I’ve been waiting for 20 minutes when Jack Antonoff darts in, flustered, holding a bottle of sparkling water and a crumpled tote bag, from which he pulls out nasal spray and quickly spritzes it into each nostril.
“I’m really sorry, I was working on something and it was running late and I couldn’t get it done 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 wearing a white T-shirt that has holes in it — not in the distressed fashion way, but in the really-old-shirt way — with a smattering of brown stains on the sleeve. Signature thick black wire-rimmed glasses frame his face.
It’s a sunny, perfect September afternoon in New York, and we’re at the Marlton Hotel on West 8th Street, where Jack Kerouac used to write. We’re having a late lunch before Antonoff heads to the studio, a block away.
“The studio” in this case is Electric Lady, a mythical spot in Greenwich Village where Jimi Hendrix, Carly Simon, Stevie Wonder and many more music legends have recorded. In recent years, since Antonoff set up shop there, it has become a place where paparazzi and teenage girls linger outside.
Even if you’ve never heard of Jack Antonoff, you’ve probably heard Jack Antonoff. Through his work with stars such as Taylor Swift, Lana Del Rey, Sabrina Carpenter, Lorde and many others, he has shaped the sound of pop music over the past decade. He’s won the Grammy award for “producer of the year” three times in a row — only the second person to accomplish this, after the 1990s R&B producer Babyface.
Antonoff occupies a strange position in the celebrity matrix. He is both a household name for millions of people, a fixture of internet fan culture — and someone who can mostly walk 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 Top 40 hits.
Antonoff cringes at such discourse. He says his records are “a very long-term meditation on where I grew up and how I feel . . . I won’t work on anything I don’t love. I feel, like, allergic to ‘the moment’ if anything. If what I do is going to be something that some people define as ‘the moment’, cool, that’s up to them. But I don’t care what’s going on . . . I’m just in my own world.”
If Antonoff, Swift and other intermittent collaborators have formed an unofficial superstar songwriting troupe, Electric Lady is their clubhouse. When Swift joins Antonoff on West 8th Street, police tape and crowd control barriers are erected to contain the fans who wait for hours to catch a glimpse of her three-second strut from the door to a car.
Today, though, it’s quiet at the Marlton. We’re seated beyond a cavernous empty dining room, in an even emptier solarium with creamy brick walls and greenery, mimicking Italian summer. We are the only people back here, apart from a guy in the corner working on his laptop, AirPods in his ears.
In person, Antonoff is boyish, even though he turned 40 this year, his curly hair speckled grey. It’s easy to understand why Swift describes him as “my precocious young son” (he is, in fact, several years older than her).
The challenge of having Lunch with the FT with Antonoff is that he can chat about just about anything: the joys and dangers of driving in New York (“the city is one big miracle”), chiropractors (he’s in favour), outdoor dining huts (“how am I not getting mowed down?”), steak (“my Instagram is pop stars and steak”). We’ve been gabbing for several minutes when Antonoff flags down a server. I quickly scan the menu and panic-order a grilled cheese sandwich to go with my iced black tea. He asks for a black coffee, the roasted eggplant sandwich without aioli, and a hot water with lemon.
Antonoff tells me he’s always been a bit obsessive. As a kid in suburban New Jersey, he went through “multi-year obsessions”: first with baseball, then baseball cards, then Star Wars figurines (“not the movies, it wasn’t about that”), then skateboarding. Aged 12, he found the one that stuck: music.
His early life was defined by tragedy. His younger sister was born with brain cancer and her sickness “was a big character in the household”. She died at age 13, when Antonoff was graduating from high school. School had always been hard for him. He says he has a learning disability, maybe dyslexia, but is undiagnosed. Flooded with grief, he took off with his band while the rest of his classmates went off to university.
“I was never gonna go the path of what was maybe wanted for me, and I just didn’t give a flying fuck at that point. Because I was so upset, it felt like, who gives a shit?”, he recalls. “I always wanted to get out. I wanted to go to New York City. I wanted to go on tour.”
He carried on as a musician and was “remarkably unsuccessful, from a financial point of view” until “26 or 27”. He made peace with being “probably a loser in my community”, and had a lot of fun playing shows, making music first with an obscure indie band named Steel Train, and then the band Fun, which he joined in 2008. Their massively successful song “We Are Young” propelled Antonoff into the pop world.
Our food arrives. Antonoff wordlessly removes some of the bread from his sandwich and continues answering my questions intensely between bites. My grilled cheese is just OK, although the braised leeks offer a little excitement.
We talk about some of the albums he’s worked on in recent years. There’s Lana Del Rey’s Norman Fucking Rockwell, a critically adored 2019 masterpiece that kicked off one of Antonoff’s most successful creative relationships. As he tells it: the two met, messaged each other, met for lunch at EJ’s diner on the Upper East Side, and headed straight to Antonoff’s Brooklyn apartment where he has a home studio. That same day, the pair wrote two songs together, start to finish: “Love Song” and “Hope Is a Dangerous Thing”.
“You can’t plan that type of thing. I just got it, and I got her,” he says as he scarfs down his sandwich. Afterwards, he visited Los Angeles, where they made “Venice Bitch” and “Mariners Apartment Complex”, and the rest of the album — a stripped-back, poetic, soft-rock record — came together. “That’s when I really felt: oh wow, I really think we could do anything.”
Antonoff talks about songwriting as something that happens entirely externally from himself, like a ghost that enters and exits his body without warning. “It’s deeply out of my control. I can’t really go write a song today,” he says. “It would have to come to me.”
Songwriting, he adds, is “deeply frustrating . . . It’s not like a movie where . . . you shoot heroin, light a candle, and write and record the perfect song.”
But he knows instantly, without a doubt, when he has a hit: “I have a very clear feeling in my body of whether something is great or not. There’s not a lot of variable. It’s not like, I don’t know, it’s pretty good.” Every time he gets to work, he worries about whether the magic is still going to be there. “At some point people write their last song, and it’s usually not before they die, you know? It seems to leave people,” he says.
Every so often, a producer can come to define the sound of an entire period, like Quincy Jones in the 1980s or Max Martin’s 1990s Euro-infused pop. Their sound permeates the world we live in — you’ll hear it on the radio, in a taxi, at the airport.
The Antonoff sound is surprisingly difficult to nail down. An essay in literary magazine The Drift likened Antonoff’s touch to “vapour”, arguing that he hasn’t taken over pop “so much as diffused across it, leaving behind a faintly perceptible vapour of understated good taste”.
The stereotypical Antonoff song, at least with his own band, Bleachers, features ingredients that include cinematic synths, big choruses and nostalgic references. But as a producer, he’s worked with an eclectic range of artists from Diana Ross and Carly Rae Jepsen to The Chicks (formerly The Dixie Chicks) and Kendrick Lamar. “I think the way that my sound is digested is a choose-your-own-ending for writers. If you actually listen to my records, there’s many things that are like me, but they’re incredibly unique,” he says.
He regularly turns down artists who want to work with him, but won’t specify names (“It makes it sound hatery”). He’s now working on the music for Romeo + Juliet, a Broadway show that’s about to debut. Earlier this year Bleachers released a self-titled album, and this month unveiled a re-recording of their 2014 album Strange Desire. He’s in the studio daily, presumably working on albums for A-list collaborators that he’s not going to tell me about right now.
It’s late afternoon, and the server seems to have forgotten that we’re here. Someone brings a candle out to signal the beginning of the dinner shift. Antonoff has cleaned his plate, only tiny shards of fries left. I’ve thoroughly failed at having a lavish lunch. Antonoff asks if I smell something burning, eyes darting around the room. I do. “Good,” he says, “as long as I’m not having a stroke or something.”
He’s now the guy sought out by the stars, but Antonoff says he was never taken seriously as a producer until Taylor Swift “kicked open the door for me”. This was in 2013, when she brought him in to produce a handful of songs on the blockbuster album 1989. “She was the one who said, ‘No, he’s a producer.’ It takes that person.” He’s worked on all of her albums since.
He is carefully vague about Swift. He brings her up frequently, but has mastered the art of telling stories without really revealing anything. The two met and “just started making things”.
“We get together and just find that magic space. It’s kind of crazy that we’ve been able to access it as long as we have,” he says. “It’s not normal, you know?” I ask how the song “August”, a fan favourite from the album Folklore, came about and am met with a clinical response: “I made a track, sent it to her, and she sang over it on a voice note.”
Where, I ask him, is pop music going? “I don’t think we’re going somewhere as much as we’ve arrived somewhere, which usually means that there’s a new thing coming,” he says.
“But we’ve arrived pretty hard at the great pushback to being told what to listen to. We’ve just landed in this great blank spot where authenticity seems to be winning out everything. If you look at who’s cutting through right now? It’s really good. Chappell [Roan], Sabrina [Carpenter], Charli [XCX] . . . the thing I love about those three people [is] they’re all stories of people who have been fucking at it. Real artists . . . It’s a culture that’s been marketed to so fucking heavily that you can’t really market to people any more,” he says, speaking intensely now.
“As hard as it can be to make, the formula is actually very simple, which is: don’t make anything that you wouldn’t die for. Like, die on the hill of that work,” he says. “It sounds pandering, like bullshit, but my life is very, very little planning ahead.”
We only have a few minutes left, and I can no longer avoid it: it’s time to broach the backlash to the Great Antonoff-Swift Era.
I bring up a withering New York Times review of Swift’s latest album, which calls the Swift-Antonoff musical universe “stale”. He tenses a bit, instantly knowing what I’m talking about, then smiles sheepishly before responding: “Nah, I don’t give a shit . . . My shit ages well, it ages remarkably well.”
After a pause, he adds: “It’s funny because . . . I don’t think I’ve ever really had anything be perceived the way I feel.” I ask him to try to distil what making an album really feels like in his brain.
“You’re hearing sounds, and your words and emotions are connected to feelings, and then you tap into instruments, and you’ve charted a whole world for yourself, right? Cool. That’s that process. And then it’s almost like we’re old pen pals, the audience and the artist, and we only talk every two years.”
Throughout lunch I’ve discovered that Antonoff has opinions about the music industry, and a lot of them are negative. He repeatedly compares the music business to the US Republican party (“You look at it and you’re like, it can’t be this insane. But it is”).
He calls the state of live music “so dark . . . I mean, has there ever been a more obvious monopoly?” he asks, laughing. “I know this from the inside, that when you put a show on sale, you have to work so hard to say, like, no, no, no no, obviously no dynamic pricing, obviously no weird gold thing, just sell the motherfucking ticket for what we say is fair. It’s scam after scam after scam after scam.”
What does he think of song management investor Hipgnosis? Antonoff was one of the lucky — or perhaps shrewd — musicians who sold their catalogue to Merck Mercuriadis back in 2019, when the controversial mogul was offering big piles of cash for songbooks. Hipgnosis would later turn into a slow-motion car crash of shareholder disputes and “strategic reviews”.
“I was experimenting,” Antonoff says, clarifying that he sold “a piece of” his catalogue.
“I love Merck and Hipgnosis,” he adds. “There’s not a person I know whose mind on the value of a song wasn’t changed by him.
“This is why I think that a lot of feathers were ruffled [by Merck] . . . The value of music in the streaming era is really serious, and I’m really tired of the artist always being the one to get fucked first.”
Our time is up and Antonoff leaps up, checks whether it’s “illegal” for me to pay for lunch, and bids me goodbye with a “nice to meet you”.
I pay the bill and head out to the street. Antonoff has already disappeared inside Electric Lady, but a handful of people are standing out front. A few girls wearing leather bomber jackets linger, giggling, and then take a photo of the studio door.
Anna Nicolaou is the FT’s US media editor
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