Jack Antonoff on the Dark Secrets of Good Pop Music
Jack Antonoff—the singer, songwriter, and multiple-Grammy-winning producer who’s worked with Lorde, Taylor Swift, and St. Vincent, among others—is everywhere. By way of explanation, a digression:
America is in a tough spot right now. Even at 19 years old, R&B wunderkind Khalid gets that. But he's optimistic because his music (and his fellow teens) are going to take this country to a better place—they have to.
Back in August, I was getting out of a taxi on lower Park Avenue when someone hollered at me. It took me a few moments to realize that someone was Antonoff, holding his camera up in selfie mode and filming my exit. “We look alike,” he said, thrilled at the discovery but a little shocked at the resemblance. And he was right: Me and Jack Antonoff, two Jews with curly hair, white tees, and New York Mets caps, look strikingly similar. He asked if we could take a picture, perhaps the first and last time a famous person has asked a normal to take a photo with them, and blasted it out via Instagram.
Like I said: Jack Antonoff—in his songs, but also in the form of writers who look exactly like him—is everywhere.
This is new. Antonoff, now 33, used to be a secret weapon. He started touring the country at 15, was signed to legendary pop-punk label Drive-Thru at 18. And then he linked up with some old touring pals to write world-eating pop jams as Fun. You remember the songs—“We Are Young,” “Some Nights”—because they destroy at weddings, bar mitzvahs, graduation parties, and bars. Along the way, he became something of a pop guru—not a gun for hire, but the rarest kind of collaborator. Armed with his own sonic signature, forged in vans and clubs and small theaters and bedrooms, he also had a willingness—a need—to be a true partner.
You probably noticed the sound taking over radio stations and barbecue playlists and political conventions before you learned his name: lots of unexpected major-to-minor key changes; a thrumming, propulsive synth-plus-guitar-plus-drums heartbeat; a hook so big it threatens to swallow the entire song. Plenty has changed since a teenage Antonoff drove a van with his buddies to play shows in Florida. Streaming is ascendant; the punkest resident of New Jersey is Cardi B. And the very nature of pop music has changed: People who look and think and sound like Jack Antonoff are allowed to participate in its making at the very highest levels. But Antonoff’s approach hasn’t really changed. He’s still writing Jack Antonoff songs—they just happen to be sung by people like Lorde now.
Some of those songs are massive hits: Taylor Swift’s much-maligned “Look What You Made Me Do,” which Antonoff co-wrote, still hit the top spot on the Billboard chart. Others seem like they should be the biggest songs on the planet but sit a little too left-of-center to dominate. Lorde’s “Green Light,” easily one of the best pop songs of 2017 and probably the decade, made it up to #19 but fell short of chart-conquering. That success wasn’t the intent; it wasn’t custom-built in a lab to take over radio. It’s just another Antonoff song: a little cockeyed, the math not quite right, yearning and blood-rushed and wanting to feel it all. Lately, he’s been out in front as the singer and songwriter for Bleachers, the project he started in 2014. Everything Antonoff sneaks into his work with other acts—the ’80s instrumentation, the pop-punk choruses, the synths—is at the fore here.
We speak in an empty café in a photo studio. Antonoff, hair buzzed on the sides and floppy up top, wearing beat-up Doc Martens, baggy blue jeans, and an oversize vintage Tommy Hilfiger shirt, looks like he won Aaliyah’s music-video wardrobe at auction. The last show of Bleachers’ U.S. tour is the next evening in Brooklyn. It will be madcap: He’ll start the show in the bedazzled captain’s outfit from his “Don’t Take the Money” video, try to give a synchronized champagne toast, speak fondly of his home nearby, jump off amps like a teenage punk. But if he’s excited for the tour to end, for a break, he doesn’t show it. Touring, still, is what he lives for. “That's when you get to celebrate a thing that took so much out of you,” he explains. Because the music-making part, he explains—the marrow-and-all intimacy he turns into pop magic, the stuff that will make a capacity crowd of Brooklyn hipsters unselfconsciously lose their shit tomorrow night—is the loneliest activity in the world.
GQ: You work mostly out of your house. Why is that?
Jack Antonoff: It’s where I've had the most success. It's not like I think everyone has to work that way, but it's about knowing yourself. You go to any big studio, you're gonna be listening to the music you're making through speakers that literally no consumer could ever afford. You gotta consider that. Don't make food with ingredients that no one would ever taste. Don't make music with frequencies that no one will ever hear. That right there immediately decides all the deeper, weird feelings about leaving your house. I like being at home. I like bringing you back to that, because I don't think that in music or songwriting there's any sense of professionalism. I don't think you get better at it.
Really?
You just keep working at it. I don't think it's, like, a skill that you can get better and better at. You have it, and you access it or you don't. And so it's about putting yourself in situations where you can access it. Not, like, crafting it better and better and better. I think that's bullshit.
I'd imagine that can be a little isolating.
Yeah, it's crazy. It's a totally detached, strange thing. You feel like you spend your life trying to share things with people, at the expense of sharing things with people in your actual life, because you're trying to share with people as a broad concept. That's why I have so much disappointment toward a lot of the way that film and television has portrayed music and songwriting: They're missing the most exciting part.
Which is?
Which is like, all the sadness and isolation that comes with it. That's the interesting part. It's not like lighting candles and smoking a joint. I wouldn't go as cliché as saying it's not glamorous, but what I would say is that it's perilous. You're praying toward something. And that's a lot to bite off.
In the run-up to the St. Vincent album, you said something about you guys shooting for lyrics that people would want to get tattoos of.
I grew up in the scene in music where a lot of people listened to a lot of bands that not everyone knew about, and took a lot of pride in tattooing those lyrics on their bodies.
Does that mean something different when it's a bigger band?
No. I don't know if there's really a terribly interesting conversation to have between small music or big music. I think the only interesting conversation to have is quality or not. And I think that is the thing that gets muddled. I mean, I think that The Sopranos is the greatest TV show in history. I'd tattoo the whole script on my back. You know?
You did, or you would?
Yeah, I have a Sopranos backplate. No. I would. I keep remembering the Mountain Goats. That's not a wildly popular band. That means as much to me as some of the biggest albums of all time. I think that what's so special about music is that when you're alone and you're in your space, it kinda doesn't matter. We don't live at the arena with the artist. So especially nowadays, when you're listening to some playlist, it doesn't matter. If you go from this huge pop artist to this random folk song, it grabs you or it doesn't. And if you think about your life, I never met anyone that exclusively listens to successful pop music. And I've also never met anyone that exclusively listens to, like, fringe trip-hop. I'm sure they're out there, but everyone I've always known, myself included, whether you've made tapes, flipped over records, burned CDs, or now you're just a person with a playlist, it's always just like, these are the songs that touch me. And then, yeah, one of those gets really big, and you have to deal with liking something this popular, but also, kudos and shit, if you're lucky enough to find something that touches you.
But that also feels like one of the bigger shifts that's happened over the course of your career. If, 20 years ago, you described that arc—"I'm playing in punk bands and then 15 years down the road, I'm writing songs with the biggest pop stars of my generation"—that sounds a lot different in 1995 than it does in 2017, right?
Totally. But I think the feeling is the same.
But it's cool now in a way that it didn't used to be.
My dad was telling me, the other day, we were talking about Paul Simon, and he was like, "It's so weird, because when Graceland came out it was so not cool for the kids. It was such an adult album." And I don't know if there's a literal cooler album on Earth. It's the coolest shit in the world. Springsteen's gone through those phases. Especially in this culture where you can see how everyone's feeling about everything at every second, I really try to pull myself away from it and just think ten years down the line. ’Cause, like, everything that I love and means so much to me has gone through these weird phases.
Someone was just telling me that they saw Springsteen in the ’90s in a half-empty arena. It's so easy with all of our legends to just be like, "He's brilliant!" But there's so many moments and layers. And I think you have to function regardless.
So what’s your version of the half-empty arena in the ’90s?
I don't know, because I've had a funny career where it's just always very slowly moved forward. Which is a funny thing. You know, when Fun got really big in 2012-ish, everyone was like, "You came out of nowhere!" It's like, Dude, I was on tour for 12 years!
Has streaming changed the way you work at all?
No. It all gets to people. When I was a kid, my parents were like, "We used to buy these big albums and put them on and skip song to song, and now you can just skip around with a touch of a button on a CD!" You know? And so it's like, who gives a shit? I don't think music has changed at all. And everyone is just in this loop of a conversation about how it's changing, and it's just like, All right: What's your favorite song right now? What album do you like? My whole fucking career, everyone's like, "Albums are going away. It's all singles." That's not true. You have streaming, right?
Yeah.
Do you find yourself listening to 40 million songs a week? Or pretty much a similar array of songs that you would've put in your Discman? It's the same shit. You can't make a human being listen to something they hate. You can't make a human being watch something they hate. Things are just more available. I have Amazon Prime, [but] that doesn't mean I bought a washing machine every day last week.
You just have seven washing machines.
Maybe when I first got CDs I skipped around a little too much. Maybe last year I made one too many playlists. But it all settles in. And at labels in the industry, it's all sort of a deflection against, like, Let's just make good records. When I was a kid, I didn't dream about negotiating a deal with Spotify. I dreamt about making records. I don't wanna get fucked, but I also don't want to figure out the deal. And I don't wanna go to court, and I don't wanna be an ambassador. I just wanna fucking make the records.
On the one hand, you are making exactly the music you wanna make. It is intimate and personal and serious. There's that wild Max Martin quote, secondhand, about him telling Lorde that the math on “Green Light” is wrong.
Oh, that was taken out of context. He means it as a compliment.
Can you explain what that means, what it means to have bad math in a song?
Well, everyone's got systems. And even if your system is no system, that's a system. My system is who fucking knows. But that's still a system. So, other songwriters, hence that quote, have some literal ideas. Like, if the verse vocal starts on the one-beat, the pre-chorus can't. A lot of people have the rule that do what the song says. If you shout "stop" in the song, the song should stop. If you say, "I'm alone in my room" in the song, it should go down to very few instruments.
So a lot of people have math. And that's fucking great, and a lot of great songs have come from that. I'm literally bad at math, quite literally. So I've never tried to engage in that.
And I think that quote, which got slightly taken out of context, was more Max joking around. Celebrating a different process. I think what he meant, which is true, is that song does not make perfect sense mathematically for a pop song. So, like, the song is in A, and the beginning chords are like F# minor, and E, and A, and D, and it follows these very simple chord structures, and then out of nowhere in the pre-chorus, it just hits a G.
It gets all disco-y.
It's not like we snuck it in with that chord. It sounds like a ballad at the beginning to, all of a sudden, you're literally in a Euro dance club, with a totally new set of chord changes that is jarring to anyone. And then in the second verse, we go right back to that sad stuff. We didn't sit there and say, "Let's fuck with people." We were just around a piano and we were messing around and somehow we landed on that. And you try to talk yourself out of it. And then you listen to it outside, you listen to it the next morning, and it's like, "I kinda like hearing that." And you just sorta go with it. A lot of things I like doing have come from that. As long as you never wanna confuse people on purpose—which I never do, I don't get off on that—it's really exciting to find confusing things that are also satisfying. I like that. If that was my niche, then I'd put it on my tombstone.
You collaborate intensively.
I don't believe you can write a song for someone and have it be an artistic expression of that person, because how could you know them? You only know what they've already given you. I don't do that. I work with people and talk about the future.
What is that conversation like?
It's about what's going on, what's happening in life, what's happening in the world. You don't really punch in and out. It's texts at 4:00 in the morning, it's nonstop.
It’s a deeply intimate process for you.
It's a sacred process. It always has been.
I think there are plenty of people who don't treat it as a sacred process, though.
Yeah. I don't know if you like their music.
