Jack Antonoff doesn’t stop. Between soundtrack work on Anne Hathaway’s new thriller Mother Mary and his producer role on Lana Del Rey’s much-anticipated album Stove, how did the Grammy-winner – famed for his collaborations with Taylor Swift and Sabrina Carpenter – find time to record a new album with his solo project Bleachers?
“I’m not actually quite as busy as I seem,” Antonoff, 42, jokes from his home in New York. “There’s this impression that I’m running around doing all these things, but I’m pretty chill. Time is easy to find when you’re compelled to do something.”
1. Worst habit?
So many come to mind! I have an ability to think I’ll be able to get places quicker than I can. And I know it, but it’s like this tick I have where I think I can fit in a bit more than is possible. It’s a problem every day.
2. Greatest fear?
Feeling like I’m unfulfilled or have no purpose. I’ve spent a lot of my energy trying to get to a place where I won’t feel that. In the past, particularly in school, I felt really unfulfilled and it’s a sad place to be in. I started my first punk band [Outline] around 13ish and that was when I started to find some relief, some ability to exist in a place that felt like the opposite of boring. But it’s a fear that’s still a real driving force for me, and something I have to keep in check.
3. The line that has stayed with you?
“You have to have the dream live in you, you can’t live in the dream.” It was advice I received from a friend around how to do this work and survive and not get wrapped around it. It hit really hard when I heard it. I remember thinking it was a perfect way to describe how to stay creatively vital but also exist in the world and not get taken away by all of it. Who was the friend? Eh, just a friend. Sometimes the best wisdom comes from the non-public ones.
4. Biggest regret?
I don’t really live with any large existential regrets. I have that belief that one thing leads to another thing and if something doesn’t work out then it makes space for something else to. But daily regrets are a constant. They’re usually something really stupid or small, like ‘I should have woken up 20 minutes earlier because it would’ve made things much easier’. Or, like, a lunch order. Actually, most of my regrets are based around food.
5. Tell us about your turning point.
I would say it was my mid-20s, around the first seeds of what was going to become the first Bleachers album. I was 10 years into making music, but I felt like I finally started getting what was in my head onto the records and it all got a lot more intense, in a good way, in terms of the work ethic and the seriousness around it. I kind of stopped doing anything else.
When you’re younger and in bands, people ultimately start to fall away. A separation begins between the people who want to be there forever and the people who are just treating it as a fun thing to do. I remember just finding myself more alone and determined.
6. The artwork or song you wish was yours?
Tom Waits’ The Heart of Saturday Night or Bob Dylan’s New Morning. They’re not necessarily my favourite albums ever but the way they exist completely as themselves and in their own worlds … I love that kind of album. The Heart of Saturday Night was an album I got into in high school. At that time I was really sad. I was dealing with my first experience of death and grief and I was also falling in love – and out of love – for the first time and Tom Waits is the perfect soundtrack for all that. He has so much sadness in his music but also so much romance and love.
7. If you could time-travel, where would you go?
I’d go back to see my sister again before she died [Antonoff’s younger sister Sarah died of brain cancer at 13]. I was 18 when she died and graduating high school – so this moment when you’re supposed to be flying, I was just on another planet. I was so out of step with my peers who were turning 18 and going on to the next phase of their life.
I had made the decision that I wasn’t going to go to college, that I would just play music and tour. I got a small record deal, which was incredible, and it felt like my artistic life was awakening. But I was also completely crashing out and burning emotionally. It’s almost comic how extreme what I went through at that time was. There are a few people who are dead who I’d love to see again but [Sarah’s] by far the number one. I’d just want to go and spend a day with her, knowing what I know now.
Bleachers’ new album Everyone for Ten Minutes is out now.
Robert Moran is Spectrum deputy editor at The Sydney Morning Herald.Connect via email.
