This year Jack Antonoff won the Grammy for producer of the year (“except for classical music”, specifies the category, let’s not get involved). It was his third consecutive nomination for the award and his first win. Considering the devotion to the success of these awards that the American music industry bestows, it would have been difficult to explain that another candidate would have won it. Antonoff produced in 2021 Gold Rush de Taylor Swift, Chemtrails Over the Country Club by Lana Del Rey, Daddy’s Home of St. Vincent, Solar Power of Lord, Sling of Claire and Take the Sadness Out of Saturday Night from Bleachers, his own group.
In reality, the award confirmed what an algorithm had advanced days before: “Jack Antonoff is currently the best music producer in the world,” the list stated. The 100 most successful producers in the business by Jaxsta, a new website that presents itself as “the world’s largest music database”. According to this page, his algorithm decided that Antonoff is number one based on these criteria: his chart position, Grammy wins and nominations, streams of Spotify and physical sales. This is how Kanye West, Max Martin or Diplo were imposed on that list. Names much more known than his.
At the Grammy Awards ceremony, when his name was called, he came out elegantly dressed in a Chanel suit, but dashed and nervous. With that image that he cultivates in which he is all shyness and humility. He dedicated it to his team, his agent and his girlfriend, Margaret Qualley, the actress daughter of Andie MacDowell. And he ended by saying. I dedicate this to all the people who sit at home and do shit that they think he’s really cool and keep doing it and keep doing it.
Because he has been a millionaire for years, but he continues to maintain the speech of the nerd a music fan who composes in his small room in his parents’ house. To such an extent that on his 2017 tour he reproduced the room down to the smallest detail in a trailer so that fans could know where his sound comes from. The room in which he, he never tires of repeating, he lived until he was 27 years old. It may be that Rollercoaster, His biggest hit with Bleachers exceeds 115 million streams on Spotify alone, but he says his music should sound “like a person going crazy in a room alone, that’s what it is.”
This image of a misfit is becoming more and more powerful. When he was a guest on the Jimmy Fallon show three years ago, he appeared in jeans and a baseball cap, but on his last visit, 10 months ago, he was dressed as an elaborate Steve Urkel impression. At 38, this scrawny white man with oversized horn-rimmed glasses looks like a revamped version of Woody Allen. Allen grew up in Brooklyn but his life is Manhattan. Antonoff in a wealthy New Jersey suburb, Bergenfield, although he finished his studies in Manhattan, at the exclusive Professional Children’s School, a school founded in 1914 to educate Broadway child actors. His girlfriend at the time was Scarlett Johansson. As the director of Manhattan, Antonoff is Jewish, his family is of European origin and he easily verbalizes that neurosis that they attribute to the troubled history of his ancestors: “It is the thought of the Holocaust. The depressive mentality is in my lineage, because of the stories you have heard from your ancestors. And they tell you, “We went through that shit so you could play music if you wanted to.” Two generations ago, the highest form of success was not being killed”, he recounted in an interview.
He was just in his twenties when his group at the time, Steel Train, signed their first record deal. They didn’t do badly, but it wasn’t enough for the ambitious Antonoff to tour medium-sized venues with a band. emo. “Different things are accepted at different ages,” he confessed to Rolling Stone. “When you’re 18 and your friends are off to college and you’ve got a little record deal, you’re a king. When you’re 21 and your friends are planning their lives and you’re smoking pot in a van, you’re a loser. When you’re 25 and your friends say, “I feel a little stuck,” and you’re smoking weed in a van, suddenly you’re cool again. I wasn’t able to support myself, to move, to imagine a life where I could make music and not live in my parents’ house. And so it was until the age of 27. I had a blind faith, illusion, which I think is part of being an artist”.
He gets involved in a band, Fun, which he defines as “a side project”. But in 2012 he gives her his first number one, We are young. The success is colossal, but he aspires to do something totally solo, and in 2014 he founded Bleachers, actually a pseudonym for his personal work, which he defined as a group that wanted to fill the gap between Disclosure and Arcade Fire. From the first moment he received the support of the media. His music could be part of the soundtrack of any Yankee teen movie, from pink girl, until American Pie. It could be a song by a Californian pop punk group and Britney Spears. Others remind LCD Soundsystem or Interpol. His epic and colorful songs are always reminiscent of something, but you never know exactly what. That is a colossal talent when it comes to monetizing a style.
In 2014, Taylor Swift contacts him. together make up Out of the woods, which also produces Antonoff. He assures that almost by chance. “I put my heart and soul into that song. And just when she was expecting some heavyweight to come do the production, she said, ‘I want it to come out now! I can not wait!’. I asked him: ‘Are you going to leave it like this?’ and she replied ‘Yes, it’s perfect’. The success of Swift’s foray into the synthpop It was just the push that Antonoff needed, who had wanted to become a producer for years, but who, according to his version, stumbled over and over again with the distrust of record executives. “Overnight, you are allowed to produce records. That filled me with joy and bloody resentment because it’s a reminder of why I stay extremely detached from the business. They have no ear.”
But it was nearly three years before Antonoff was allowed to produce an entire record. After the colossal success of her debut, New Zealander Lorde was facing what they call “the fearsome second album”. The cliché says that an artist has a lifetime to produce his first album, but only two years to make his second, and that pressure, the business assures, has ended thousands of careers. Lorde turned to Antonoff. Together they composed and produced the entire album. They triumphed, in sales, but especially in reviews. For most posts that matterMelodrama It was the best album of the year.
From there everything came rolling. In five years the Antonoff sound has become the dominant sound in commercial pop, especially female. To the point that there are already artists who sound as if he had produced them without him having anything to do with it (without going any further, Olivia Rodrigo had to add Antonoff, Taylor Swift and St Vincent in the credits of Déjà vu to avoid possible plagiarism lawsuit).
This year a massive tour awaits him with Bleachers, he has been recording the group’s new album in Paisley Park, the studio that Prince had in Minnesota. And presumably he will be turning down hundreds of proposals to produce albums around the world. In 2017, the Stereogum website titled an article: In the future, all albums will be produced by Jack Antonoff.. Obviously it was a joke, but in 2022 it seems more like a prophecy almost fulfilled.
You can follow ICON at Facebook, Twitter, Instagramor subscribe here to the Newsletter.