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I\u2019ve been trying to get Jack Antonoff on the horn for two years. I <\/span>panned<\/span><\/a> Take the Sadness Out of Saturday Night<\/span><\/i> in 2021, when I was a freelance journalist with few clips to speak of and a posture of \u201cwell, I need to hate <\/span>something.<\/span><\/i>\u201d (I still don\u2019t love the album, but I like to think that I would cover it in a less gauche way today.) So I figured that Antonoff\u2019s people would be against any conversation between him and me, let alone for a rag like <\/span>Paste <\/span><\/i>in a time of <\/span>Rolling Stone <\/span><\/i>exclusives and <\/span>GQ <\/span><\/i>tell-alls. I wouldn\u2019t have blamed his team for telling me to get lost. But when Antonoff announced <\/span>Bleachers <\/span><\/i>in 2024, I decided it was time to \u201cfigure him out\u201d and better understand why he <\/span>produced <\/span><\/i>great records but never made his own <\/span>Norman Fucking Rockwell! <\/span><\/i>or <\/span>1989<\/span><\/i>. 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\u2019s become the nadir of online barbs and music-critic snobbery. It was my self-imposed mission to come up with a proper rebuttal to <\/span>Pitchfork<\/span><\/i>\u2019s \u201cJack Antonoff, Polarizing Nice Guy\u201d <\/span>article<\/span><\/a>.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n I still have a complicated relationship with Antonoff\u2019s music. In fact, his music actively frustrates me. He shares great singles and then albums full of holes. \u201cModern Girl\u201d? Terrific, eruptive. \u201cChinatown\u201d? Play it back. The deep cuts from <\/span>Take the Sadness Out of Saturday Night<\/span><\/i>? Forgettable. Side two of <\/span>Bleachers<\/span><\/i>? Too tame. Here is the most visible music producer on planet Earth, who\u2019s 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\u2019s no longer able, but he\u2019s yet to produce his own <\/span>Born to Run<\/span><\/i>, or even his own <\/span>Tunnel of Love<\/span><\/i>. But I\u2019ve listened to <\/span>Gone Now <\/span><\/i>enough times to know there\u2019s an unequivocally great piece of art inside him.<\/span><\/p>\n Considering the diminished returns of <\/span>Bleachers<\/span><\/i>, I had my doubts about <\/span>everyone for ten minutes<\/span><\/i>. But the fifth Bleachers record, titled after an AirDrop setting, is Antonoff\u2019s best release yet. It\u2019s not a masterpiece, nor do I think it will persuade his loudest critics, but it is ambitious\u2014full of synth-pop, bluegrass, and chanty rock songs that blister, celebrate, and tame the wild hearts of Antonoff\u2019s past. \u201csideways,\u201d the opening track, is handily the sharpest thing he\u2019s done since <\/span>Gone Now <\/span><\/i>(I can picture every syllable in \u201cshow me love from the rafters\u201d). \u201cshe\u2019s from before\u201d is a Jersey lodestar swooning with Upstate New York twang on the album\u2019s downswing. Across the rest of the tracklist, Antonoff sings about \u201ckids and their shadows\u201d 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\u2019s an honest record, probably the most honest thing he\u2019s ever done.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n 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\u2014funny, generous, pedantic\u2014felt best presented without much writerly interference. So this is the first <\/span>Paste <\/span><\/i>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\u2019m the editor and<\/span> certifiably insane. Last month, after a World Cafe appearance, hopped on a plane and endured its \u201csymphony of coughing,\u201d parked himself at his private studio here in Los Angeles, and gave his morning to me.\u00a0<\/span>The following interview has been edited for clarity.<\/span><\/p>\n