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These days, Jack Antonoff might be better known for being the go-to producer for a galaxy of iconic superstars, but as he returns to Bleachers for their self-titled fourth album, he’s embracing the “really big band that still feels like a secret” .
Words: Ali Shutler.
“I spend all my time doing these different things, but I don’t spend any time asking why I do them,” says Jack Antonoff. In two weeks’ time, he’ll win Producer Of The Year for a record-breaking third time at the 2024 Grammys, thanks to his work with Lana Del Rey and Taylor Swift. Right now, though, he’s sitting in a Parisian hotel during Fashion Week to talk about Bleachers’ rousing self-titled fourth album. “I always mean to figure it out, but I never do,” he says. “I just do what compels me, I guess.”
The trilogy of Bleachers albums that came before it – 2014’s ‘Strange Desire’, 2017’s ‘Gone Now’ and 2021’s ‘Take The Sadness Out Of Saturday Night’ – saw Jack “mourning the past and yelling at the future” as he tried to work through the death of his younger sister Sarah, who died when he was 18. “They were all about grief and loss through the lens of time and how that changes.” This new record is very much about the present, though.
Again, he’s not entirely sure what sparked the shift in perspective. Perhaps it was getting married to actor Margaret Qualley last year or the growing bond between the other members of Bleachers, but he didn’t run away from those feelings of being right here. “I was just happy to be writing,” he admits. “I don’t write unless I’m frantically called to it because it seems like an unfair thing to do to yourself otherwise,” says Jack, who believes songs are only worth pursuing if they’re about things you don’t know.
‘Bleachers’ was written about “distant voices within yourself, weird feelings, and trying to figure it all out. I just feel a huge sense of relief that this album actually happened,” he continues. “Being compelled to write is such a rare and powerful feeling.”
“It’s pretty hard for albums not to be cathartic,” he adds. “They’re all mountains. You get through them, or you get over them.”
Still, ‘Bleachers’ feels very different to other albums the band have released, says Jack. “It’s not a big pivot left or right. It’s just this huge sense of drilling deeper.” That idea of going further and further is “what I’ve been really interested in with all my work lately,” he adds, ordering a Diet Coke to go alongside the sparkling water and fruit plate. “Let’s rack this fucking bill up,” he grins.
“Right now, it seems like people are defining themselves by what they hate, and that’s really exhausting”
Jack Antonoff
Across the album, there are huge, life-affirming choruses driven by sheer terror and quiet moments of defiant self-confidence. It’s sincere, hilarious and warm. The thunderous ‘Self Respect’ was inspired by a studio session with Florence And The Machine, who came up with the line “I’m so tired of having self-respect”. It’s very rare that a studio session with someone else will turn into a Bleachers song, but it sparked something within Jack, who spun it out to explore the very human desire everyone has to be liked. “Everyone is just trying to prove that they’re alive and they matter, and they’re here, myself included,” says Jack. “It’s a beautiful concept in theory, but right now, it seems like people are defining themselves by what they hate, and that’s really exhausting. Everyone is so eager to eat one another alive.”
Elsewhere, ‘Ordinary Heaven’ features an inspirational spoken word section from skateboarder Rodney Mullen about carrying on “until the wheels fall off” before the dreamy track explores the comforting bliss of falling in love. That romance continues across the gorgeous ‘Tiny Moves’ while ‘Alma Mater’ is a fuzzy celebration of friendship and the safety that it offers. It’s playfully weird and, like the band who created it, comfortable in its own skin.
The drifting closing track ‘The Waiter’ deliberately offers a dot dot dot to the whole story. “It’s cocooning this idea of having seen too much, which is just how I feel sometimes,” says Jack, with the track offering bruised optimism.
That bloodied hope can be felt across ‘Bleachers’. Previous records have desperately searched for optimism, but this one knows it there. “It feels like the sun is pouring in through the window to me,” says Jack. “This record feels like a brand new thing.”
“That hope was inherent because I was writing so many love songs,” he continues with a bulk of ‘Bleachers’ written after he met Margaret. There’s still a darkness to the record, though. “That edge is always there. In fact, it gets more intense when you have something to lose,” he offers.
“Falling in love also does something funny to people. Most of us create this mythological, emotional armour about why we’re so bad at relationships,” he offers, with people blaming everything from their parents and their upbringing to the amount they work. “It’s like that great Wolf Alice lyric [from ‘Don’t Delete The Kisses’], ‘Love, maybe it’s not meant for me’, which I think is something everyone can relate to,” he explains. When you realise you just haven’t found the person you were meant to be with yet, “you’re left with the realisation that maybe you’re not this incredibly broken thing. I found it really interesting to explore all the ways I beat the shit out of myself beforehand,” says Jack.
“I’ve always played with a bit of a last night on Earth mentality”
Jack Antonoff
In the studio, Bleachers were also able to reference their own back catalogue or moments that happen on stage, instead of channelling The Beatles, Bruce Springsteen or synth-punk duo Suicide to spark a new idea. It adds to that sense of newness and is why the record is self-titled instead of using the working title ‘Tribute Living’. “For your first album, those references help you discover who you are, but bands just get better the longer they’re together, so long as you don’t hate each other,” offers Jack with a grin. “I’ve never been in a band for a fourth album before.”
The lineup for Bleachers has mostly been the same since they released their first album a decade ago. That same group of people has also played on multiple albums from Taylor Swift, Lana Del Rey and St Vincent. “A lot of people think Bleachers is just me, but really, we’re a band who can play anyone under the table,” he says. “Realising we’d created enough of our own mythology meant we could really plant our flag in the ground. This feels like the most crystalised version of Bleachers,” said Jack.
The last Steel Train record was also a self-titled one, but fans don’t need to be worried about the end of Bleachers. “I hope that isn’t the curse,” he says. “It was the best Steel Train record as well, but Bleachers is just deepening and deepening. There’s absolutely more to come.”
Because of his high-profile production work, “Bleachers has been able to become a really big band that still feels like a secret,” says Jack. “It’s a rare, special thing,” but he has no fear about the best Bleachers album potentially letting the cat out of the bag.
“There is this insane aspiration in the music we make, and I’m no way shy about that. It’s not out of greed, though; it’s just because the bigger the shows get, the more it makes sense,” says Jack. “It feels like this inside joke. The more people that are in on it, the more powerful that is.”
He’s stopped trying to predict what certain songs will mean to people. “The ones I think are real motherfuckers and will tear people apart are usually the ones that become party songs, while the fun ones end up depressing people.” It creates this “grand mystery” for Jack. Inside of trying to pick it apart, though, “I feel like it’s become my purpose to create gathering places for people. Touring is a lot like what I imagine religious people get out of church.”
Thanks to the vulnerable, heartfelt lyrics and the bombastic rock’n’roll, the audience has also “always been really protective of Bleachers,” says Jack. No matter how big the band gets, “I don’t think that will ever go away,” he offers, refusing to use the word fan. “I’ve always been right there with them.”
Jack started writing for Bleachers while on the road with pop trio fun., who were enjoying the success of 2011’s global hit ‘We Are Young’. “Everything was good, and I was busy, but I kept having these strange desires to write music that took me down this grimy path and away from the flowers and light. It was the most inopportune time as well, but I was compelled to write,” explains Jack, who’s never been one to shy away from that inspiration. There were no ambitions for the project beyond self-expression, but once ‘Strange Desire’ was finished, Jack felt intent on “hand delivering it to the world.”
Since then, every Bleachers album has come with the same energy. “We’re going to tour hard on this record,” promises Jack.
“I’ve always played with a bit of a last night on Earth mentality. That’s just how I grew up playing,” he continues, coming up alongside the punk scene in New Jersey. “I’m really jealous of people who perform sitting at a piano because I look like I’ve run every marathon by the time a Bleachers gig is over. We don’t do encores because we can’t. We play until there’s nothing left.”
Jack goes on to say the desire to play live helps him stay in touch with himself. “I’ve always needed to be in the studio, and I’ve always needed to be on tour. It’s just reached this grand scale now.”
That grand scale has seen Jack work on some of this decade’s biggest albums, including Lorde’s ‘Melodrama’, Taylor’s ‘1989’, St. Vincent’s ‘Masseduction’, Florence And The Machine’s ‘Dance Fever’, The 1975’s ‘Being Funny In A Foreign Language’ and Lana Del Rey’s ‘Norman Fucking Rockwell’.
Despite the Grammys, the Number 1s, and the amount of people who truly adore those albums, a vocal minority routinely accuse Jack of creating bland pop music. “The idea that any of those records sound similar is absurd,” he says, shrugging off the criticism with a grin. “Fuck it.”
“You never want to do the same thing twice,” he continues. “You always want to do things that fulfil you and excite you, and that’s always something new. Exploring the unknown is when you can create something really explosive.”
As Bleachers, he’s also hopped on a remix of Taylor’s ‘Anti-Hero’ and guested with Lana on her song ‘Margaret’. “I used to be more anxious about being misunderstood. I wanted to keep Bleachers and the records I produced as separate things, but that was never really the truth. There’s always been so much crossover in the studio, and my life is really a community,” he explains. “It was exhausting pretending otherwise.” The “powerful” Bleachers audience helped him make peace with that. “I’ve laid down that armour now,” he says. “Sometimes I get this fire from people misunderstanding what I do, though.”
He also creates records with the trust that they’ll find their audience. When they were released, Lorde’s ‘Solar Power’, Taylor’s ‘Reputation’ and Lana’s ‘Chemtrails Over The Country Club’ were all dragged through the mud but have become celebrated in recent months.
“You can’t make music for anyone. You make it because you feel it,” says Jack. “You can’t be afraid to bother your audience either.” Sometimes he makes music knowing fans will love it; sometimes, he makes tracks that he knows will piss them off. “All that matters is giving people the truest expression of yourself.” That’s what connects.
“Bleachers’ music is just very specific, so when people connect to it, they just connect all the way,” he says of the intense bond between artist and audience. “We don’t leave a tonne of space for the casual listener. In fact, I think all the music I make is like that.”
“When you’re building something that comes from the soul, you really don’t need the opinion of some fucking guy”
Jack Antonoff
As frustrating as it can be at times (“I have a phone, and I’m not above anything”), the opinions of others “drift away” whenever Jack is in the studio or on the road. “That’s probably why I spend so much time there,” he says. “You’re constantly in argument with yourself and trying to understand what you feel. You’re in deep conversation with your audience and with unknown parts of yourself.” There’s not much space for social media discourse.
When Bleachers first started out, Jack wasn’t as sure of himself and had to work to not let the opinions of others influence him. “When you’re building something that comes from the soul, you really don’t need the opinion of some fucking guy,” he says. “Artists, and people in general, are fragile.”
“You just have to make sure you let the right people in,” he continues, refusing to shy away from the world. “I’ve worked really hard my whole life to make my process, whether it’s Bleachers or collaborations, really protected,” says Jack. When he was making ‘A&W’, one of the most critically acclaimed and beloved songs to be released last year, it was just him, Lana and sound engineer Laura Sisk in the room. “I don’t think we played it for anyone else, and if we had, I bet we would have got some weird reactions,” he says of the seven-minute epic. “I have a short list of people I play things to because I know their only motivation is what the music makes them feel.”
Jack doesn’t have a hitlist of dream collabs either. “Being able to work with someone is so much more than just adoring their work,” he explains. “It’s about where they want to go, me understanding that, and then us being able to do something together.”
There is an obsession with finding out how things are made, says Jack. “People see my name on all these records that have done well, and they want to know what the secret is,” he continues. The real secret is that he doesn’t know. “The truth about music is that at any time, what you make could either make all the money or no money. Stuff connects, or it doesn’t,” he says.
“I’ve been really inspired lately, and that’s been great. If you locked me in a room, I don’t know if I could come out with anything good though,” he continues, adding that the creation of ‘Bleachers’ felt like a “fever dream”.
Getting in a room and making music with his friends makes Jack feel “alive”, and even when he’s by himself writing for Bleachers, he’s thinking about playing live and having that conversation with his audience in real time. “Music is inherently built on community,” he says. “The fact I can have that means a lot to me.”
“People see my name on all these records that have done well, and they want to know what the secret is”
Jack Antonoff
It’s an outlook inspired by Jack’s teenage years, growing up as part of New Jersey’s vibrant DIY punk scene, which eventually transformed into the emo explosion of the early noughties. “It was such a special time. It’s looked back on so fondly now, but there was so much shame about being an emo band back then,” he says. “Now it’s bigger than ever, and it’s still so influential. Artists are mining all these bits from it, sometimes unknowingly. I think people miss the community of it because it was the last real scene before the internet blew things up. You couldn’t recreate that now,” he says, before offering to spend the next 45 minutes talking about that scene rather than his own music.
Jack approaches putting on tours with the same community-led spirit.
“Whenever we put a tour on sale, myself and the people I work with have to spend hundreds of hours stopping the industry exploiting fans.” As a rule, Bleachers don’t do VIP tickets, paid meet and greets, or commemorative tickets, but that doesn’t stop venues from trying to offer them. “It’s insane, embarrassing and gross capitalism at its worst, and that’s before we get to scalpers and [dynamic pricing]. It feels like everything has become about squeezing as much money as possible out of kids, which is really sad. Live music should be aspirational. It should be about people coming together and being equals,” he says. He also donates a portion of each ticket sold to The Ally Coalition and their work supporting LGBTQ+ Youth.
“I’m always focused on my audience, but as my music starts to reach more people, it’s an interesting thing to ingest because there’s such a purity to what I’m doing,” Jack offers. “Some people need to be seen by strangers. Some people need to be completely alone. For me, I need to have this combination of incredible solitude and this little community around me.”
“Ultimately, the process is no different than when I was a kid,” says Jack. “Sure, the studio is nicer, the hotel is nicer, and I get a better seat on the plane, but the writing has always come from a deep part of your soul.”
“It’s definitely funny that the landscape of my world now, which does seem so massive at times, is bizarrely similar to how I was making music as a teenager. It’s something I’m really happy about,” he offers, but he knows it’s not exactly the same, playfully shutting down our suggestion that the tight-knit musical collective made up of his friends and global superstars is actually the world’s biggest DIY punk community. “That will get you killed, saying that,” he smirks.
“Ultimately, if you go into a room with some instruments and make something you love, there’s a chance other people will love it too.”
Taken from the April 2024 issue of Dork. Bleachers’ self-titled album is out now.
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