When the world gets too loud, Jack Antonoff turns to Bleachers : World Cafe Words and Music Podcast

The internet seems to have a lot of opinions about Jack Antonoff’s production style. Many of those takes, respectfully, are baloney.

“Almost everything I’ve ever read about myself is not just a couple of inaccuracies, but like massively fraught,” he tells World Cafe.

Antonoff is talking about a video that made the rounds a few years ago, where a content creator tried to guess whether certain songs were produced by the New Jersey native within mere seconds.

“Part of me wanted to be, like, ‘A bunch of these songs you identified, the part you identified, I never touched’,” he says.

Such ardent scrutiny over his music production comes, in part, from his list of high-profile collaborators: Lorde, Lana Del Rey, Clairo, Carly Rae Jepsen, Taylor Swift. The list goes on and on.

Rather than stoking the digital flames, the Bleachers frontman minds his business. He prefers to maintain a level of mystery around his craft. That’s why his band is so important to him. It’s a place for Antonoff to turn to when the world gets a little too loud.

“It’s just really hard to care about anything but what you care about the most, so it felt like a really nice time to make an album,” he says about the band’s self-titled fourth album. “Every signal that I was receiving was sort of, like, nothing here is worth believing in, so just look completely inward.”

In this session, Antonoff and the band join us for a session in front of a live audience. He talks about his actual ethos for music production; why he keeps coming back to making music for himself; and why he’s not that concerned with artificial intelligence in the music industry.

Plus, Bleachers perform songs from across their discography.

This episode of World Cafe was produced and edited by Kimberly Junod. The web story was created by Miguel Perez. Our engineer is Chris Williams. Our programming and booking coordinator is Chelsea Johnson and our line producer is Will Loftus.