With no shade to anyone, there really is no other choice for Variety’s Hitmakers Producer of the Decade than Jack Antonoff.
Yes, he’s won the Grammy producer of the year award for three consecutive trips around the sun, but that’s just one indication of his culture-shifting collaborations with Taylor Swift, Lana Del Rey, Kendrick Lamar, Lorde, St. Vincent, Sara Bareilles, the 1975, the Chicks and more. And in a busy year that also saw Antonoff releasing the latest album from Bleachers (the band he’s fronted for a decade), he collaborated on three songs in this year’s Hitmakers Top 25, including Sabrina Carpenter’s “Please Please Please” — a song he and the singer co-wrote with Amy Allen. He also co-produced Lamar’s latest album, “GNX,” and wrote the music for Sam Gold’s Broadway adaptation of “Romeo and Juliet,” including the single “Man of the House,” sung by Rachel Zegler.
Surprisingly, Antonoff downplays his productivity, evoking the words of his idol, Bruce Springsteen. “This is one of the many great things Bruce has said to me,” he recalls. “‘If you spend your life making records and touring, that’s more than enough.’ He was responding to me reflecting on this culture where everyone has a million side hustles and fashion lines. I needed someone in his shoes to say, ‘That’s all you need.’” Of course, in Antonoff ’s case, “that’s all” includes dozens of songs that have deeply affected people’s lives, primary among them his extensive work with Swift.
While Antonoff had been working in the trenches for 15 years, recording and touring with his rock band Steel Train and later scoring success with the group Fun, his work on her groundbreaking “1989” album launched his career as a producer. “I actually would say she’s the first person who allowed me to produce, really, because I was already doing it,” he says. “The way my early collaboration with her came along was, I was making tracks, and she would write all the lyrics and melodies, then we’d get together and record it — it wasn’t that deep. And when it reached the point where, in the past, someone said, ‘Now we’ll hand it off to so-and-so producer,’ she just said, ‘It’s done.’ I was sort of shocked — and thrilled! I think that’s part of the reason why we’ve had such an incredibly long and beautiful collaboration.”
The pair have written more than 100 songs together. So how do they keep it fresh? “I never know what’s gonna happen next,” he says. “It’s always an off-the-cuff surprise — dinner at the house that turns into messing around in my little studio that turns into a new idea.”
It was a similar scenario for Carpenter’s “Short n’ Sweet” album, although Antonoff places the credit for the melodies and hilarious double-edged lyrics on the singer. “She’s incredibly funny, and she has this singular personality that comes through in her writing,” he says. “There’s a seamless, effortless vacillation between the most dark and depressing topics and the absolute silliest and funniest. Sabrina does a brilliant job of that: I mean, are these songs about being alone and finding no love and no one to relate to, or are they also about roasting a bunch of men in their 20s? Choose your own ending.”
As for what’s next, there’s a just-released Christmas song by Bleachers and a soundtrack Antonoff’s working on with Hitmaker of the Year Charli XCX for the upcoming film “Mother Mary.” There’s also his music for A24’s Anne Hathaway-led movie about a musician and her relationship with a famous fashion designer. But beyond that, Antonoff deflects, preferring to make space in the future for the same sense of surprise he finds in writing songs.
“I love it when fans run free with their imaginations,” he says. “When you don’t know everything about what happened and how it happened, you get to write the story yourself.”
Variety will have much more from our interview with Jack Antonoff in the coming weeks.
From Variety US