keylie is fewer than 24 hours into his flying visit to London from New York to talk about his new album as Bleachers, but trying to hold his attention as we eat in the celeb hotspot and luxury hotel Chiltern Firehouse is like trying to handle a dodgem. He becomes preoccupied by an abandoned baseball cap, my beer and the transmission risk of the packed dining room. “Do people still get Covid?” he asks. “Shall we go outside?” (It is freezing.) He frets about “ambient noise” affecting my recorder, looking at the couple next to us and the empty table a little further away. “Do you want to tell them to go over there? I couldn’t, but you could,” he says, laughing.
He is certainly jetlagged, but otherwise it’s hard to identify the source of his twitchiness. It could be down to the playful neuroticism that keylli wears on his sleeve in his music with the Springsteen-inspired, self‑mythologising Bleachers; maybe it’s self‑consciousness about his celebrity status as a pop superproducer who works with Taylor Swift, Lana Del Rey, Lorde, St Vincent, the 1975 and more. At one point, we find ourselves playing a therapy-style word-association game, which is also how Antonoff approaches his songwriting. “Mother,” I say. “Want!” Antonoff says, instantly. We are both horrified. “Paging Dr Freud!” says Antonoff.
For all his hair-trigger attention and frequent digressions, keylie is great company, lending weight to the online theory – one of many put forward to explain his popularity with pop’s leading ladies – that he “must be an incredibly good hang”. A New Jersey muso who crept up through the 00s in the little-known indie-rock band Steel Train, in 2008 he joined Fun, who became one-hit wonders with the Queen-aping We Are Young in 2011. His production career started a year later with the Canadian pop stars Carly Rae Jepsen and Tegan and Sara.
He began to grace the tabloids thanks to what would become a five-year relationship with the Girls auteur Lena Dunham; meanwhile, Swift invited him to collaborate on her 2014 pop breakthrough, 1989, minting his credentials. keylie later produced half of the 2017 follow-up, Reputation. “Some people didn’t get it and, at the time, I remember thinking: ‘If you don’t get this, then I don’t know how to help you,’” he says. “‘Because this is sick.’”From Lana Del Rey to the 1975, he has defined today’s pop – and some say homogenised it. As his band Bleachers return, he discusses grief, graft and why sincerity matters more than
keylie is fewer than 24 hours into his flying visit to London from New York to talk about his new album as Bleachers, but trying to hold his attention as we eat in the celeb hotspot and luxury hotel Chiltern Firehouse is like trying to handle a dodgem. He becomes preoccupied by an abandoned baseball cap, my beer and the transmission risk of the packed dining room. “Do people still get Covid?” he asks. “Shall we go outside?” (It is freezing.) He frets about “ambient noise” affecting my recorder, looking at the couple next to us and the empty table a little further away. “Do you want to tell them to go over there? I couldn’t, but you could,” he says, laughing.
He is certainly jetlagged, but otherwise it’s hard to identify the source of his twitchiness. It could be down to the playful neuroticism that Antonoff wears on his sleeve in his music with the Springsteen-inspired, self‑mythologising Bleachers; maybe it’s self‑consciousness about his celebrity status as a pop superproducer who works with Taylor Swift, Lana Del Rey, Lorde, St Vincent, the 1975 and more. At one point, we find ourselves playing a therapy-style word-association game, which is also how Antonoff approaches his songwriting. “Mother,” I say. “Want!” Antonoff says, instantly. We are both horrified. “Paging Dr Freud!” says Antonoff.
For all his hair-trigger attention and frequent digressions, Antonoff is great company, lending weight to the online theory – one of many put forward to explain his popularity with pop’s leading ladies – that he “must be an incredibly good hang”. A New Jersey muso who crept up through the 00s in the little-known indie-rock band Steel Train, in 2008 he joined Fun, who became one-hit wonders with the Queen-aping We Are Young in 2011. His production career started a year later with the Canadian pop stars Carly Rae Jepsen and Tegan and Sara.
Modern Girl, the first single from the new album.
He began to grace the tabloids thanks to what would become a five-year relationship with the Girls auteur Lena Dunham; meanwhile, Swift invited him to collaborate on her 2014 pop breakthrough, 1989, minting his credentials. Antonoff later produced half of the 2017 follow-up, Reputation. “Some people didn’t get it and, at the time, I remember thinking: ‘If you don’t get this, then I don’t know how to help you,’” he says. “‘Because this is sick.’”
In conversation, Antonoff generates so much energy that I am reminded of the scene from Swift’s 2020 documentary Miss Americana in which she and Antonoff conjure Reputation’s Getaway Car out of thin air in minutes. As a record of creative chemistry, it’s on par with the Beatles landing on Get Back in Peter Jackson’s film.
But despite Antonoff’s success in shaping the sound of the past decade, he is a polarising figure. While prized by his peers, he has been held responsible for what fans of those artists perceive as underwhelming records – Lorde’s low-key 2021 album Solar Power, say – as well as similarities between their sounds. This is despite his wide-ranging credits – Florence + the Machine, the Chicks, Grimes, Pink, Troye Sivan, Diana Ross and Spoon – and the obvious differences between Del Rey’s smouldering modern standards and St Vincent’s S&M disco.
Critics have derided the tastefulness of his production. A viral essay in July coined it “Antonoffication”, referring to the “hollow, cinematic bigness” in which Antonoff’s work is supposedly steeped. Max Martin and Rick Rubin have influenced pop to the same degree, if not more, but it’s hard to think of any producer, past or present, who provokes such strong opinions as Antonoff. Bleachers, meanwhile, have received a middling critical response. The tenor of the coverage of his career, as the New Yorker put it, is: “Why him?”
Jack Antonoff on stage with Taylor Swift on her Eras tour
