felt misunderstood. Welcome to the f-----g club.’ ”

Bleachers is out now.

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