"I think collaboration boils down to the core belief that something can work," Jack Antonoff recently told GRAMMY.com. "When I make an album with someone, I'm filled with faith that much more in my life or the universe can work, which is definitely a reason why I do this."
The 11-time GRAMMY-winning singer, songwriter and producer has worked with many of the biggest modern pop stars — from Taylor Swift, Lana Del Rey and Lorde, to St. Vincent and Sabrina Carpenter — but his core focus has never changed. Antonoff simply wants to make music he loves with people he loves, and perform it live.
Antonoff not only holds many peoples' dream job of being Swift's go-to collaborator, but he's been having a banner year filled with notable creative projects and big wins. At the 2024 GRAMMYs, he won Producer of the Year, Non-Classical for the third year in a row. He also earned two more GRAMMYs that night, sharing Best Pop Vocal Album and Album Of The Year with Swift for his extensive production work, co-writing and instrumentation on Midnights. In March, he released his fourth album as Bleachers and launched a lengthy world tour with the band, which will wrap with their biggest-ever (sold-out) gig at Madison Square Garden on Oct. 4.
His 2024 production credits include Swift's The Tortured Poets Department, four of breakout star Carpenter's Short n' Sweet tracks including No. 1 hit "Please Please Please," and even one of Kendrick Lamar's Drake diss tracks, "6:16 in LA." He also curated and produced the soundtrack for Apple TV's WWII couture period drama "The New Look," featuring modern renditions of classics by Lana Del Rey, Florence Welch, Nick Cave and others. He was also tapped by Tony-winning director Sam Gold to create the soundtrack for a modern reimagining of "Romeo and Juliet," debuting on Broadway later this month.
Before Antonoff became one of the most in-demand producers in pop, he spent his time in bands. As a high school senior in 2002, he formed indie rock outfit Steel Train with several classmates, who'd have a decade-long run playing big festivals including Bonnaroo, SXSW, Warped Tour and Lollapalooza. Afterwards, he played guitar in the power pop trio fun. with whom he earned his first six GRAMMY nods and won his first two in 2013, for Best New Artist and Song of the Year for their anthemic hit "We Are Young" featuring Janelle Monáe.
2013 was a pivotal year for the "Tiny Moves" artist, as it also marked his first time he worked with Swift, who then enlisted him to support her transition away from country music on Album Of The Year winner 1989. Antonoff has said that she was the first artist to trust him as a producer, and that their work together, understandably, opened many other doors for him.
GRAMMY.com recently caught up with the prolific producer and artist for a dive deep into his collaborative magic, the latest Bleachers album, and why he thinks pop is whatever you want it to be.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
There's a lot to talk about just from this year, it's pretty crazy.
When the Bleachers album came out and I was starting to do interviews, I had this really weird experience. Interviews recap things that have happened, so [they make me] realize how little I think about the past. I don't know if that's a good or bad thing.
I think it's a symptom of how much my life is future-focused — which is something I really like and fear about my life at the same time. The studio is such a forward place. You're thinking about the next thing, how to find this next feeling in literal and esoteric ways. [Being on] the road is one of the most literally forward places — every day you're somewhere new and you're thinking about the next day and the tour.
I feel like I'm trapped in the future. It's nice and I've designed it that way. But sometimes I get a little scattered or emotional when I talk about things that have happened because I'm thinking about them for the first time. I don't have canned answers.
You're often called a super-producer, which is valid; you've worked with so many big artists and on so much music that everyone hears. But what are you desiring as an artist and a producer lately?
The grand desire that I have has never changed, because it's so much bigger than any amount of success. That desire is to write and produce things and play live. That's a big part of why I love this work so much is because nothing can really help you with that besides your soul. You could be in the most expensive studio in the world with all the best engineers, but there's no proof that [that setting] equals a better song than just sitting in your room.
That fleeting feeling of knowing that it comes and it goes, and you just have to be there to grab it, is such a deep connected-to-the-cosmos feeling.
When you're working on music, at what point do you get excited about a song or know that it's going in the right direction?
When it does happen is when I start to push it forward in a real way. There's an amazing amount of f—king around in search of that feeling, and you never know where you're going to get it. It's sometimes just moving around instruments or lyrics or thoughts with no direction until one thing feels exciting, and then you follow that thing.
It's a really fun process, and it can be anxiety-producing. It's a different kind of fun when you do it with someone else, because you're on this weird adventure together. When you're in a room with other people and everyone has that feeling off of one idea or one sound, it's a very connecting feeling.
When you're working on your own music, particularly with Bleachers, it's mostly just you in the studio, right?
Yes. But the Bleachers process is oddly similar [to my producing], just sort of flipped. I work with producers on Bleachers because I need it sometimes. I've always had these two sides of writing my music and having my own band and needing help with that in various ways. I've learned so much on either side.
Being on the road with Bleachers, remarkably, keeps me connected to everything that matters the most when I'm making records with other artists because I can very easily visualize real fans, the people who live and die by this music. To be acquainted with them every night is a very powerful experience. It always just reminds me who I'm in conversation with, because I think it's easier than ever to get lost.
You've had a busy summer on the road with the Bleachers. How has it felt performing this album live?
It's really my favorite ever. It's the first album I've made with Bleachers that feels like a response to this thing that happens at the shows. Somewhere during the Take the Sadness Out of Saturday Night [tour in 2021], the shows got really crazy and loose and kind of off the wall. There was something about it where I was kinda like, Okay, you want to play chicken? [Laughs.] I went into the studio and I tried to one up them. I never felt that before. This time I was talking right at [my fans], which is a luxury of being known by them.**
The first song we ever released was "I Wanna Get Better," which is almost a Wikipedia page of my life, it rattles through everything I'm going to be talking about [forever]. It feels like now I can wax on about something, and they know what I'm talking about.
Is that why you decided to self-title this album?
The actual decision to self-title is a gut feeling. But the real reason is it felt like an earned moment, like we had arrived somewhere where everything had completely formed.
Every reference point [while] making this album became about our own history and our own mythology. In the past, I would have said, Make it like a Mick Fleetwood or Ringo kind of feel. Now the reference point would be Play it like you do at this point in the set when the wheels have blown out for you. You tour and spend enough time with people where it becomes almost like conversations with your best friends, the reference points become your own shared history.
What called you back into the studio to make your own music?
I never know. My life is a lot less structured than people would think. The way I make Bleachers records — and even in everything I make with other people — there's a real looseness to it because I like to be [in the studio] when I feel incredibly excited to be there. I schedule things, just not terribly far out.
For example, Lana and I or Taylor and I have never once been like, "Let's book out a month here." It's sort of like, "What are you doing today? I got this idea, come over." And then if that's feeling good, it's like, "What are you doing tomorrow? Let's keep this going." It's very [much] catching it when it's happening. Some days I'm in the studio for an hour, some days for 16 hours; it's all based on how I feel.
Are you always working on music or ideas — is there always something that's coming out of you?
Lately — the past couple years — I've been feeling the need to create a lot. I feel connected to something, and I feel a lot of joy and that good buzzy anxiety of having these ideas and wanting to hear them, which reminds me of my earliest memories of writing and producing music. When you hear the thing in reality — you can press play on a thing that was a thought — it's the most incredible experience.
"Alma Mater" is such a poetic way to refer to an ex. How did that track come together? Did you have Lana del Rey in mind for it?
No, we were just f—ing around. I think a lot about where you put people [when listening to a song]. On that song, I wanted to put you in a room with me and her, so I left a lot of the elements of us being in the room writing it, messing around. We kept singing back and forth like, "She's my alma mater, f— Balenciaga." [Chuckles.] The lyrics were just making us smile.
As it started to come together, this idea of referring to an old relationship as an alma mater, that excited me and made me want to write that story. That's kind of what an old relationship is: a school that you go to where there's a whole set of friends, and a whole culture, and when it's over, poof, it's gone.
Obviously, you worked with Sabrina Carpenter on some of her new music…
How brilliant is she?
Read more: How Sabrina Carpenter Became A Pop Queen: Tracing Her Journey To 'Short N' Sweet'
She's around the same age Taylor Swift was when you started working with her. Do you see any parallels with Sabrina where Taylor was at then? Sabrina has said it was a really big deal to get to work with you. What was it like working with her?
It was a big deal for me to get to work with her. The great parallel is brilliant writing and being able to write about one's life in the most vulnerable and powerful way. It sounds so simple, but it's the rarest thing to be able to write about your life and to be able to make it so specific and also so poetic. You know it as soon as you hear it.
Can you talk a little bit about the sonic landscape on "Please Please Please"?
We were thinking a lot about joy and the kind of fantastical nature of ABBA, Dolly [Parton] and ELO that I felt would fit her voice and lyrics so well. She [does] this quick vacillation between really cheeky then really emotional, back to really sarcastic, and then she smacks you over the head with something so serious and real that you're stunned. It's my favorite kind of music.
One of the reasons it's so thrilling to me that so many people have responded to it is because it doesn't sound like anything that's going on at all, it almost sounds like the opposite of everything going on. Those are my favorite moments; when something out of left field grabs everyone's attention.
Those bubbly sounds right when "Please Please Please" comes in are not in time. You have a LinnDrum ['80s drum machine] and a live drum playing this tight beat and these country-picking acoustic guitars. Then you have these wobbling synths that, in my head, I'm playing the same way someone would play it when it was first invented because you're just playing along to the track, you're not locking it to any MIDI or anything. I was thinking a lot about that time period — I think about [it] all the time — when I was with Sabrina.
How has your creative partnership with Taylor Swift and your trust in each other evolved in the decade-plus you've been working together? And what has been the coolest thing for you to see in your ongoing work?
As far as evolution, we just have our own language. I saw her play last night [at Wembley Stadium in London], and actually played some songs there too. Most of the time when we work it's just her and I in a room, usually my apartment or Electric Lady [Studios]. To see [the songs] in literally the biggest spaces and retain all of [their] importance and soul and feeling like it's that for every single person in that crowd, it's like the absolute coolest.
She's the absolute greatest of all time, with a never-ending hunger to push forward.
You and Taylor both have such an affinity for witty, nerdy, literary references, and poetic phrasing. How do you pull that out in a way that makes sense in a pop song structure?
I think that tendency is just inherent in both of us. But I think the concept of pop structure is whatever the hell we want it to be. The worst of pop music is ambulance-chasing. The real inspiration is to be your own loud light-up machine shooting down the street. The things I've loved about pop music have just invigorated me to believe that pop music is whatever the hell the person making it says it is, and then everyone else gets to argue if it is or isn't.
I don't sit around and think about genre, placement, or who they're going to satisfy. All those thoughts are not just the death of making things. It's pretty easy for me to only consider that gut feeling. I'm just fascinated by how people hear things. There's no genre of music that I think is better or worse than any other one.
What can you tell us about the upcoming Romeo + Juliet Broadway show you soundtracked? Was it a different creative exercise for you to score such a well-known text; how so?
It was a very different process which is exactly why I wanted to do it. Credit to [director] Sam Gold who really let me fly out to left field and back. I'm about 50 percent through it and I'm going to finish it when I'm home from this tour. It's been something that has opened my world in many ways, to a whole new side of scoring and writing for a musical.
You have a lot of GRAMMYs, 11 of them —
People always ask me if it gets normal. No, it doesn't get normal! It's crazy.
One, where do you keep them?
That's one thing I've never really figured out, they kind of move around. Everything in my life moves around a lot, so I don't have a satisfying answer for that one.
And going back to 2013 when you won your first GRAMMYs with fun., how did you feel that day?
F—ing shocked. As I was saying, I don't really sit around thinking about the past because it's the opposite of the job. What's so shocking about those moments is you're surrounded by family and the people you love and work with, and it's this huge moment to think about how you got to that point.
My biggest takeaway of these experiences that force you to stop and think about the road behind is just how heavy they are. All of us are held up by really special people, whether it's partners or parents or siblings, fans, engineers, managers, loved ones. If you have amazing people around you, it's the best feeling in the world. That's my favorite part about any award, it feels like it's for everyone that got you there.