The New Yorker Radio Hour - Jack Antonoff on Growing up Jersey

Episode Date: August 3, 2021

Jack Antonoff has had a busy pandemic. Sought out by Taylor Swift as a producer, he ultimately made two records for her—one of which, “Folklore,” won the Grammy for Album of the Year. He also worked on albums for Lorde, Lana Del Rey, and Clairo that are out or forthcoming this year. And Antonoff just released his own new record, “Take The Sadness out of Saturday Night,” his third album with the band Bleachers. It’s music for driving fast down the highway—heavy on the horns, the power chords, and the emotions. But, like his fellow New Jerseyan Bruce Springsteen, Antonoff tells intensely personal stories in his anthems. He talks with David Remnick about how growing up in the suburbs inspired him, and about a death in his family that shaped his songwriting. New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Jack Antonoff is a very busy man. In the midst of the long pandemic, Antonoff co-wrote and co-produced not one but two albums with Taylor Swift. And one of those, folklore, won the Grammy for Album of the Year. Antonoff was also hard at work producing other albums for Lord, Lana Del Rey, and Enclero, all of which are out this year. And the producer also has a record of his own coming out. The album is called Take the Sadness Out of Saturday Night.

And it's his third with the band, Bleachers. It's the kind of music you want from a Jersey guy. Music you can blast while driving fast down the turnpike, heavy on the horns, and the big emotions. I spoke with Antonoff recently, and he was in his home studio, guitars and recording gear all over the place. And in the corner, the bust. of a former president. Was that John Kennedy?

Yeah, yeah. My dad had this Kennedy bus in the house. So it's you in the Oval Office have that? Yeah, it's a really good vibe. Now, Jack, you have a new album. It's called Take the Sadness Out of Saturday Night. It makes me want to ask how are your Saturday nights right now. How has the pandemic treated you and your work? I've been okay.

I wonder if you can relate as a writer where it's like, like I drift into spaces that were always alone spaces. And so a lot of my life in the pandemic was this knowledge of how intensely the world had changed, but my body was doing the same thing. You know, this room, I'm in right now. I'm in the door shuts and that's that. But the pandemic was like, look, I think it was a wonderful, it was devastating, but the one mega upside was it kind of hit the gas on this feeling that's been bubbling of the futures here,

and we're all bored out of our minds, you know. Everyone's got a personal assistant on their phone. I want a burger it comes. Martin Scorsese makes movies for me on Netflix. You know, I sit home and it all gets pumped in. And all of a sudden, no matter where you sit, whoever you are, on any spectrum of politics, class, religion, anything, you can't find a person who's like,

my ideal Saturday night is to watch Netflix and order food. You know, we're... So I think that's good because I think that the whole... The future's here and we kind of want to walk into... traffic is good to recognize. Now, you tweeted that you felt very heavy about this album. What did you mean? Where's that Wade coming from?

I spent so much time writing about grief and loss. My sister died when I was 18. It's a very singular experience, this tragic experience in my life, and it took me years to realize the space around it, which I think is an interesting trapdoor with trauma. I noticed it with friends. especially if you're young or, you know, I was 18 as a form of time, it just, it becomes the rug in which everything gets swept under.

Everything is, well, your sister died, your sister died, your sister died, or this trauma, this tragedy. And I think this thing happens where you become like sort of a personal genius in one language of grief. But like an infant and everything else, all those years that my friends were examining themselves and their tendencies and their parents, I was just sort of like, anything dark with me is from this trauma.

But that's not true. And that's actually a really dangerous place. To be crude, do you mean it was an excuse or a catch-all in some way? Yeah, it is. And this album got really heavy for me because for the first time, I knew I wasn't going to write another batch of songs about grief because it's something that lives you forever, but I felt like I'd explored it.

So then I started exploring all these other things. And this is where, you know... What did you feel you were exploring in this album? all the things I missed because I kicked everything under the rug of grief. And what are we including there? I mean, not to be too broad, but the way, why I'm this way, my tendencies, the systems in my family that don't work, the ones that do, just, I came to take the Saturday night because what I started to realize is that there's an evil eye.

It might be Jewish, might be cultural, might be my specific family. there's a darkness that hangs pretty intensely. And I want more out of my life. And I want to break into the next phase of my life. And that's weird. So I kept seeing this image of a doorway. And there's all this hope and joy on the other side, right? There's all this frustration and anxiety of like,

sometimes it's literal, like, you're holding this bag in. It's like, you can't take it all through it. It doesn't work. I do not get through this door with all this shit. I know that. You know, I wrote songs called, like, How Dare You Want More? I was just going to ask you about this. Tell me about that song.

That song came from letting go of some anger towards my parents. Because I found some things out. And when I started to really look at their relationship and our home life and, you know, nothing horrible, but just stuff in which I'm like, God, you put this crap on me and I've got to live with it. It's the reason why I have all this trouble. And, you know, after some time, I started to say, no, these are human characters who want more, you know. And I'm not talking about money. I'm not talking about a bigger house, obviously.

I'm talking about more. you know, more out of your life and the things you really desire. So much darkness wrapped up in that for people. There's no amount of sort of work success that ever makes one feel better about these like big rubs in their personal life. They're just separate. And they're just separate. You worked with Bruce Springsteen on one of these songs.

And he has talked about, I mean, late in his career, he's talked about battling with depression for year after year and comes and goes, but he didn't really confront it until middle age. Is that useful to you to talk to other musicians who are older than you, not just about the music, but about the experience of this seeming ideal creative life, successful creative life,

and the realities of when you come home from the performance? Remarkably important to me. I would call it, like soul saving Bruce and Patty are incredibly I've touched on a little bit here and there but incredibly important figures in my life because there's a lot of people

who have great careers and there's a lot of people who have really you know kind of like great robustly vulnerable personal lives there are very few people who can hold both and if you're out there trying to have both which I am you know this is a certain shame that even comes in saying that

How dare you want more? Man, you better find some people to believe in. I'm talking with Jack Antio. And his new record is called Take the Sadness Out of Saturday Night. More in a moment. Yeah, we both have to fess up. We grew up in neighboring towns.

You were a little bit after me. Of course, you and Wickcliffe Lake and me in a town nearby called Hillsdale. And that turf, which I was growing up there, which I thought of was terribly boring, couldn't wait to leave, you know, get me to New York as soon as possible. What did that turf give you in your creative life? Well, I felt the same way.

It gave me boredom, which gave me dreams. You know, I always, you know, we're obviously diving deep into a lot of like Springsteen culture, but one of the reasons why his work means so much to me is, there's a fine line between loving music and hearing yourself and your experience. I mean, when I heard it started with him, he's the architect of it, then it was the local scene and all the other great. music from the shore that I started to discover. You know, first of all, it's the literal landscape.

You're here in streets and places you know. But it's this feeling that there isn't really a word for. You could say outside the window of the party. You could say younger brother. You could make the medieval comparison calling the Hudson River remote. But it's deeper. It's, you know, it's our culture. It's we are not there, but we are right there, which is, it's not small town thinking.

It's a whole, I mean, let's look at it scientifically. how much energy is coming off of New York City and then dying as it hits New Jersey. I think we grew up in the sort of like metaphorical ash of energy. All of New Jersey would be thrilled to hear it. But here's the thing, you know, how much beauty is that created? I mean, let's look at New York music, right? Velvet Underground, strokes, right? Reporting from the center of the world.

It's all been there, done that. The first stroke record when I was younger came out was called Is This It? question mark. You know, let's let's let's let's uh compare and contrast is this it with born to run. You know, like I mean, and it's true in my life. The kids I met, I just wanted to be in the city. I wanted to be a New York City band. I wanted to be around it.

I fucking grew up knowing every band that was playing in the city that night and not not being there. Yeah. But it creates darkness and it creates a lot of hope. It creates dreams. There's somewhere to go. it's almost like people who have a very successful father seem to have a tough time. And I feel like growing up in New Jersey, I had nowhere to, and I was lucky.

You know, we never worried about food on the table. You could look it up. It's a nice town. We had a nice house. I played tee ball. I went to Jewish school. Like, you know, our worries were not deep. But I never thought that I couldn't outdo my upbringing.

Now, what has stunned me musically about you over time? And I, is how much music and musical styles you've incorporated into your, into your work. As a musician, as a producer, how does that happen? Did you grow up liking music, country music, for example? Well, yes and no, because I look back, well, my dad, the interesting story of my dad, is a ragtime musician named Reverend Gary Davis. Guitar player. Guitar player, brilliant.

And everybody loved getting lessons from him, all kinds of people. My dad was one of them. Yeah. So I think it was Bergenfield, New Jersey. You could, I think at the time, you could go get a lesson from Reverend Gary Davis, which is crazy. Unbelievable. Amazing. So my dad learned into that style, and the style is very specific.

It's this sort of fast back and forth picking. It's really hard. One sec. Sure. It's worth, sorry, just grabbing this off the wall. If you can do this, I'm always impressed with you, but if you can do this, you're my hero. It's really hard, but this is like, so I'm going to play something really probably. that my dad plays great. It's like this kind of style.

Fuck, it's like, oh, okay. So it's that kind of, and that's a... See, if I could do that, I would die happy, immediately. But then, yeah, so the level, if you see my dad do it, it's a, it's a language, this kind of playing. And it flows through you where your thumb is moving back and forth seamlessly, and you're picking in between. It's got all these blues undertones and just southern undertones, and there's even like this jazz to it.

Long story short, I think it opened this idea of me of just like, oh, like, there's different kinds of music because it wasn't just popular music flowing through the house. You're known not only as a musician and as a writer, but also as an extremely successful and varied producer working with other people. You've done albums with Lana Del Rey, with Lord. You've done a lot of this since your last album with Bleachers.

At what point did producing other artists really take hold for you. Well, the funny thing about being a producer, and I've only sort of, I realize this when I was getting into it. Like, if you're a songwriter, you can write songs. If you're a performer, you could probably find an open mic night and you might get boot off the stage, but you're a performer. You can't really be a producer unless someone admits that you're a producer. And so I always produced my own records and loved it. But if you do it for yourself, it's a little bit more like, oh, you just kind of make your own records. It's really that, you know, that lens that, that someone else sees you through,

where they're like, oh, this person can be my producer. And Taylor Swift was the first person who said, we made a song together, and I made it sound like everything I wanted to sound like, and she said, cool, that's that. And that kicked the door wide open.

Jack, one of the collaborations that is really knock me flat, and it also surprised me when I first heard about is you've got a song on the album called 91. Yeah. And your collaborator is one Zadie Smith. Tell me about that. That's your world. Tell me how it came about.

I know Zadie a little bit, and I ran into her near electric lady, which is in the West Village. And I'm sure you know Zadie. You know, she's not someone who's like high and by it. Sort of like high. And then five minutes later, it's like, and that's why this crushing weight is in tow wherever I go. And what do you think of macha? You know, it's a sort of, she's a heavy character. And she can sing, by the way.

She can really sing. And she loves music. So I thought, huh, you know, I work with people who are in music. Zadie's a brilliant writer. I have this song, which I'm having a very, very hard time with. What if Zadie helped me frame it? You just sort of give this unknowing permission where you make space for someone to be like,

you know what you could do there? And that was the story with Zadie, and she helped me put it together. She actually sings on a little bit. And the interesting thing about 91 is then I had this mountain with the production. I just could not get that song right. And it ended up being Zadie helping move the lyrics.

St. Vincent coming up with the idea of the strings. And then Warren Ellis, plays in the Dirty Three and the Bad Seeds, one of my favorite musicians of the world, playing those parts. And it made me feel like this sort of cast of heroes of mine kind of pushing me into the album. It's 91 o'Orizond. Watching black, white and green. Mama, the dances around like there ain't all rip in the scene.

All she welters with ghosts, I can feel what went wrong. She's here, but she's not just like her. I'm not home. Just like her. I'm not home. Now, you haven't played in front of a live audience, I assume, of quite a while, right? Once. I played, when we played Haddhry on Fallon, there was 100 people there. And that was my first audience in, you know, I guess two years. How'd that feel? It felt amazing. It wasn't my audience. I mean, there were a couple people, but, you know,

there was also some people who, I guess, were probably at the gift shop of 30 Rock and got handed tickets. So those things are always a funny audience. But look, I think it's that cliche, you know, the car hits empty and there's that secret 20 miles. My grandfather, who's a rabbi, used to talk about this all the time, about human reserve. And I think it's a metaphor that comes to mind about live music. There's no part of me that ever thought it could be more special, more important, that we could go harder. And here we are. My first show is actually on September 11th. and I know it will be more. I don't know if I will be weeping.

I don't know if the crowd will be weeping. I don't know if we'll disassociate. I don't know what the hell is going to happen, but it's going to be big. I will be there. I will make it a point. Jack, thanks so much. It's really great talking to you.

Great to see you, David. That's Jack Antonoff. Take the sadness out of Saturday night. This is his third album with Bleachers, and it's out now. And that's the New Yorker Radio Hour for today. See you next time. The New Yorker Radio Hour

is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbus of Tune Arts, with additional music by Alexis Quadrado. This episode was produced by Alex Barron, Emily Boutin, Ave Carrillo, Riannon-N-Corpi, Cala Leah, David Krasnow, Gauphin and Putubuele, Louis Mitchell, Michelle Moses, Annabelle, and Stephen Valentino. And we had additional help from Harrison Keithline. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina

Endowment Fund.