{"id":813454,"date":"2026-10-25T13:30:09","date_gmt":"2026-10-25T13:30:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/813454\/"},"modified":"2026-10-25T13:30:09","modified_gmt":"2026-10-25T13:30:09","slug":"id-rather-live-through-something-publicly-than-escape-it-privately-jack-antonoff-on-survivors-guilt-and-still-singing-love-songs-after-his-breakup-jack-antonoff","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/813454\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018I\u2019d rather live through something publicly than escape it privately\u2019: Jack Antonoff on survivor\u2019s guilt and still singing love songs after his breakup | Jack Antonoff"},"content":{"rendered":"

Sitting in the restaurant of a Denver hotel, in the middle of a US tour with his band Bleachers, Jack Antonoff<\/a> shrugs. \u201cThere\u2019s this intense need to figure me out,\u201d he frowns, \u201cand I don\u2019t really know where it comes from, because I keep explaining all of it.\u201d<\/p>\n

He has a point. For the last 12 years, Bleachers have released a succession of albums packed with Antonoff\u2019s strikingly personal and frank songs. Being strikingly personal and frank was the whole point. Antonoff had previously been guitarist in Fun, a pop-rock band who went supernova with their 2011 single We Are Young. Despite co-writing a song that sold 10m copies in the US alone, Antonoff says he \u201chated\u201d the experience \u201cbecause I wasn\u2019t the leader, they weren\u2019t my words, and I needed to write a song that if I fucking died tomorrow would be my life story\u201d.<\/p>\n

He says he insisted his then-record label release said song I Wanna Get Better as Bleachers\u2019 debut single \u201cto let people know what they were in for\u201d. It depicted Antonoff literally screaming in anguish, \u201closing my mind\u201d with grief in the wake of his younger sister\u2019s death, aged 13, from a brain tumour. You can tell it set the confessional tone of Bleachers\u2019 oeuvre just by looking at some of their other song titles: I\u2019m Ready to Move On, Everybody Lost Somebody, Stop Making This Hurt, Self-Respect, I Can\u2019t Believe You\u2019re Gone, We Should Talk.<\/p>\n

Their latest album, Everyone for Ten Minutes, offers his audience what you might call the Jack Antonoff origin story: there are songs about his teenage years spent traversing the US in his parents\u2019 minivan, touring down-at-heel punk venues with an emo band called Outline, which by his own account was a pretty hair-raising experience (\u201cTeenagers, in a van, drinking a lot, smoking pot, taking psychedelics, smoking what we thought was hash but turned out to be black opium,\u201d he laughs, \u201cI\u2019m amazed we survived\u201d), to which his parents only agreed because his sister\u2019s illness meant \u201cthey could not give a fuck about anything that didn\u2019t really matter. When something serious, existential is going on in your life, you get a little less stressed about a parking ticket or grades, you know?\u201d<\/p>\n

double quotation markThere\u2019s a difference between joyfully seizing the moment and something that\u2019s predicated on anxiety<\/p>\n

If Bleachers were the only thing that Jack Antonoff did, then it would all seem terribly straightforward. But, of course, they aren\u2019t the whole story. Around the same time he started the band, he met Taylor Swift<\/a> at an awards ceremony, bonded over a mutual love of 80s synth duo Yazoo and embarked on a creative collaboration that ultimately led Antonoff to become perhaps the most in-demand pop producer on Earth: he\u2019s worked not just on 11 Taylor Swift albums, but with Sabrina Carpenter, Lorde, Lana Del Rey, St Vincent, Kendrick Lamar and Gracie Abrams, among a host of others. He is in the vaunted position of being a blue-chip pop mega-producer who also makes soul-baring, Bruce Springsteen-influenced angst-rock, and insists neither activity takes precedence over the other in his career.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m in a very narrow group of people who truly do both, probably,\u201d he nods. \u201cUsually someone\u2019s slumming it on one side: songwriters or performers who think they can produce a record but then have to really care about someone else\u2019s work in a deep way, or producers who think: \u2018Now it\u2019s my turn!\u2019 but don\u2019t have that thing you can\u2019t even describe that drew you to write your own songs and fucking sing them in front of people since you were a kid.\u201d<\/p>\n

Indeed, for all his protestations that he\u2019s really terribly straightforward, Jack Antonoff seems anything but. Rather, he seems like such a mass of complexities and contradictions that you sometimes get the impression he might be trying to puzzle them out himself, in front of you. He\u2019s clearly very driven, but he worries his drive is bound up with \u201csurvivor\u2019s guilt\u201d over his sister\u2019s death, \u201cabout not going for things or using my time when someone you love didn\u2019t get time, which is not the best way to live \u2013 there\u2019s a difference between joyfully seizing the moment and something that\u2019s predicated on anxiety\u201d.<\/p>\n

Jack of all trades \u2026 Antonoff with (from left) Phoebe Bridgers, Julien Baker and Lucy Dacus of boygenius and Taylor Swift at the 2024 Grammy Awards. Photograph: Michael Buckner\/Billboard\/Getty Images<\/p>\n

He decries the constant chatter of opinion on the internet: \u201cI don\u2019t give a fuck any more, it\u2019s like, the very act of engaging negatively on the internet is inarguably such a fucking low-vibrational joke, and I think artists for too long over the past decade have read into it and there\u2019s less than nothing there.\u201d But equally he says he enjoys making \u201csuper high-stakes albums \u2026 helping to architect and guide something that everyone is going to have an opinion on, that people love to have the hottest opinions on\u201d.<\/p>\n

He thinks his role in making some of the biggest records of the century so far is widely misconstrued as shadowy and machiavellian (\u201cHe\u2019s annoyingly, inescapably, maddeningly everywhere \u2026 the designated steward of Tasteful Pop,\u201d protested one piece on music website Pitchfork, which went on to accuse him of \u201cmusical manspreading\u201d and suggest he had \u201cextreme Main Character Energy\u201d). \u201cOne of the great misconceptions of how it works in my world is that I write songs and hand them to, like, a pop star, which I\u2019ve never done once in my life,\u201d he says, but declines to discuss how it actually works because \u201cit doesn\u2019t really matter\u201d. Besides he\u2019s sick of people constantly trying to explain everything online. \u201cYou\u2019re on your phone all the time being explained something,\u201d he says. \u201cYou\u2019re being explained what\u2019s happening in this country, you\u2019re being explained how a train works, it\u2019s like an information dump and it\u2019s killing people\u2019s imaginations. \u2018Do you want to sound like Jack Antonoff? Here\u2019s how he did it!\u2019 It\u2019s made me want to allow people to imagine the magic of it all.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

Certainly, in the context of 21st-century pop, he\u2019s a very odd fish. He is obviously someone who moves with enviable ease among the pop aristocracy: he apparently ended up working on Kendrick Lamar\u2019s multiple Grammy-winning 2024 album GNX when he popped into the studio to visit a friend and \u201cdidn\u2019t leave for three years\u201d; Bruce Springsteen isn\u2019t just an influence but a friend, collaborator with Bleachers and mentor (best advice thus delivered by The Boss: \u201cDon\u2019t live in the dream, let the dream live in you\u201d). But Antonoff both looks noticeably more like someone who might have spent his teens playing gigs in anarchist book stores on drugs than someone who co-wrote, say, Sabrina Carpenter\u2019s Please Please Please \u2013 close-cropped hair, tattered skate pants, Sonic Youth T-shirt \u2013 and often sounds more like a chippy indie outsider than someone who recently enjoyed chicken nuggets with caviar at Taylor Swift\u2019s wedding.<\/p>\n

Certainly, he is more free with his opinions than you might expect from someone who operates at the top table of pop, a world where artists tend to have any capacity for controversy media-trained out of them. He\u2019s currently engaged in a war of words with Live Nation over gig ticket prices (he is proud that Bleachers\u2019 tickets are \u201cas low as they can physically possibly be\u201d). \u201cLive Nation keep missing the point, because every time I say something, they\u2019ll call my people and say: \u201cLet\u2019s have a meeting.\u2019 You don\u2019t get it, I don\u2019t want to fucking talk to you people, I want to make it clear that I\u2019m not fucking OK with you turning the most sacred thing into the world into some weird free-market piece of shit \u2026 the idea that if you\u2019re rich, any ticket you want is yours at any time and if you\u2019re not, you have to go through this demoralising online experience where you get whacked and kicked and fucked around.\u201d<\/p>\n

When the Fun stops, stop \u2026 Antonoff (left) with Nate Ruess and Andrew Dost in his first major band. Photograph: Dave Hogan\/Getty Images<\/p>\n

When I meet him, his social media channels are filled with abuse from commenters angry that a Jewish artist has made a point of saying \u201cfree Palestine\u201d onstage at Bleachers shows: he points out that he was saying it long before the recent Ed Sheeran\/Macklemore controversy blew up but says he has \u201cfelt way more emboldened to say it now, because it\u2019s not in any way a strange, uncomfortable or controversial thing to say, it\u2019s a deeply human thing to say. If you think it is [controversial] you\u2019re lost in some other sauce that is so crazy. They\u2019re going to let some fucking promoter tell me what I can say? Don\u2019t book me. I\u2019ll play for free outside. [Ed Sheeran] missed a massive, beautiful opportunity there: just cancel the whole fucking tour, then play for free outside each venue, raise a bunch of money, rather than let a fucking billionaire tell you what to do. The reason it\u2019s not an anomaly or niche issue is because we all live in a world where billionaires are constantly telling us what to do. So stand the fuck up.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Of course you could argue that Antonoff has more freedom to be unguarded than the artists he works with. Bleachers enjoy a curious kind of success \u2013 their albums sell respectably rather than astronomically and they\u2019ve never come \u201ceven close\u201d, Antonoff points out, to having a huge crossover hit. Yet they are capable of filling out Madison Square Garden with an audience that Antonoff says aren\u2019t there to see \u201cthat producer\u2019s band\u201d. His own celebrity is largely by proxy, thanks to the company he keeps in the recording studio \u2013 his 2023 wedding to actor Margaret Qualley<\/a> took place amid a scrum of fans and paparazzi, but that seemed to have less to do with the bride and groom than the fact that Taylor Swift was in attendance.<\/p>\n

Recently, the gossip pages have been alive, first with his former partner Lena Dunham\u2019s memoir Famesick<\/a>, which suggested that one of the reasons their romance floundered was because Antonoff was more invested in shepherding Lorde through her Difficult Second Album than their relationship, and latterly with news of his marriage\u2019s collapse. That came as a surprise given that Bleachers had released an album thick with loving peans to Qualley and to marriage a matter of weeks before their split was announced: one of them, You and Forever, even came with a video starring the couple together.<\/p>\n

double quotation markThe deal I\u2019ve made with my audience is I\u2019m going to tell you honestly how I feel and I\u2019m going to risk standing behind it<\/p>\n

Antonoff thus currently finds himself on tour, singing songs about a relationship that\u2019s now over. When I mention it, he first interrupts me \u2013 \u201cOh, I can imagine what you\u2019re going to say: it\u2019s bizarre\u201d \u2013 then clarifies my point: \u201cSongs which I wrote recently,\u201d he nods. \u201cI obviously was really worried about this specific thing, I sat long and hard with it and thought: \u2018If I change the setlist \u2026\u2019 and in my gut there was a unanimous jury that said, \u2018No, this is the deal. The deal I\u2019ve made with my audience is that I\u2019m going to tell you honestly how I feel and I\u2019m going to risk at any moment having to stand behind it for fucking ever.\u2019<\/p>\n

\u201cAnyone could relate to the terrible sadness and pain, but there\u2019s a great power to it also,\u201d he says. \u201cIt\u2019s actually been really beautiful. I mean, for people to come together, to know what I write a song about, to know how that must feel for me now, to know what that song means to you as an audience member, to just hold it all and sort of celebrate. I don\u2019t rewrite the past, I have no shame about the things I\u2019ve said. My life has been dedicated to making it impossible for me to rewrite the past, because I\u2019m standing there, singing about how I felt during the good times, so when the bad times hit I can\u2019t look myself in the mirror and pretend that those times didn\u2019t exist. I would rather live through something publicly than even escape it privately.\u201d<\/p>\n

After we speak, on stage at Colorado\u2019s Red Rocks Amphitheatre, there is indeed a fraught emotional charge to Bleachers\u2019 performances of Dirty Wedding Dress and You and Forever. Antonoff follows the latter by playing I Wanna Get Better alone on acoustic guitar. The audience \u2013 who, as he promised, are an odd combination of twentysomething women, middle-aged couples and a smattering of grizzled Deadheads in tie-dye T-shirts, none of whom look as if they\u2019re there to see Taylor Swift\u2019s producer in the flesh \u2013 bellow along, so loudly that they\u2019re in danger of drowning him out entirely. For a moment, in the spotlight, Jack Antonoff does not need figuring out.<\/p>\n

Bleachers are touring the UK and Ireland<\/a>, 23 November to 4 December; tour starts Kingston upon Thames. Their album Everyone for Ten Minutes is out now.<\/p>\n