Jack Antonoff on the “randomness” of creativity

For the last 18 months, Taylor Swift’s “Eras” Tour conquered the pop music world, and in a show full of great moments, one stood out: “Cruel Summer,” a song produced by Swift and her friend, Jack Antonoff:

It’s hard to overstate Antonoff’s influence on pop music. He’s written or produced some of the biggest songs with some of the biggest names in the business, including Lana Del Ray, Sabrina Carpenter and The Chicks. But his career as a producer basically began when Swift decided that he was someone she wanted to work with. 

In his last Grammy speech, Antonoff credited Swift as being the one who “kicked that f*****g door open” for him. “Literally!” he said.

Literally? “Well, metaphorically!” he laughed. “It felt so validating. Finally someone hears what I hear and isn’t afraid to just say, ‘Done. You know, press the records.'”

He’s been pressing a lot of records ever since. Besides his producing gigs, Antonoff is the lead singer and the soul of his band Bleachers. And he owns 11 Grammys, including producer of the year in 2022. He won it again in 2023, and 2024.

These days when he’s not on tour, Antonoff often works from his studio in L.A. He says a lot of it is “just playing around,” like the time he was on the synthesizer and found the Bleachers’ signature sound – a riff that became “Rollercoaster,” one of the band’s biggest songs yet.

He’s become a reliable fountain of hit music, but Antonoff said he never knows when the creative lightning is going to strike: “You look at the story of any album, any song. No one’s ever like, ‘We planned that day to write the best song we’ve ever written. We got coffee when we went in. And we did it. And that’s how that happened.’ The the story is always like, ‘So-and-so’s plane was delayed. And I got kicked out of my hotel in Reno ’cause of some s**t that this person did. Blah, blah, blah. So I’m walking down the street and I hear this … ‘  You know, like, it’s always this randomness. That buzz is where it all comes from. I just don’t wanna ever lose that. You never put yourself in a position as an artist where any of this feels normal.”

And there’s nothing even close to normal about Jack Antonoff’s life. Born and raised in New Jersey,  Antonoff put his first band together in high school. But success came slowly. In 2017 “Sunday Morning” visited with Antonoff back at his family’s home, where he’d lived until he was 29. [He’d already had a #1 hit record.]

He was back East again last week for a personal milestone: his band was playing Madison Square Garden in New York City, and the butterflies were kicking in. “Most of the time I actually – even if a show is sold out – I have such a level of surprise. That doesn’t get old.”

And talk about milestones: His first Broadway show just opened. Antonoff did the music for the play “Romeo + Juliet.”  “When I think ‘Romeo + Juliet,’ and I was doing this in music, I think about hope and love and finding something and running with it against all odds,” he said. “I always forget about all the death. And so, I started going back and sewing that into the score slightly, a slight, not knowing this, but hint that it’s gonna be horrible. ‘Cuz I forget!”

His own love life is less troubled. Last year he married actor Margaret Qualley. You might know her as the daughter of actor Andie McDowell. You might not know that she directed and danced in the music video for the Bleachers song “Tiny Moves.”  “It was real magic,” Antonoff said.

At 40 years old, married to the woman of his dreams, and possibly in line for a record fourth producer of the year Grammy, Jack Antonoff is on fire.

It feels, he says, surreal: “And it continues to be surreal because one of the only promises of the work I do is how fleeting – not the performance, not the audience, but that kind of success is. So, there’s never a moment when I’m not, like, amazed by it all.”

You can stream the Bleachers’ latest album, titled “Bleachers,” by clicking on the embed below (Free Spotify registration required to hear the tracks in full):

      
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Story produced by John D’Amelio. Editor: Remington Korper. 

Tracy Smith

Tracy Smith is a correspondent for “CBS News Sunday Morning” and “48 Hours.” Smith is a versatile correspondent who is equally adept at interviewing actor and comic Billy Crystal as she is going head-to-head with outspoken New Jersey Governor Chris Christie. Her work on “CBS News Sunday Morning” has included covering news, the arts, pop culture and celebrity interviews.