Article: Jack Antonoff is pop's A-list producer. Here's what he's learned about songwriting

[Rorman Nockwell 56,716]

Someone else can edit and paste the text, I'm lazy

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-03-15/jack-antonoff-take-5-interview-taylor-swift-lorde-lana-del-rey/103587884

[Rorman Nockwell 56,716]

Also idk if the referenced article was ever discussed but lollll https://www.thedriftmag.com/dream-of-antonoffication/

[shadesofblue 15,524]

Jack Antonoff is pop's A-list producer. Here's what he's learned about songwriting

By Al Newstead and Zan Rowe for Take 5

Posted Thu 14 Mar 2024 at 3:10pm, updated Thu 14 Mar 2024 at 6:08pm

 

"There's always a door to kick down…"

This is sage wisdom from Jack Antonoff — a man who, at this point in his career, appears to possess the keys to the entire pop kingdom.

He's been the creative force of indie rock band Bleachers for 10 years and been touring and writing music for more than a decade before that, but Antonoff's solo artistry has been overshadowed by his status as a producer. That's an occupational hazard when you've worked with recognisable acts like Taylor Swift, Lana Del Rey, and Lorde on some of the most influential and universally lauded records of the past decade.

 

From The 1975 and Florence + The Machine to Amy Shark and Harry Styles, Antonoff has shaped the sound of modern pop. But his credits also extend to indie darlings like St. Vincent, Clairo, and ex-BROCKHAMPTON ringleader Kevin Abstract, as well as legends like Diana Ross, Nick Cave and The Chicks.

 

His CV has never looked more impressive, and the super producer recently attributed one person for his rise to being coronated as one of music's go-to names.

"Taylor Swift kicked that f***ing door open for me," Antonoff said at the 2024 Grammys, accepting the award for Producer of the Year (non-classical) for the third year in a row. He talked about Out Of The Woods (from Swift's 2016 pop blockbuster 1989) being his big break as a producer. They've worked together ever since, including earning Swift four Album Of The Year trophies — the most in Grammys history.

"She was the first person to let me produce a song, because there's such gatekeeping going on in mainstream music," Antonoff tells Zan Rowe for Double J's Take 5.

 

"Like anyone's career, there's a list of people who didn't believe [in me], that stretches around the universe, but there's a few people who [did]."

 

He'd have little trouble with gatekeepers these days, but Antonoff remembers the come-up all too well.

"When I was a kid, it was 'how do we get to play this venue?' 'Well only bands at this level can play this venue'," he says.

"I think a lot about what it's like to be a new or younger artist right now and what the avenues of trying to get your stuff out there are.

"How do you get your music on the radio? On this playlist?"

Antonoff doesn't have the answers but, much like his production and songwriting processes, simply asking what's possible is a crucial first step.

 

Inspiration comes 'by any means necessary'

Antonoff says the music he's drawn to hasn't changed considerably over the course of his career. "Stylistically I'll gravitate this way or that, but I'm always interested in the feeling of something and where it can take me. And that is bigger than genre or sound," he says. "The part you can't really describe feels the same but then it's always dressed up different.

 

"I'm always trying to find that unnamed feeling. I know when I have it and I know when I don't have it. And when I don't have it, I long for it."

 

Even after doing this for more than half of his almost 40 years, Antonoff says there's still no exact science for reaching those special, ephemeral moments.

 

"I've used some of the most absurd words to try and describe a sound. Often, it's a lot of playing: 'No, there, there! Go'. It's almost like Marco Polo — you're guiding," he says.

"Sometimes you know specifically 'oh shit, this needs this' Boom, put it in. 'Wow, that's exactly what it needed'.

"Sometimes it's this esoteric journey of finding it. Sometimes it's literal: 'Hit it harder'. Sometimes it's 'Hit it like you know you're in trouble'," he chuckles.

"It's literally by any means necessary."

 

Antonoff's 'anything goes' method for translating abstract ideas into meaningful music is what a bevy of respected artists admire about him.

 

Spirit vs technical skill

He's been likened to chart-topping pop Svengali Max Martin, but Antonoff is closer to philosophical mega-producers Rick Rubin and Brian Eno with a healthy dose of Pharrell Williams — a prolific hit-maker with his finger on the pulse of the zeitgeist but not defined by it. Antonoff admits he's not a technical wizard. He's quick to clarify he isn't someone unable to switch off their 'producer brain' — dissecting how a song is made as he's listening to it.

 

"Honestly, no! Because all that stuff is the top layer. Songs have such deep feeling to them that I'm not sitting around being like 'oh, the drum sound…'" he says.

"Parts of the [craft] you master… and trust me, I spend more than enough time obsessing on that side of it. But I'm definitely more interested in things that you can't really define but are resonant.

"I'm thinking more about what I feel from it, and that's the magic part.

"There's only so many instruments out there, right? There's only so many notes, and notes between notes and what not. And yet, music just keeps coming out that feels new and exciting and the expression of one person. That's what I'm thinking about mostly."  Antonoff's strength seems to be creating a cosy, mates-in-a-room space for artists to conjure that magic, comfortable to chase down and capture spells to their full fruition.

"It's not that much deeper than that weird excitement of 'Oh, I can't wait to go to the studio tomorrow and be with so-and-so, who knows what we'll do?'," he says.

 

As he's grown in ubiquity however, Antonoff's Midas touch has become the centre of a lot of online discourse. Depending on what you read, he's either revolutionised pop music or ruined it, and regularly faces criticisms that there is a 'sameness' to his sound. (The 'Antonoffication', as one essay has put it). Rather than spend his time getting frustrated scouring social media opinions, Antonoff is focused on the work. And he has a long list of artists seeking out his services to keep him busy.

 

In the case of Swift, Lana Del Rey and Lorde, they've made multiple records together, striking up a bond that goes deeper than just professional.

"Not necessarily friends," he explains. "But for me, I must have a very strong bond. It's very hard for me to get somewhere if there isn't some kind of magical connection there."

 

"The more I work with someone the more I know about them, sometimes the more… I dream about what's possible."

 

Artists love that sense of possibility, and like historic music partnerships — The Beatles and George Martin, David Bowie with Brian Eno and Tony Visconti, Michael Jackson and Quincy Jones — their comfort with Antonoff gives us revealing moments.

"I want the person I'm in the room with to be on the recording," he says in a Mix With The Masters video, on the process of recording Del Rey's A&W.

"Obviously that's going to happen with her vocal — but she's also the person who's like, sending a text, taking a hit of the vape, laughing about something… there's more of her in the song."

 

Antonoff's origins

Though he started writing songs at age "11 or 12" and cut his teeth playing rowdy folk-punk venues with teenage bands (called The Fizz, Outline, and later Steel Train), Antonoff never saw music as a viable career path.

"I was of the generation where the gospel was 'It's an impossible job. Good luck!' So, I didn't think about it as 'this is how I'll support myself'," he says. Instead, making music was a compulsion. A way of life.

 

"It was the language of how I communicated myself to the world… as time went on, I had to keep doing it. It's how I recognise myself."

 

"I got pretty acquainted with imagining living with my parents forever," jokes Antonoff, who only moved out of home in his 30s.

 

Born in 1984, Antonoff was a Jewish kid raised in suburban New Jersey. All three elements have become defining qualities of Bleachers, beginning with 2014 debut album Strange Desire. Even if you've never hit play on a Bleachers record, you've heard its members before. Antonoff regularly enlists his bandmates to play in sessions for his A-list clients.

There's even a self-conscious wink to his status on Bleachers' new self-titled album:

'I guess I'm New Jersey's finest New Yorker / Unreliable reporter, pop music hoarder'.

Coming in the wake of Antonoff's chart-baiting 2000s pop trio fun. (remember their huge hit We Are Young? Antonoff probably prefers you didn't), Bleachers has always been a deeply personal songwriting project. It wraps his love for Jersey idol Bruce Springsteen and anthemic 80s music ("it's a part of my duty to bring it into the future", he remarks) with open-hearted musings on home, family, and the devastating loss of his younger sister, Sarah, at age 13 to brain cancer.

 

"It's so baked in: how you grew up, the things you saw, the things you were told, the way you were raised and where," he says of those recurring themes.

"On a personal level, we can all spend, frankly, all our time re-looking at [it]. But if I can find the threads of that loop in my head that is also conversational to other people then I can usually find interesting songs in there."

 

Lessons on songwriting

 He's a well-documented acolyte of The Boss but Antonoff's love for Tom Waits often gets overlooked. On Alma Mater — a track from the new self-titled Bleachers record featuring a brief cameo from Lana Del Rey — Antonoff sings about listening to the gravelly-voiced artist's album, Heart Attack And Vine.

"Yeah, he's real formative to me," says Antonoff.

"We all love lots of music but there's really very few artists or bands that you really know everything, right? Every album [and] song, every moment, every live recording. You only get a couple of those in your life — he's one of those for me."

Hearing Hold On, from Waits' acclaimed Mule Variations album, was a "turning point" for Antonoff's songwriting. "Because it led me to this place of a tiny chorus, which I love," he says. "Sometimes you say so much in the verse, like 'God, he's saying so much in the verse. He's telling this whole Tom Waits story [with] all this poetry. And the chorus is just 'oh you gotta hold on, you gotta hold on…'

 

YOUTUBE: Tom Waits 'Hold On' music video

Spoiler

 

 

"It just, boom, says it. I like that because sometimes the chorus can be such a burden as this epic, biggest part of the song… wrapping it all up. But sometimes it can be simple."

Hold On was a direct influence on his early Bleachers song I Wanna Get Better, "which is an important song to me."

Like Waits', the song title anchors the refrain and an unabashed honesty, as Antonoff sings:

I didn't know I was lonely 'til I saw your face.
I wanna get better
I didn't know I was broken 'til I wanted to change
I wanna get better

"It makes so much sense," he explains.

"And then, if you allow yourself to have that simple, straightforward chorus, you almost give yourself more space to be able to f**k it up in the verse and really go nuts in the story.

"Because you're like 'well, even if I'm losing someone here, even if it's a bit much and they're going to have to listen 10, 20, 30 times to really get this whole story, at least they'll be able to have this moment that's very clear'."

 

Whether it's with Bleachers or working in the room with some of the biggest names in music, Antonoff's process has always been led by intuition and leaving his heart "wide open".

"I can't really do it any other way. I don't really finish songs if I don't put everything into it," he says.

"That's what it is for me — I'm all there or I'm not there at all."

 

Hear Jack Antonoff's full interview with Zan Rowe on the Take 5 podcast and ABC Listen app.

[PARADIXO 32,940]

Love you Jack

[Rorman Nockwell 56,716]

When I first saw this I was so confused

We have Zan Rowe from Australia and Zane Lowe from New Zealand what is going ON

[Mer 61,772]

Jack peaked on Melodrama. There's crack in the production and engineering of that album. The soundstage, the clarity, the bouncy drums and the brass instruments that are perfectly staccato-ed, the smoothness of Lorde's voice. 

He never recaptured that magic with any of his other collab's (though he came incredibly close on Florence + the Machine's Dance Fever), so I find it kinda amusing that this decade is heralded as the "Antonoff Years of Pop" when truly he's never topped what he did back in 2017.