“Hold on to the memories, they will hold onto to you”
If you check the credits for the big pop records that have come out in the past few years, you’ll notice that Jack Antonoff co-wrote and produced a hell of a lot of them.
In 2017 alone, Antonoff produced two of the finest songs released: Lorde’s twisted ‘Writer In The Dark’ and Taylor Swift’s ode to lasting love and friendship (and excess glitter) ‘New Year’s Day’.
He also released the second album from his Bleachers project, co-wrote and produced Pink’s lead single ‘Beautiful Trauma’ (which we cannot hold against him), produced St. Vincent’s first Top 10 album (plus wrote a third of it with her), co-wrote Lorde’s massive hit ‘Green Light’ and produced her entire ‘Melodrama’ album (save one song) and began working with the criminally underrated Carly Rae Jepsen on her next project.
That’s a strong year.
He also broke off a five-and-a-half year relationship with Lena Dunham, who hinted at their dissolution months back in an otherwise gushing Variety essay, opening with: “It’s easy to forget someone’s magic when you’ve lived with them for half a decade. Their refusal to pick up their towels or get more seltzer or clean the hedgehog cage becomes a narrative louder than, ‘They’re changing the world with their passion and skill.’”
It’ll be interesting to see if Taylor and Lorde continue to work with Antonoff after he split with a vital member of their #squad, or whether work will be treated separately to relationships. It will be hard to justify such a distinction: the way Antonoff works is inherently personal. “It’s an intense album, and that’s what I care about”, he told EW late last year, about creating six of the better songs on ‘reputation’ with Taylor Swift. “The sessions were just her and I. She would come over to my apartment, and we would talk and eat and talk more, and the things we talked about turned into songs.”
In other words, this is personal art. It’s quaint that you can hear Antonoff squeaking on a piano stool or something during the intimate scratch track of ‘New Year’s Day’, which they kept because perfection is subjective. It’s quaint that in the liner notes for some of the biggest pop records of the day, one of the studios listed is “Jack Antonoff’s home studio”, which we can only assume is less “studio” and more “home.”
“My way of doing it is: I would never write a song for someone”, he clarifies later in that same EW interview. “I would write a song with someone. I would never sit down and say, ‘Okay, I’m going to write so-and-so a song,’ because that, to me, violates the great concept of art. How could you know where that person is going, when the only information you have is where they’ve been?”
That’s the type of quote you see on T-shirts.
Antonoff is also the driving force (along with singer Nate Ruess) in fun. who had a breakthrough album in 2012 with the theatrical ‘Some Nights’. Even as the title track shot up the pop charts, it seemed more troubled than the pomp of the Queen-style vocals and ‘Cecilia’-style drums suggested, with twisted lines like “I found a martyr in my bed tonight, she stops my bones from wondering just who I am” and the more pointed “who the fuck wants to die alone?”
This is pop, but it’s personal. While listeners speculate as to who Taylor’s pointed songs are barbs at, maybe it’s actually Antonoff who pleads for an ex-lover to “don’t ever become a stranger whose laugh I’d recognise anywhere”.
Dunham does have a very distinctive cackle, after all.
BONUS FUN FACT: Antonoff’s first band — formed when he was nine — was named The Fizz and had a song named ‘Last Week’s Lunch’ about the perils of discovering an old sandwich/banana has stunk out your locker over the weekend.
