Tremendous-producer Jack Antonoff: ‘Don’t make something you wouldn’t die for’

I’ve been ready for 20 minutes when Jack Antonoff darts in, flustered, holding a bottle of glowing water and a crumpled tote bag, from which he pulls out nasal spray and rapidly spritzes it into every nostril.

“I’m actually sorry, I used to be engaged on one thing and it was operating late and I couldn’t get it completed in time,” the music super-producer says, sounding like he means it. He brushes off my assurances that it’s OK: “Lateness is annoying,” he pronounces.  

He’s carrying a white T-shirt that has holes in it — not within the distressed vogue means, however within the really-old-shirt means — with a smattering of brown stains on the sleeve. Signature thick black wire-rimmed glasses body his face. 

It’s a sunny, excellent September afternoon in New York, and we’re on the Marlton Resort on West eighth Avenue, the place Jack Kerouac used to write down. We’re having a late lunch earlier than Antonoff heads to the studio, a block away.

“The studio” on this case is Electrical Girl, a legendary spot in Greenwich Village the place Jimi Hendrix, Carly Simon, Stevie Marvel and lots of extra music legends have recorded. Lately, since Antonoff arrange store there, it has develop into a spot the place paparazzi and teenage ladies linger outdoors. 

Even in case you’ve by no means heard of Jack Antonoff, you’ve most likely heard Jack Antonoff. By his work with stars comparable to Taylor Swift, Lana Del Rey, Sabrina Carpenter, Lorde and lots of others, he has formed the sound of pop music over the previous decade. He’s received the Grammy award for “producer of the yr” 3 times in a row — solely the second individual to perform this, after the Nineteen Nineties R&B producer Babyface. 

I really feel allergic to ‘the second’ . . . If some folks outline what I do as ‘the second’, cool, that’s as much as them

Antonoff occupies a wierd place within the movie star matrix. He’s each a family identify for thousands and thousands of individuals, a fixture of web fan tradition — and somebody who can largely stroll the streets unnoticed. Critics have spent years scrutinising the omnipresent Jack Antonoff sound that has washed over mainstream music, labelling it “tasteful pop” for its injection of indie rock influences into Prime 40 hits.

Antonoff cringes at such discourse. He says his data are “a really long-term meditation on the place I grew up and the way I really feel . . . I received’t work on something I don’t love. I really feel, like, allergic to ‘the second’ if something. If what I do goes to be one thing that some folks outline as ‘the second’, cool, that’s as much as them. However I don’t care what’s happening . . . I’m simply in my very own world.”

If Antonoff, Swift and different intermittent collaborators have fashioned an unofficial famous person songwriting troupe, Electrical Girl is their clubhouse. When Swift joins Antonoff on West eighth Avenue, police tape and crowd management boundaries are erected to include the followers who look forward to hours to catch a glimpse of her three-second strut from the door to a automobile. 

Right this moment, although, it’s quiet on the Marlton. We’re seated past a cavernous empty eating room, in an excellent emptier solarium with creamy brick partitions and greenery, mimicking Italian summer season. We’re the one folks again right here, other than a man within the nook engaged on his laptop computer, AirPods in his ears.

In individual, Antonoff is boyish, though he turned 40 this yr, his curly hair speckled gray. It’s simple to know why Swift describes him as “my precocious younger son” (he’s, in truth, a number of years older than her). 

The problem of getting Lunch with the FT with Antonoff is that he can chat about absolutely anything: the thrill and risks of driving in New York (“town is one huge miracle”), chiropractors (he’s in favour), out of doors eating huts (“how am I not getting mowed down?”), steak (“my Instagram is pop stars and steak”). We’ve been gabbing for a number of minutes when Antonoff flags down a server. I rapidly scan the menu and panic-order a grilled cheese sandwich to go along with my iced black tea. He asks for a black espresso, the roasted eggplant sandwich with out aioli, and a sizzling water with lemon. 

Antonoff tells me he’s at all times been a bit obsessive. As a child in suburban New Jersey, he went via “multi-year obsessions”: first with baseball, then baseball playing cards, then Star Wars collectible figurines (“not the flicks, it wasn’t about that”), then skateboarding. Aged 12, he discovered the one which caught: music. 

His adolescence was outlined by tragedy. His youthful sister was born with mind most cancers and her illness “was a giant character within the family”. She died at age 13, when Antonoff was graduating from highschool. College had at all times been onerous for him. He says he has a studying incapacity, perhaps dyslexia, however is undiagnosed. Flooded with grief, he took off along with his band whereas the remainder of his classmates went off to college.  

“I used to be by no means gonna go the trail of what was perhaps wished for me, and I simply didn’t give a flying fuck at that time. As a result of I used to be so upset, it felt like, who offers a shit?”, he remembers. “I at all times wished to get out. I wished to go to New York Metropolis. I wished to go on tour.” 

He carried on as a musician and was “remarkably unsuccessful, from a monetary viewpoint” till “26 or 27”. He made peace with being “most likely a loser in my neighborhood”, and had lots of enjoyable taking part in reveals, making music first with an obscure indie band named Metal Prepare, after which the band Enjoyable, which he joined in 2008. Their massively profitable track “We Are Younger” propelled Antonoff into the pop world. 

Our meals arrives. Antonoff wordlessly removes among the bread from his sandwich and continues answering my questions intensely between bites. My grilled cheese is simply OK, though the braised leeks supply a little bit pleasure. 

We discuss among the albums he’s labored on in recent times. There’s Lana Del Rey’s Norman Fucking Rockwell, a critically adored 2019 masterpiece that kicked off certainly one of Antonoff’s most profitable inventive relationships. As he tells it: the 2 met, messaged one another, met for lunch at EJ’s diner on the Higher East Facet, and headed straight to Antonoff’s Brooklyn condo the place he has a house studio. That very same day, the pair wrote two songs collectively, begin to end: “Love Track” and “Hope Is a Harmful Factor”. 

“You possibly can’t plan that sort of factor. I simply bought it, and I bought her,” he says as he scarfs down his sandwich. Afterwards, he visited Los Angeles, the place they made “Venice Bitch” and “Mariners Condominium Advanced”, and the remainder of the album — a stripped-back, poetic, soft-rock document — got here collectively. “That’s once I actually felt: oh wow, I actually suppose we might do something.”

Antonoff talks about songwriting as one thing that occurs completely externally from himself, like a ghost that enters and exits his physique with out warning. “It’s deeply out of my management. I can’t actually go write a track as we speak,” he says. “It must come to me.” 

Songwriting, he provides, is “deeply irritating . . . It’s not like a film the place . . . you shoot heroin, mild a candle, and write and document the proper track.” 

However he is aware of immediately, indisputably, when he has a success: “I’ve a really clear feeling in my physique of whether or not one thing is nice or not. There’s not lots of variable. It’s not like, I don’t know, it’s fairly good.” Each time he will get to work, he worries about whether or not the magic continues to be going to be there. “Sooner or later folks write their final track, and it’s often not earlier than they die, you understand? It appears to go away folks,” he says.

Occasionally, a producer can come to outline the sound of a complete interval, like Quincy Jones within the Nineteen Eighties or Max Martin’s Nineteen Nineties Euro-infused pop. Their sound permeates the world we reside in — you’ll hear it on the radio, in a taxi, on the airport. 

The Antonoff sound is surprisingly tough to nail down. An essay in literary journal The Drift likened Antonoff’s contact to “vapour”, arguing that he hasn’t taken over pop “a lot as subtle throughout it, forsaking a faintly perceptible vapour of understated good style”. 

The stereotypical Antonoff track, at the least along with his personal band, Bleachers, options elements that embody cinematic synths, huge choruses and nostalgic references. However as a producer, he’s labored with an eclectic vary of artists from Diana Ross and Carly Rae Jepsen to The Chicks (previously The Dixie Chicks) and Kendrick Lamar. “I feel the best way that my sound is digested is a choose-your-own-ending for writers. When you really hearken to my data, there’s many issues which can be like me, however they’re extremely distinctive,” he says. 

He usually turns down artists who need to work with him, however received’t specify names (“It makes it sound hatery”). He’s now engaged on the music for Romeo + Juliet, a Broadway present that’s about to debut. Earlier this yr Bleachers launched a self-titled album, and this month unveiled a re-recording of their 2014 album Unusual Need. He’s within the studio every day, presumably engaged on albums for A-list collaborators that he’s not going to inform me about proper now.

It’s late afternoon, and the server appears to have forgotten that we’re right here. Somebody brings a candle out to sign the start of the dinner shift. Antonoff has cleaned his plate, solely tiny shards of fries left. I’ve totally failed at having a lavish lunch. Antonoff asks if I odor one thing burning, eyes darting across the room. I do. “Good,” he says, “so long as I’m not having a stroke or one thing.” 

He’s now the man sought out by the celebs, however Antonoff says he was by no means taken critically as a producer till Taylor Swift “kicked open the door for me”. This was in 2013, when she introduced him in to provide a handful of songs on the blockbuster album 1989. “She was the one who stated, ‘No, he’s a producer.’ It takes that individual.” He’s labored on all of her albums since. 

He’s rigorously obscure about Swift. He brings her up often, however has mastered the artwork of telling tales with out actually revealing something. The 2 met and “simply began making issues”.  

The worth of music within the streaming period is actually severe, and I’m uninterested in the artist at all times being the one to get fucked first

“We get collectively and simply discover that magic house. It’s type of loopy that we’ve been in a position to entry it so long as we now have,” he says. “It’s not regular, you understand?” I ask how the track “August”, a fan favorite from the album Folklore, happened and am met with a medical response: “I made a monitor, despatched it to her, and he or she sang over it on a voice notice.” 

The place, I ask him, is pop music going? “I don’t suppose we’re going someplace as a lot as we’ve arrived someplace, which often implies that there’s a brand new factor coming,” he says.

“However we’ve arrived fairly onerous on the nice pushback to being instructed what to hearken to. We’ve simply landed on this nice clean spot the place authenticity appears to be successful out every little thing. When you take a look at who’s slicing via proper now? It’s actually good. Chappell [Roan], Sabrina [Carpenter], Charli [XCX] . . . the factor I like about these three folks [is] they’re all tales of people that have been fucking at it. Actual artists . . . It’s a tradition that’s been marketed to so fucking closely that you could’t actually market to folks any extra,” he says, talking intensely now. 

“As onerous as it may be to make, the system is definitely quite simple, which is: don’t make something that you simply wouldn’t die for. Like, die on the hill of that work,” he says. “It sounds pandering, like bullshit, however my life could be very, little or no planning forward.” 

We solely have a couple of minutes left, and I can now not keep away from it: it’s time to broach the backlash to the Nice Antonoff-Swift Period. 

I convey up a withering New York Occasions evaluation of Swift’s newest album, which calls the Swift-Antonoff musical universe “stale”. He tenses a bit, immediately figuring out what I’m speaking about, then smiles sheepishly earlier than responding: “Nah, I don’t give a shit . . . My shit ages properly, it ages remarkably properly.” 

After a pause, he provides: “It’s humorous as a result of . . . I don’t suppose I’ve ever actually had something be perceived the best way I really feel.” I ask him to attempt to distil what making an album actually appears like in his mind. 

“You’re listening to sounds, and your phrases and feelings are related to emotions, and then you definately faucet into devices, and also you’ve charted a complete world for your self, proper? Cool. That’s that course of. After which it’s virtually like we’re previous pen friends, the viewers and the artist, and we solely discuss each two years.”  

All through lunch I’ve found that Antonoff has opinions concerning the music business, and lots of them are unfavorable. He repeatedly compares the music enterprise to the US Republican social gathering (“You take a look at it and also you’re like, it could’t be this insane. However it’s”). 

He calls the state of reside music “so darkish . . . I imply, has there ever been a extra apparent monopoly?” he asks, laughing. “I do know this from the within, that while you put a present on sale, you must work so onerous to say, like, no, no, no no, clearly no dynamic pricing, clearly no bizarre gold factor, simply promote the motherfucking ticket for what we are saying is honest. It’s rip-off after rip-off after rip-off after rip-off.”

What does he consider track administration investor Hipgnosis? Antonoff was one of many fortunate — or maybe shrewd — musicians who bought their catalogue to Merck Mercuriadis again in 2019, when the controversial mogul was providing huge piles of money for songbooks. Hipgnosis would later flip right into a slow-motion automobile crash of shareholder disputes and “strategic evaluations”. 

“I used to be experimenting,” Antonoff says, clarifying that he bought “a chunk of” his catalogue. 

“I like Merck and Hipgnosis,” he provides. “There’s not an individual I do know whose thoughts on the worth of a track wasn’t modified by him.

“For this reason I feel that lots of feathers have been ruffled [by Merck] . . . The worth of music within the streaming period is actually severe, and I’m actually uninterested in the artist at all times being the one to get fucked first.” 

Our time is up and Antonoff leaps up, checks whether or not it’s “unlawful” for me to pay for lunch, and bids me goodbye with a “good to fulfill you”. 

I pay the invoice and head out to the road. Antonoff has already disappeared inside Electrical Girl, however a handful of individuals are standing out entrance. A number of ladies carrying leather-based bomber jackets linger, guffawing, after which take a photograph of the studio door. 

Anna Nicolaou is the FT’s US media editor

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