Jack Antonoff’s new morning | PASTE Cover Story

I’ve been trying to get Jack Antonoff on the horn for two years. I panned Take the Sadness Out of Saturday Night in 2021, when I was a freelance journalist with few clips to speak of and a posture of “well, I need to hate something.” (I still don’t love the album, but I like to think that I would cover it in a less gauche way today.) So I figured that Antonoff’s people would be against any conversation between him and me, let alone for a rag like Paste in a time of Rolling Stone exclusives and GQ tell-alls. I wouldn’t have blamed his team for telling me to get lost. But when Antonoff announced Bleachers in 2024, I decided it was time to “figure him out” and better understand why he produced great records but never made his own Norman Fucking Rockwell! or 1989. I wanted to know why his live shows were heart-attacks but his Bleachers albums were spread thin. I wanted to come up with an explanation for why, of all people, he’s become the nadir of online barbs and music-critic snobbery. It was my self-imposed mission to come up with a proper rebuttal to Pitchfork’s “Jack Antonoff, Polarizing Nice Guy” article. 

I still have a complicated relationship with Antonoff’s music. In fact, his music actively frustrates me. He shares great singles and then albums full of holes. “Modern Girl”? Terrific, eruptive. “Chinatown”? Play it back. The deep cuts from Take the Sadness Out of Saturday Night? Forgettable. Side two of Bleachers? Too tame. Here is the most visible music producer on planet Earth, who’s established fruitful, multi-album relationships with Taylor Swift, Lorde, Sabrina Carpenter, and Lana Del Rey in a single decade, but has been unable to make a tape of his own with a shelf-life past New Music Friday. He volunteered to carry the Jersey torch when Bruce Springsteen’s no longer able, but he’s yet to produce his own Born to Run, or even his own Tunnel of Love. But I’ve listened to Gone Now enough times to know there’s an unequivocally great piece of art inside him.

Considering the diminished returns of Bleachers, I had my doubts about everyone for ten minutes. But the fifth Bleachers record, titled after an AirDrop setting, is Antonoff’s best release yet. It’s not a masterpiece, nor do I think it will persuade his loudest critics, but it is ambitious—full of synth-pop, bluegrass, and chanty rock songs that blister, celebrate, and tame the wild hearts of Antonoff’s past. “sideways,” the opening track, is handily the sharpest thing he’s done since Gone Now (I can picture every syllable in “show me love from the rafters”). “she’s from before” is a Jersey lodestar swooning with Upstate New York twang on the album’s downswing. Across the rest of the tracklist, Antonoff sings about “kids and their shadows” and his old bands, Outline and Steel Train Days. He tails the ghosts of his Eastern European Jewish ancestors, and eulogizes the bloodline he left behind to tour the world as a teenage bandleader. He honors the souls that shine up and down the halls of Electric Lady Studios, and waxes poetic about his recent marriage to actress Margaret Qualley. It’s an honest record, probably the most honest thing he’s ever done. 

My conversation with Antonoff last month was similarly thoughtful. Usually, when I write these digital cover stories, I spread interviews across multi-thousand-word profiles full of purple prose and careful stitching, to make every thought seem logical and perfect. But Antonoff—funny, generous, pedantic—felt best presented without much writerly interference. So this is the first Paste cover story Q&A and probably the last, clocking in at a length that no publication would (or should) ever reasonably publish. Good thing I’m the editor and certifiably insane. Last month, after a World Cafe appearance, hopped on a plane and endured its “symphony of coughing,” parked himself at his private studio here in Los Angeles, and gave his morning to me. The following interview has been edited for clarity.

Matt Mitchell: Was the title of this record a launching point, or did it come later in the process of making it?

Jack Antonoff: The last thing in the process.

Have you ever written around a title before?

I’ve tried to. I’ve always wanted to make an album called New Jersey Transit, for all the reasons you could imagine. There was a chance that it would be this album, because I had written [“sideways” and “the van”], which are very “origin story” songs. Then I quickly stopped being compelled to write that, and I put that away. Now I maybe have a different idea for that title, and who knows if it’ll ever happen. But with everyone for ten minutes, and every album I’ve ever made, [the title] is really the last piece—and it’s usually some kind of accidental thing I’ll see out there.

Bleachers records usually have a motif. “Rolling thunder” in Gone Now. “Wild heart” in Strange Desire. “Take the sadness out of Saturday night” reappears on “dirty wedding dress” in this album. “She was from before” repeats throughout. I need to ask you about that storytelling device—recurring phrases that span albums. What purpose does that serve for you as a writer, curator?

Those things create themselves, and they become touch points. Whether it was “rolling thunder,” “wild heart”… my first album, Strange Desire, I was searching for this thing so deeply within myself. I had no audience at that time, so I was casting this message in the bottle out to the world. There was this yearning, and that phrase “wild heart” really connected it. Take the Sadness Out of Saturday Night, that album was born out of COVID, and I felt so much distance from any kind of free happiness—not because I didn’t feel a lot of joy, but it was a time in the world when experiencing joy came with guilt for a myriad of reasons. So I was humming on that like crazy. 

This one, the concept that “she’s from before” and “only my people can see me,” the album is really deeply about communication and how people interact with each other, how I interact with people, and figuring out who you’re speaking to—what matters to you. My least-inspired moments are when I’m considering the “everyoneness.” If I think about my partner, or my family, or my audience, that’s when I get to really drill down and say things that make me feel alive. Sorry, it’s a very intense question. 

You’re talking about “sideways” and “the van” being these origin stories, and I interpreted a lot of the record to be you reckoning with and reflecting on your past while also building a future with Margaret. You have songs that deal with ancestry, hometowns, and generational shame, but then there are songs about falling in love, getting married, partying on the roof of Electric Lady Studios. If Bleachers was about “tribute living,” where does everyone for ten minutes land for you? Is communication the throughline?

Not moving on, but forward. It’s a really weird balancing act, and it can’t be reduced to “you got to leave it, get over it.” It can’t be “take it all with you.” It’s like a fucking ballet. You can’t just drop your trauma and shoot out into the distance. You become an idea of a person. You have to live with yourself. You have to live with what you’ve been through. But you don’t want that to be the totality of yourself. Loss is a fascinating thing. I’ve always wanted to write “i can’t believe you’re gone.” As I’ve gotten past the hyper-intense part of a great loss, it’s fascinating to me how you live with it. But then it can come back in its completeness in an instant. How bizarre that is. I think that everyone experiences these things, so the central theme is: What am I taking with me? What am I leaving behind? 

The way we all interact in this transient, shitty way… I’m leaving that. “dirty wedding dress” is a song about that: this incredible binary that we live in—probably because of the things we consume, of “leave this, take this, leave this, take this.” It’s so much more complicated, and it’s why I wanted to get into that origin story a little bit—because, sometimes, you don’t understand things until much later. For a lot of my life, I was like, “How cool that I chose to do this when no one asked me?” I loved that. 

Now I think there’s this other piece of it, that ancestral part. I’m sure you’re like me, or like anyone, where you go back a few generations and it was about survival, food on the table, roof above the house, partner, kids, start a family. That was the entire point of existence. And then I find myself at fifteen, leaving the house with these other guys who felt like I did, and it was magical and amazing. And I also felt really guilty, because I was severing this ancestral pact for me—this Eastern European thing that has all of its bones to it. But everyone has this concept of making art and living one’s dreams. Maybe this is getting better for a different generation, but that was very complicated for me, and beautiful. You ever feel that way?

I do. My family comes from deep, deep Appalachia, so I have to untangle a lot of horrible things. I shouldn’t have to, but that’s just being a fucking person, trying to figure it all out. When I was listening to everyone for ten minutes, I was thinking a lot about ancestry. I’m not Jewish, but I have Jewish friends who are questioning the life they were born into right now because of the genocide. This album seems like the most urgent thing you’ve made. You’re not mentioning Kobe Bryant in a lyric four years after he died. A lot of this music does reflect on the ancestral pact and breaking it, on top of making sense of your internalized and educated faith. How important is it to have conversations like this in your art?

They’re very personal. I don’t feel part of some broad continuum other than my family, which is why it’s so easy for me to see everything so clearly and be completely heartbroken and disgusted by the genocide. When I talk about my ancestral pact and my past, that’s a direct lineage of my people. I’m not speaking for a greater group of people. It’s how I feel about my parents, my grandparents, their parents. It’s this thing that’s in my blood, which isn’t about culture or religion—even though they went through a lot because of that. It’s about what they passed down and how it landed on me. I don’t think of myself or my family other than our experience. 

Part of that is… something was beaten out of me at a young age when I experienced loss. It felt very othering. I come from a line of people that did things a certain way. My father was a brilliant guitar player. He graduated college, he had to cut his hair and go work at the shoe factory with his dad. That was that. I’m the first one that broke that. There’s incredible power to it, and incredible guilt. It’s tied into the seriousness of what I bring to what I do.

Music is folklore—a tool we use to capture a life that came before us. Because it’s so personal, what are you trying to leave behind, for your children or their children to find?

The quickest answer is: I don’t really think about it. If I was to think about it, which is what I’m doing now, it’s like if someone cut you open and the sound came out. You know when you hear it. I’m sure you feel that way as a writer. Sometimes I’m in the studio writing a song—or I’m producing something, making music, anything—and it’s like, cool, that’s neat. And then something happens, and you can’t really identify why, but it just feels like the sound of you. That has always, in my entire life, been extremely powerful to me. I’ve talked about it in therapy. There’s a million reasons for feeling misunderstood: feeling unseen, the house I grew up in, a level of distance, needing to create my own world… I could go on forever. But the bottom line is: that’s who I am. That’s how I need to communicate.

So I would say, at the core, if I had to leave something behind, it would be hope and expression and communication. If there’s a way that you want to communicate with the world, do it—because that’s so inherently hopeful. It’s why I love songwriting so much. It’s why I love shows so much. There’s just zero room for cynicism. No one has ever gone to a show cynically. It would be such a self-own, because you went. We go through so much to be here. Everything is on the line, especially when you do this kind of stuff. No matter where you end up, you made a choice to say, “Hey, this might not work out,” and the longer you do it, the longer all those other options and Plan Bs drift away. You relish in that. It’s a deeply hopeful thing to do. It’s why I like to surround myself with the community I do.

It’s been a long time since you’ve done so much on one Bleachers record. On this one, there’s synth-pop songs, dance-pop songs. “she’s from before” has a fucking banjo in it. 

You never know what’s going to fit together. I started listening to Bob Dylan’s New Morning a lot. I found the [“she’s from before”] lyrics to be so sad that I wanted to jangle it up a little bit. So there’s banjos and twelve-strings and harpsichord. It felt exciting to me.

New Morning is my favorite Bob Dylan record.

Me too, by a landslide. And we’re in a real minority. 

“Sign on the Window.” 

Classic, incredible. The reason why I love that album so much is because he’s so vulnerable. He sounds in love. It’s really weird, because Dylan is often masking things and making you find the answers. His directness in New Morning is completely arresting to me.

In every chapter of my life that your work has been in, I’ve always thought that I had the sound pinned down. Then it changes. I appreciate when an artist does that, even if it frustrates me. I found myself frustrated by the last two Bleachers records. Maybe those are my own insecurities jumping out, but I’ll listen to a song like “Modern Girl” and think, “Well, shit, this is one of the catchiest songs I’ve ever heard. I can’t wait to listen to this forever.” Then I’ll listen to the rest of Bleachers and wish there was more of that. 

It is a much sadder album than “Modern Girl” suggested. But I get that. You give someone a front door and it’s gold and sparkly, and then they open the house and there’s a bunch of dead bodies around there. Bleachers, there was a slight rebirth to it—and I saw “Modern Girl” as, if we were superheroes, that would be our theme song. It kind of sounds like we’re superheroes. My intention was: if you dropped a person an hour into the show, when the whole thing is flying off the rails, everyone’s sweaty, we’re so past formalities and we’re transcending into this other place… can I start a song like that? It’s so much harder to record than I can even tell you, but when I heard it back, I was like, “Well, this is 1,000-percent what people need to hear first, but it’s gonna be a funny journey.” The heart and soul of that album is “We’re Gonna Know Each Other Forever,” which is, to me, devastating.

How wed are you to musical continuity?

Deeply. If you walked into my head, there’s a completely different reason for the track listing and why it is that way and why some things seem like they’re from other sides of the house. Not everyone’s going to take it that way. It’s made writing setlists and interacting with the audience really interesting, because it’s made our audience fascinating—it’s made them feel like how I feel on a day-to-day basis. Sometimes it’s “Modern Girl” and I’m running and shouting and everything’s possible. Then, sometimes, it’s remarkable, like you’ve been tased in place and you’re convulsing with grief. That was always the intention. The first song I put out was “I Want to Get Better,” and that was a really intentional thing—where I was coming from and what I had going on. I wanted to present a cliff-notes of my life in an awkward, not-dinner conversation—not obscuring and being cool about things, but saying what happened about dead people and disorders, coupled with pretty non-traditional production for what was, essentially, a resting folk song. That was my intention right at the beginning, to sift out anyone that was going to want anything less complicated. A lot of the things with Bleachers that have bugged me in the past have become my favorite things now. There’s an odd purity to how known I am for production, because it’s allowed Bleachers to become an oddly big band that still feels like a secret.

You’re selling out Madison Square Garden, but I’ll bring Bleachers up to someone and they’re totally unfamiliar with the band. 

I think, two albums ago, three albums ago, I was puzzled by it. I don’t long for much outside of my work, so it’s become a really special thing. We didn’t have a hit song or a viral moment and then just pop up at Madison Square Garden. A lot of those people in that room saw us at Bowery, and then Webster Hall, and then Terminal 5, and then two Terminal 5s, and then Radio City. I’m in a sweet moment with all of it, because now it feels like a weird blessing. I really love the people who see it all together, because that is my life. There’s not some big, drastic separation of “I’m producing a record, I’m working on a Bleachers album.” Everything’s happening at the same time, and I really like it that way. Everything is influencing each other—not sonically, but emotionally—so it’s always fun for me to talk to people who understand the entire picture. 

I was trying to figure out what the last real sample on a Bleachers record was, I came to the conclusion that it may have been the Norman Cook percussion loops on “Goodmorning.” Now there’s the sample of Blue Magic’s “Just Don’t Want to Be Lonely” in “the van,” and then Q Lazzarus’ “Goodbye Horses” in “you and forever.” There’s even a FaceTime dial tone in “we should talk.” 

The Blue Magic sample, which is the biggest one on the album, that was Mikey [Freedom Hart] from the band. He sent me that, and I just had this really intense moment where I was like, “Oh, my God, this is so strange that you’re sending me this, because I’ve been trying to write a song about the early days and I can’t find my way in. It’s not feeling right to me.” When I left for my first tour, we got to Philly and we got out of the van, and we were all just standing there, because none of us knew how to pump gas. We all grew up in Jersey, and you don’t do that in Jersey. “Just Don’t Want to Be Lonely” was playing, and I remember that so vividly. I had the feeling of, “Wow, me and these fives guys really don’t want to be lonely in a very interesting way, to the point where we’ll get in a van and drive around and play shows that no one’s even asking us to play.” As soon as I heard that song, I was like, “Oh, I’m going to tell the literal story about this literal sample.”

Outline and Steel Train Days do come up on this record a bit. And I feel like the M.O. you operated by in those days, being on stage as much as humanly possible, connecting with people in that way, is still the most present and guiding force of this band. What do you think is the most important lesson that you learned twenty-five years ago while being in a touring band? What does a text like Book Your Fucking Life mean to you now?

There’s a big difference between a true passion and being invited. Falling in love with writing music, having my band, touring, helping my friends out on their records… I fell in love with exactly what I do right now with those things before I knew that they paid money, before I knew that they led anywhere, before I knew that they were even an option. It was really beaten into my head that those weren’t an option, and that’s something I could talk about forever. Maybe that’s for another time. But the things that are really humming inside of you are real guiding forces. I would do this for free. I have done it for free for over a decade. That’s also a whole other conversation about the way artists are treated but, once again: another time. That real burning thing inside you that makes you feel alive… if you can find it, there’s nothing else that matters—and you’d be laughing in the face of God to not dedicate your life to it. 

But then there’s being invited. I’m at a point now where people ask me to do all these ancillary things. And it’s a funny thing, because you’re like, “Well, that’s interesting,” but it’s actually not. I’m really dedicated to what I really believe in doing, and the way that that shapes me is… it’s just no different, now and then. In many ways, everything’s different, but the soul of it is no different. The venues got bigger, right? The hotels got nicer. I have a lot of cool studio equipment. But, if you boiled it all down, it’s the exact same thing. I’ve never once felt cynical or bored of it. The person who started and the person I am now—and wherever the fuck I’m going—have a really unique link. They’re one person. I also think that’s a beautiful life, to believe in something so desperately that you’ll dedicate your life to it. When I’m around people who are like, “Ugh, I gotta go on tour,” I don’t relate. When I’m around people who talk about their exit plan, I say, “Exit now, exit yesterday. This is way too precious. There’s too many people in line. Don’t take up space.”

You really can’t say it better than that.

And I don’t, because it’s not my place. But I call them “weekenders”—transient grifters. Even to some of your earlier questions about anyone’s criticisms about me, it’s like: What does that have to do with me? It’s weird to even be wondering about that, because that’s for anyone. You do this not because of anything but needing to do it. When you go play Madison Square Garden, or when you’re at Nyabinghi in Youngstown and there’s no one there, it’s like your body and soul are doing the same thing. And I’m not minimizing how fucking thrilled I am that I get to do this on this level. I truly love it. But, I would have been here either way. 

If you want to hear the best versions of some Bleachers songs, you have to go to a show to hear them. I don’t think that’s a complaint. I feel the same way about Springsteen.

The core of why that is is because me and the band are not trying to play the [studio] recording live. You’re creating an impression of a thing. It’s like a dream, right? If you chuck a band in the studio and play live, it actually, sometimes, has diminishing returns. But, point being: playing live is the last fucking night on Earth. Only here, only now. Anything can happen. Anything does happen. And I vacillate. Sometimes I hear recordings of things and I’m like, “I don’t know, the live version’s got me on that.” And sometimes, when I get live versions of things, I’m like, “Man, there’s a soul in that recording that I want to rework the live version of to get closer to the soul of it.” But I love that. The aesthetic of “band” has become so popular again that, sometimes, it can be shocking to people when they actually see “band,” which is something that takes years and years and years to develop. It’s a shared experience, and the old days, the future, how you’re perceived, all this stuff… every member of the band is dragging that onto the stage. Six people equal a lot more than six people; they equal a concept. I do feel really bullish about what that means, to have a band.

If you only lived on the internet, you’d say, “Man, guitar music coming back in a big way.” Bands are having their moment right now, even if they’ve always been there.

They’re having a moment right now, which it seems like everyone’s doing a pretty good job of spoiling. But the bottom line is: everything has always been there. Go to a fucking metal show, man. It’s gonna be 100,000 people at some of these things. Everything is so fragmented that it feels hard to care anymore. I almost feel like this last death rattle that’s going on right now is a last-ditch effort to try to bring it back to the gatekeeper’s old days, but it’s just gone.

Does having a band this tight influence the songwriting? Are you ever consciously thinking about saxophone parts because of how good Evan Smith and Zem Audu are?

It’s almost the opposite. I would lay my life in their hands, musically, and that frees me, in a weird way. I don’t think of sax parts, because I’m like, “I’m not gonna fucking sing here, and these two guys are going to blow my mind.” In other projects I’ve had in the past, there was once a deep anxiety of “oh, no, no, it’s got to be this.” I feel the opposite now, and I’ve probably felt it even more than I ever have on this album. It’s like a fucking trapeze, man, and they’re like this giant net. I can do whatever the fuck I want because I can’t fail. They’re just the greatest band. I want to do ten backflips, and I’ve never landed ten backflips, but, sure, I’ll fucking try it. I haven’t had that in the past. The worst thing you can feel when you’re fronting a band is like you’re the plate-spinning guy and you’re running around trying to do it all. So when you let me find those people, it just loosens me up. It’s so crazy how I believe in them so much that I can go out on that limb. It’s the story of any great partnership. 

A word that I would attach to parts of your career is “anxiety.” You’ve even used that word before, especially when you’re talking about being in a touring band in your twenties. Anxiety has taken years off my life, but—

I know that it’s taken years off my life. I have doctors that can prove that.

I see my hair thinning and I know where it came from.

My head went white overnight, and I joke with my wife about that. Something will happen and I’ll be like, “I feel it changing my hair color.” 

I think the buzzcut has suited you well.

Have you done it?

No, I’m too scared.

It’s very liberating. It’s like, “What do I look like with nothing on my head?” But when you do it and just fucking shoot it right down the middle, it feels really good.

There’s that old wives’ tale about carrying sadness in your hair, that people get haircuts to feel less depressed. I buy into that.

I totally buy it. Change of scenery, change of view, all of it. 

What makes you anxious now, especially with Bleachers? 

There’s things I grapple with in life, and there’s things I grapple with in work and career—and those are often blended together. Some of these things, you want to let go. Then some of these things, you don’t. Some of these things have really interesting sides to them. The part of me that feels like I see the whole picture is also the part of me that sees all the things that make me anxious. But I like that. I don’t want to lose that. The biggest anxiety I live with right now, which is what “you and forever” is essentially about, or “i’m not joking,” is what happens when you get what you want. There’s so much to lose. It’s been the story of falling in love for me—how to be present and not let anxiety guide my life in a weird way, spending how many years of my life meditating on loss. There’s also a safety in that, because it’s like, the worst thing that can happen happened, and I’m sitting in it and I’m talking about it. You can’t hurt me as bad as that hurt me, so that’s that. 

The story of the band, story of my work, story of finding someone I want to be with for eternity… these things things come with a giant side of having to also hold imagining them not being there, which is the most uncomfortable feeling. Not to be overly poetic, but it’s a weird twist. You’re always going to be there, you’re always going to bring your perspective. You’re not going to get something wonderful and not grapple with the terror of not having it, but sitting in that doesn’t really let it grow. On my best days, I feel interested in the shit flying through my head. On my worst days, I would love to turn it off.

That’s all of us.

But I don’t want to sedate myself. I’ve been down that road in different forms. That’s part of the transitional time. I just want to live in it. I don’t want to vacillate between shutting it all off and feeling like my head is blowing off. Harder than ever. You feel me?

This album is such a “my people” album. You’re singing about Zem Audu, Lana Del Rey, Carly Rae Jepsen, Margaret Qualley, Outline, Lee, Blu, Rex, and a couple others I’m certainly forgetting. I’m drawn to poetry like that. Frank O’Hara, Kenneth Koch—writers who name the people they’re loving. The older you get and the more records you do, what makes honoring people in your songs as important as the songs themselves?

I noticed that my audience starts to recognize them. I even started that a little bit on “Modern Girl.” Sometimes, when you’re writing, it’s a device to have no one know what you’re talking about. And, sometimes, it’s fun to say it when you realize that people are gonna know. The deeper the relationship goes with the audience, the more space I have to tell the story. “I Wanna Get Better” to this album is a perfect example. “I Wanna Get Better” sounds like I’m screaming my life’s story to someone who’s never met me—because I am, right? It’s bullet points, and now they know me and I know them. The conversation deepens. Does that make the music less accessible for a wider audience? Maybe. But, I think you just reach a point where, when you have an audience and you’re talking to them, talk to them. And you can’t talk to them like they’re babies. They know you. You’ve let them know you, and they’ve let themselves be known by me and the band. 

At the same time, when I hear that shit—like Dexys songs—I just enjoy the sound of someone as if you were having coffee with them, not as if they’re explaining something to you. It’s how I’ve always liked to write. I think it gets easier the more I feel seen by them. “dirty wedding dress” just flooded with inside jokes with an arena of people.

It’s a good feeling.

It really is. With my family, it’s so fucking sarcastic. It can get so exhausting. Barely anyone gets a sincere thought out, because everyone’s talking so much shit at each other. We were playing a show once, and my dad came on and played a song with us, and the front row was just roasting me—and also roasting my dad for being short. I just had this feeling like, “Wow, we’ve created the thing.” But on a bigger level, in all its bizarreness and glory, it’s the relationship I have with the literal people I live my life with, and then the audience is stunningly similar. 

I clocked the Yazoo reference in “upstairs et els” immediately, and I know that Upstairs at Eric’s is an important record to you. Can you explain that meaning, since it encapsulates the finale of everyone for ten minutes?

On earlier Bleachers stuff, I leaned heavier into that broken-hearted pop—but, also, the odd, synth-texture world. The short answer is: I love it. I think Vince Clarke is as important as, if not more important than, all of the greats. The guy started Depeche Mode, led Yazoo, Erasure—this sound and feeling, to me, is the real bedrock of where everything went ten, twenty, thirty years later. I think he’s a genius. He does the thing that means the most to me, which is he plays the machine with so much heart and soul that it actually feels more soulful because you hear a human being desperately trying to squeeze themselves through the machine. I feel that way about Laurie Anderson and Jeff Lynne. It’s an incredibly inspiring way of working. 

But Upstairs at Eric’s… just that title, it fucking took me away. I always had this feeling like, I go to Electric Lady, I walk in the door, I walk upstairs. It’s an apartment that’s basically become a studio. I slip into a different realm there. “upstairs at els” is, essentially, like the credits are rolling. It’s not a bonus track, but the album ends with “i’m not joking.” I just wanted to have this moment of me and my people up there, because we’ve had some times up there that are just the greatest shit ever. We’re working on records, call some people, some people come down, we all hang out, we listen to some records, we hang on the roof. The culture of that upstairs is my life. I want to make some kind of documentary live performance up there—Bleachers records, other records I’ve worked on, everyone playing them together in this space where they all happened. It speaks to me, because it’s the cherry on top. You tell all these stories about love and loss and communication, trying to move forward, this and that, and then the whole thing just rolls credits with you and your people drinking on a roof. 

I can see so many of your songs just as clearly as I can hear them. Gone Now sounds like a play more than an album. 

There was a play, and I’m dead in it. Everyone’s like, “Why are you like that on the cover?” Motherfucker, I’m dead!

When artists become a “mega producer,” whatever you want to call it, I think people form an image of you and stick to it. I watch how the world reacts to you as an artist. You’ve become a scapegoat for fans who are too scared to critique their favorite artists, some of whom appear by name in “upstairs at els.” Their fans say, “Oh, Midnights isn’t good. That’s Jack’s fault.” Or, “Solar Power was a letdown. I know who to point the finger at.” Maybe that’s an imaginary clause in the contract you signed to be able to do this work. Maybe you have to be the punching bag for this deity-like pop musician that you enjoy working with. But when I’m engaging with your stories on this album, I feel like I know you better than I did two years ago. With all the shit that’s been thrown your way over the last ten years, you didn’t need to let anyone in, but you did—you are. With scrutiny and over-consumption looming over your work, and where we’re at with social media and entitlement, why let anyone in? Why write a song like “i can’t believe you’re gone” or “sideways”?

It’s about who you’re telegraphing to. I think one of the greatest misunderstandings about music, or art, is that it’s being designed for everyone’s pleasure. That’s never what’s happening—at least not that I’ve seen. When I make music for myself, when I produce records with other people, it’s only about making the thing that feels completely beautiful and transcendent. It’s that feeling like, if you cut yourself open, this is what it sounds like. I think that we increasingly are living in a time where I think it’s pretty clear that the whole thing’s been a scam. It kind of started as a really fun conversation. Then it became a fun conversation with really critical, interesting sides to it. Then it became the conversation. Then it became the conversation with some really weird shit going on, and then it got really weird. Now it’s devolved into a place of: You have all the information, how can you care? 

I have eyes and a phone, you know? I see the way people talk about you online, the way they treat your work, especially how you produce records. You’ve worked on albums I hate, but you’ve also had a heavy hand in albums that I love. That’s probably how the business works. 

My time on Earth is not a service industry. Things are really meant to ebb and flow. An album that wasn’t received great becomes a classic. An album that was received great is seen differently at a different time. You make the records that couldn’t exist if you didn’t make them, because they’re calling you. It’s the importance of what you’re doing in the room, and the joy and the intensity of trying to get it all together. There’s just no room for anything else. It’s not a place I live in, because there’s nothing there. It’s choosing your ending. Most of the time, I feel pretty overwhelmed with love and the intensity of this conversation that I have with my audience.

It seems like every artist goes through a period where they feel responsible for pushing back against assumptions about their work. 

There’s nothing more thrilling and powerful than just doing things you love and letting them speak for themselves. 

Whenever you pop up in discourse again and again, I always think, “How does this guy deal with this?”

It’s a dead conversation that, frankly and unfortunately, everyone goes through at this point. A lot of conversations that happen these days happen on platforms owned by people who are using money for terrible things, and the only thing that moves on those platforms is complete rage bait. We all know that, so who gives a shit? We’ve never been in more of a transitional period. There’s no person I know right now that is like, “Yep, here we are.” It’s a technological fact, whether it’s the environment or emotional signs we’re getting. A month from now will be different than right now. Writing music is always about pushing forward. It’s always about finding what’s next. I know we’re on the verge of something. I know I’m on the verge of something. I just want to push right through it, because it’s so terrifying and exciting. There’s a great hope there, and there’s a lot of people who want to kill that hope. It doesn’t seem to die in me. 

A lot of people ask you about the pop artists you work with, or questions about the state of pop music, and you usually say, “I have no good answer for this. Someone else should decide.”

I spent a large part of my career answering for what I was doing. Explain it, explain it, explain it. I always wanted to be a good student and wanted to explain it. And, in the back of my head, it felt fraudulent—because the part that matters, the part that everyone demands an answer for, is impossible to explain. And I think it’s gotten worse, because, in modernity, the big sales pitch that we’re getting is: now you can figure anything out. Do you want to be a falconer? Here’s thirty thousand tutorials on how to do that. Do you want to write the perfect pop song? Here’s how it’s done. And it’s so sad, because it’s the exact opposite of how it’s done. Trust me, I love showing people around the studio, interesting tape manipulations, or some of that AES mixed with the Masters kind of stuff, but if I knew how to turn this on and off, I would turn it on until my head blew off. The idea of capturing inspiration is something that can’t be discussed, and it often happens in the most random moments. 

I have been so puzzled by people who feel as though they can explain it, because myself and everyone I’ve ever worked with all live in this exact same place of “it hits when it hits.” We’re all praying at this altar of hoping it hits, and it never comes when you want it to. And it never goes away when you want it to. I find it to be the funniest thing in the world. I’ve deemed it in my head to be “masterclass culture,” like “tell us how you did it.” It’s like, well, I could, but that wouldn’t mean anything. I don’t know if watching Martin Scorsese explain script writing is the ticket. I think it’s being Martin Scorsese, and that’s a big difference between tools and craft and then the part that really matters. We spend most of our time here trying to forget all of the craft just to maybe uncover something that pings that feeling in you.  

So what are people not asking you about?

Many things. There’s so much great writing out there, and I’ve always loved conversations about music, but I do think, in many ways, everyone’s just missed the boat on me. And that’s okay. Bleachers is alive. No one made us besides our audience. No one said, “Hey, you all have to listen to this,” and then a bunch of people came running towards it. It was a secret club. It still is a secret club, and now it’s so potent and solidified. I’m always saying “Bleachers is for anyone, not everyone.” 

Every turn I make, there’s a group of people who are surprised. Like, why would you be surprised? I told you I was gonna surprise you. Look at the work. It’s all right there. I don’t mean that in a shitty way. I really love talking about things and I love talking about process, the parts that I understand and don’t understand. Press is just, at moments, the most unfun thing in the world, given the times we live in, but I also feel really emboldened to reiterate the sincerity of why this matters, specifically. For the first time in my life, what I do feels like an ancient ritual—and I mean that in a good way. You don’t have to make music in a studio anymore. You don’t have to have a band anymore. You don’t have to write your songs anymore. And I’ve never wanted to do it more. 

The destruction, what will happen to the artist community, can’t be understated. But, strictly from a heart-and-soul point of view, I feel like there’s this amazing renaissance in me and the people I know—and in a lot of people out there. It seems like the only people who are screaming their heads off that everything’s fucked are just a bunch of old guys. I crossed forty, and I’ve never been more excited about what I make, what my band makes, and what I hear coming out of young people. It’s so beautiful and brilliant. I feel this hopefulness to go out and preach this idea of, like, yeah, if you’re trying to optimize creation and you want to do it faster, go drive right off that cliff. Me and my people around me are happy to see you go. 

everyone for ten minutes is out May 22 on Dirty Hit.

Matt Mitchell is the editor of Paste. They live in Los Angeles.