Jack Antonoff is defined by all sorts of things. By his upbringing in New Jersey, forever gazing upon Manhattan looming in the distance and dreaming of a faster, luckier, more successful life. By the death of his younger sister from brain cancer when he was a teenager. By his relationship with the writer, actor and creator of Girls, Lena Dunham, with whom he lives in Brooklyn. By the OCD, anxiety and depression with which he has struggled for much of his 33 years. And by his role in co-writing and producing parts of Taylor Swift’s squillion-selling album 1989, and doing much the same on the imminent new album from Lorde. Heavy baggage, which Antonoff trails round with him whether he likes it or not.
“I have self-hatred about a lot of things, everything else in my life, but not about my music
What he is less celebrated for is his work in his one-man-band, Bleachers. That will surely change. For Bleachers’ second album, Gone Now, is a stone-cold masterpiece that distils every experience Antonoff has had, every emotion he has ever felt, and sets them to music whose influences — the Beatles, Bruce Springsteen, Queen, gospel and electronica are just five in a very long list — result in a record that is like a compendium of classic pop. There it is, the p-word, that derided, patronised genre that music purists purse their lips about. And the music that has soundtracked all of our lives.
“I’ve got no problem at all with pop,” Antonoff says, recoiling — he is a notorious germophobe — from my hay-feverish snuffles in a London hotel. “I have self-hatred about a lot of things, everything else in my life, but not about my music. I don’t know if that’s generational or just me. My music history starts with what I heard when I was being breastfed. I think that’s why I have this closeness to the 1980s, to anything that sounds like Yazoo or Depeche Mode. Then you have the music your parents introduce you to, which in my case was the Beatles and Blood Sweat & Tears. Then I turn 11, 12, 13, and it’s Nirvana, the Smashing Pumpkins, Oasis. And then you’re some version of an adult. So I never had this thing of, ‘Oh, the f****** mainstream.’ Pop is pop — it’s everything. It’s like food.”
Threaded through the album are themes lyrical — loss, nostalgia, dreams, longing, displacement — and musical, both personal and universal, producing an effect that is as much novelistic and cinematic as it is compositional. “It’s about death, in a sense,” the singer says. “Not in a neurotic Jewish way of ‘I’m going to die!’, more like, ‘There are things I want to say, want to do, and I only have so much time.’”
Phrases occur repeatedly: “Waiting alone on a corner”, “I miss those days”, “Trying to find my way back home”. Two tracks — Don’t Take the Money and Hate That You Know Me — seem to refer directly to Dunham, while the closing song, Foreign Girls, stems from a conversation she and Antonoff had during the making of the album. I can’t, I say, work out why the track is called that when it seems to be about something else entirely.
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“When I started writing it,” Antonoff says, “I had this fantasy about dating a foreign girl, who wouldn’t know me. When you’re in a relationship, they know you, and that f****** burns. My girlfriend and I were laughing once, she was like, ‘If you ever break up with me, don’t date another writer.’ And I was like, ‘If we ever split, I’m going to date someone who doesn’t even speak English.’ You know: a moment of peace. I meant it as a joke, because she’s brilliant, she’s so effusive, but what I really meant was, ‘God, what a life, to be with someone that doesn’t know you.’”
The only point at which Antonoff gets vaguely tetchy is when the conversation turns to his collaborations with other artists. You can sort of see why: he’s spent “two years of hell” making Gone Now, poured his soul into it, yet people will likely either react with “The Taylor Swift guy, right?” or mention Lorde. “I used to see working with other people as very separate,” he says, “but I was wrong, it’s not. I guess I thought that out of a concern that people might jumble all my work together.
“I don’t get stressed about how a song will be received, but I do about whether it will be contextualised accurately. I don’t mind if you don’t like it, but know what it is. I didn’t produce a bunch of pop records, then decide, ‘Oh, I’m a writer.’ I’ve been doing this for 20 years. I’ve been on the road since I was 15.”
Pop remains Antonoff’s touchstone, the constant, beating heart of what he does and why he does it. Work is, he happily admits, an obsession, as it is for all creative people. “It’s not heroin or relationships that break people who do this sort of thing. It’s the knowledge that there is one way to do it, and only one way. It’s why you end up missing friends’ weddings — because you know that if you hadn’t shown up for that song on that particular day, you wouldn’t have found the key.” Which means, surely... “Yup,” he laughs. “Don’t date a writer.” Jack Antonoff: always with the defining.
Gone Now is out now on Columbia
