The rumors of a a rift between Jack Antonoff and Taylor Swift have been greatly exaggerated. At least according to Bleachers leader Antonoff, who visited Howard Stern’s SiriusXM show on Tuesday (Apr. 28) to plug his band’s upcoming fifth studio album, Everyone For Ten Minutes, and swat away those whispers about why he wasn’t involved in the production and songwriting of Swift’s most recent album, last year’s The Life of a Showgirl.
“I only feel grateful for the work that has happened,” Antonoff said of his decade-long association with Swift, which began on her 2014 1989 album and has spanned 11 albums in total before she re-teamed with Max Martin and Shellback on Showgirl. “Maybe it’s only because I write my own songs and sing them, but I understand that need to have different collaborators and jump around.”
Antonoff, who has written and produced on albums by Kendrick Lamar, Lorde, Sabrina Carpenter, The Chicks, St. Vincent and many others, said his widely varied resumé is proof that jumping around is a totally healthy thing to do. “I don’t think it’s normal to have the same collaborators over and over,” he told Stern. “And when I’ve had it with people, I think it’s a weird miracle.”
Swift had Antonoff’s back as well in her interview with The New York Times for the “30 Greatest Songwriters” issue of the weekend magazine. “Jack Antonoff is a collaborator of mine and one of my best friends,” she said, bringing up the same example Antonoff did on Tuesday in explaining their special relationship.
“We established this thing that we love to do, and we call it the ‘rant bridge’,” she told the Times. “It’s basically like stream of consciousness, endless pouring-out of emotion, intrusive thoughts, blended with metaphor, with discussion, with shouting. You want this rant bridge to feel the most intense of what that feeling is that you’re trying to establish over the course of the song, and you want it to be kind of a crescendo.”
In Antonoff’s explanation to Stern, the “rant bridge” was key to such Swift hits as “Cruel Summer,” which he explained came together thusly: “You spend a whole song — verse and chorus — you know, being super poetic and dancing around something … and then you get to this bridge, and you just crash the f–k out. At that point you’ve earned it, so it’s almost like you can be so free. It’s something that I feel like is one of our very special things … We kind of egg each other on.”
Antonoff also touched on his very Jersey upbringing, the song he considers to be the greatest recording ever made (the Beatles’ “Happiness Is a Warm Gun”), how his former band Fun.’s biggest hit, “We Are Young,” nearly ended up on the Kanye West/Jay-Z Watch the Throne album, as well as the song he wrote for his high school sweetheart, actress Scarlett Johansson and the love-at-first-sight meet-cute with his wife, actress Margaret Qualley.
Check out Antonoff on Stern below.
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