Take the Sadness Out of Saturday Night

This whole album is in questions. I kept going back to these really dark stories that somehow spin you around and you’re in this character, and you don’t know why this hope exists. I was trying to access that part of myself.

I’m always writing, and then at some point, an album will form or it won't—and when it starts to form, that’s when I chase it. It’s a window into how I hear music. I don’t craft records to be instant. I don’t craft records to be growers. I just craft what I hear and feel in myself.

—via Apple Music

Bleachers invited fans to send a self-addressed envelope to them. In response, fans were sent polaroids and pieces of music.

take the sadness out of saturday night is an album about banging on the door of the next phase of your life. all the hope that comes with that as well as the horror when it doesnt swing open. you realize how much you have to find peace with to be able to break through. starting to move in life is exactly the moment that you have to come to terms with how much you are dragging around with you and choose what comes and what has to be left behind. its an incredible time that can also break you. take the sadness out of saturday night is that story. from darkness into a glimmer of hope. and sonically from new york into new jersey. the story of going home to find the future."

— Jack Antonoff, via Instagram

In an interview with Rolling Stone, Jack said:

I was writing for a long time. The early process was, I got out of a relationship [with Lena Dunham], and I felt an amazing amount of darkness and depression. I fell in there. But the moment it starts to open up and you see a piece of light is a really amazing place to write from. There’s a lot of desperation in these songs, and I realized, “Oh, that’s the same feeling of being from New Jersey, that desperation of wanting out, of I want to break through into another part of my life.”

So that’s when I started to see the framework. And then a really amazing thing happened when the pandemic hit. It was like the final piece of the album, because everything I’m talking about in the songwriting is about sort of dreaming of a next place. For the first time, we were forced to dream about energy, which reminded me of being a kid for the first time in a long time, of dreaming about playing for thousands of people. That crazy energy is only something that can happen when it doesn’t exist. And so I got [my touring band] in the room. We kind of brought the tour to the studio, in a way.

Apple Music features an animated artwork for this release.