On February 19, 2016, a New York judge denied the pop singer Kesha’s request to terminate her recording contract with the producer Dr. Luke, whom Kesha alleged had abused her sexually and emotionally over the years that they had worked together. A heartbreaking, widely shared photograph caught Kesha reacting to this news with a heaving sob. Three days later, the producer Jack Antonoff tweeted at Kesha. “Don’t know what the legal specifics are,” he wrote, “but if you want to make something together & then leak it for everyone I’m around… or just make something and wait on it till that creep can’t block you anymore. standing offer …”
At the time, Antonoff was best known for his production work on Taylor Swift’s blockbuster album 1989 (most notably the single “Out of the Woods”), for being a member of the pop-rock band Fun. (who scored a massive hit in 2012 with the stumble-home-to-your-parents’-house anthem “We Are Young”), and also for being Lena Dunham’s boyfriend. Kesha did not end up working with Antonoff on her triumphant 2017 album, Rainbow (instead opting for a melange of producers that included Ricky Reed, Drew Pearson, and Ben Folds). Still, in a moment when women in all facets of the entertainment industry are suddenly taking great care to exorcise sexual predators from their lives and careers, Antonoff’s offer to Kesha now feels prophetic of a larger sea change. From Phil Spector to Dr. Luke, modern pop music has been built on a foundation of powerful men who sought to control and diminish the creative credit given to the women with whom they worked. But now, in this moment of widespread reckoning, age-old power dynamics between female pop stars and male producers are quickly reorganizing themselves into something that at least appears more equitable and humane. And this year, through a combination of savvy, talent, and sheer luck, Jack Antonoff was in a position to benefit greatly from this shift.
Although Antonoff has been gaining traction in the pop world for several years, 2017 was his moment. You couldn’t avoid his music if you tried: He was behind some of the year’s most celebrated and hotly debated singles (Lorde’s “Green Light” and Taylor Swift’s “Look What You Made Me Do,” respectively). He worked on the album that, in late October, scored the year’s highest first-week sales for a female artist (Pink’s Beautiful Trauma), and he also worked on the album that, a few weeks later, usurped that title (Swift’s Reputation). On slightly less mainstream turf, Antonoff also collaborated with the art-rock provocateur St. Vincent on her fifth album, MASSEDUCTION, cowriting and producing nearly every song, as he did on Lorde’s spectacular sophomore album, Melodrama, which just this week was nominated for the Album of the Year Grammy. I imagine that, at some point this year, Antonoff also got a few hours’ sleep.
Though he’s collaborated with female artists before (his first big hit as a cowriter was Sara Bareilles’s ubiquitous 2013 earworm “Brave”), Antonoff’s production work in 2017 speaks of a conscious preference for collaborating with women. “I write a full octave above where I sing,” Antonoff explained to Pitchfork earlier this year. “I think about Kate Bush and those registers when I’m writing, because I always imagine that vocals should be dancing on top of the track. There’s just a lot of melodic DNA that works better for women than men. … Also, my experiences with men and music have been in this really macho, intense, high-octane environment.”
What does a Jack Antonoff production sound like? There are definitely sonic hallmarks — arpeggiated made-in-the-’80s synths, cavernous choruses, and routine moments of pin-drop intimacy. But perhaps the most unifying force in Antonoff’s work is his ability to foreground the distinct personality of whoever he’s working with. Reviewing St. Vincent’s album for Stereogum, Gabriela Tully Claymore wrote that Antonoff has “proven himself to be very good at working with women who have a strong point of view, who will always sound like themselves regardless of who’s assisting them. Antonoff has built his career on being a friend; he’s the kind of man people feel OK sharing their feelings with.” She added, as a compliment, “Antonoff isn’t all over MASSEDUCTION the same way he’s not all over Lorde’s Melodrama.”
This is a stark reversal from the dynamic that has governed the last decade of pop hit-making, which has been largely defined by the so-called “track-and-hook” method favored by producers like Max Martin, Dr. Luke, and their many protégés. (“A track is almost a canvas with some background painted into it,” Billboard noted in 2015, describing this method, “and different people add hooks and a bridge and a chorus and slowly it becomes a song, rather than springing fully formed from the imagination of Burt Bacharach, sitting at the piano.”) Track-and-hook production has been wildly successful and also responsible for homogenizing the sound of the radio; it’s more concerned with chart-tested formulas than the messy variability of human emotions. Also, it’s hierarchical and decidedly male. “The track-and-hook method makes the producer the undisputed king of the song-making process,” writes John Seabrook in The Song Machine: Inside the Hit Factory. He notes, a few paragraphs later, that women make up less than 5 percent of music producers and engineers, and that a woman has never won the Producer of the Year Grammy.
Antonoff, on the other hand, describes his production style as less of a factory shift than a therapy session. He begins many writing sessions by asking the artist, “What’s the worst thing that’s ever happened to you?” and then working from there. (It’s worth noting that this production method is similar to that of Rick Rubin, who’s said that a good producer is about “empowering” the artist, giving them a “confidence boost,” and at times “getting out of [their] own way,” though because he’s best known for working with particularly masculine artists, conversations about his production work tend to have a different tenor.) Unlike producers of the Max Martin and Dr. Luke school, Antonoff does not write songs and then send them out to pop stars en masse to see if any of them are interested in recording them; he also does not produce previously written songs sent to him. This seems to be rooted in a belief (oddly radical right now in pop music) that the person singing the song is not interchangeable with any one of their peers. He prefers to be a part of the writing process alongside the artist, drawing deeper emotions out of them. In his experience, Antonoff has found women more open to this way of working.
“I just want to be around women,” he said in that Pitchfork interview, perhaps belaboring the point a bit too much. “It’s not a sex thing — I’m heterosexual, but it’s not coming from any place like that. It’s just a comfort thing.”
Antonoff’s method has drawn some career-best work out of female pop artists. But there’s also something vaguely unsettling right now about male producers who make a point of their good relationships working with creative women, à la Dunham’s mentor, Judd Apatow. (In fact, Antonoff’s relationship with Dunham itself serves as a bona fide for his professed role as a Male Feminist; in light of controversies surrounding Dunham, though, it also draws attention to the fact that all the major pop artists Antonoff works with are white.) For all of Antonoff’s talk about being a different kind of man, he is still a straight, white male producer helping female artists bring their vision into the world. Quietly existing as a male ally is one thing; building a public brand off Not Being That Creep is another. With Antonoff, sometimes those lines blur.
Jack Antonoff was raised in suburban New Jersey, with a view of the George Washington Bridge from his bedroom window. He grew up with two sisters: His elder sibling is the fashion designer Rachel Antonoff; his younger sister, Sarah, died of brain cancer when she was 13. (Her death, he’s said, is his own answer to, “What is the worst thing that’s ever happened to you?”) His music is often rooted in a sense of loss, searching for sounds that will provide momentary catharsis from depression, anxiety, and grief.
Antonoff cut his teeth in the early-aughts pop-punk scene. He went on his first tour at age 14 (“Half the time no one would show up or the equipment would be too fucked up to play,” he’s recalled, “but that’s when I fell in love with touring”), and his second band, Steel Train, was signed to the then-booming pop-punk label Drive-Thru Records. In 2008, Fun. was assembled from the remnants of that scene (frontman Nate Ruess got his start in the synth-pop act the Format). The band broke through to the mainstream in 2012 with Some Nights, an album that crafted Queen-sized melodies from the ambiguities of millennial malaise; what do I stand for? what do I stand for? they asked in a music video that recreated another generation’s war. The band won Best New Artist at the 2013 Grammys and then, improbably, went on an extended hiatus. They haven’t made another record, and with Ruess and Antonoff deeply invested in their respective solo careers, it seems unlikely that they will anytime soon.
In 2014, Antonoff started a solo project called Bleachers, which has not achieved the same level of recognition as Fun. Antonoff is a far less dynamic vocalist than Ruess, and on the Bleachers albums he often seems to be doing impressions of more recognizable indie-rock singers, alternately aping Win Butler’s yelp, Matt Berninger’s low croon, and James Murphy’s spoken-word deadpan. Buoyed by a relentless, sometimes exhausting optimism, Bleachers’ two albums, 2014’s Strange Desire and this year’s Gone Now, don’t feel like stand-alone achievements so much as sonic laboratories for the songs he’ll later write with other people. Swift’s “Out of the Woods,” for example, included a sample of the Bleachers song “Wild Heart.”
Bleachers’ music is deeply nostalgic for the ’80s — not just the sound of drum machines and Roland synthesizers, but for the feeling of how old Antonoff was in the ’80s, which was very, very young. (He is now 33.) “All the hope I had when I was young, I hope I wasn’t wrong,” Antonoff sings on the album’s first line; memories of his parents’ house and childhood bedroom are repeated lyrical motifs. Bleachers feels of a piece with a certain strain in millennial pop rock, to yearn not for a past that’s less teenage so much as less prepubescent — or perhaps just pre-anxiety. (“You were a child, crawling on your knees,” goes MGMT’s 2007 hit “Kids,” a song that, like “We Are Young,” became an accidental generational anthem.) But there’s a fine line between nostalgia and arrested development, and it’s the blurring of that boundary that makes Bleachers less interesting than the music Antonoff makes with other people. And yet, childhood nostalgia is another crucial element of his brand. On the latest Bleachers outing, Antonoff toured with a listening station situated inside a painstakingly detailed replica of his childhood bedroom, where his fans could listen to Gone Now “where it was most inspired in the first place.” It took a crew of seven people two weeks to finish the installation, which he described, “happily,” to The New York Times as “financially crippling.”
I’m sure I’m not alone in saying that one of my favorite musical moments of 2017 happens in the middle of Lorde’s song “The Louvre,” specifically when she tells someone that they ought to hang their love in that hallowed art museum “… down the back, but who cares, still the Louvre.” It’s a moment of casual, muttered intimacy that we don’t usually hear in pop music — it’s brilliant. (Max Martin, famously, told Lorde that her breakout hit, “Royals,” was an example of “incorrect songwriting.” It’s hard to imagine someone like Martin producing a song like “The Louvre.”) It is, singularly, Ella Yelich-O’Connor uttering those words, but I suspect that Jack Antonoff is at least part of the reason there’s enough empty space in the song for us to hear them.
Can I ever know that for sure? Probably not. I cannot be on the lot of the movies I watched when they’re being filmed, and I can’t be in the studio where the music I listen to is being created. We have a deep desire to know who deserves “credit” for creative ideas, and yet we are currently reckoning with the abuses of power and distortions of narrative that have resulted from adhering too tightly to the ideology of auteurism, which has too often given male creators a tacit permission to diminish the contributions of their collaborators and, in some extreme cases, treat them as less than human.
While promoting Beautiful Trauma, Pink’s hit record with two songs cowritten and produced by Antonoff, she was asked about Kesha’s allegations against Dr. Luke. (She had previously worked with him on two of her 2006 hits, “U + Ur Hand” and “Who Knew.”) “I don’t know what happened,” Pink said. “But I know that regardless of whether or not Dr. Luke did that, this is his karma and he earned it because he’s not a good person.” She went on, “I have told him that to his face and I do not work with him.” Artists like Kelly Clarkson and Lady Gaga have similarly suggested that they will not work with him again. Working with Dr. Luke used to be good business. He collaborated with Katy Perry on her record-breaking Teenage Dream, and his absence on her flopped 2017 record, Witness, is perhaps one reason it failed to produce a big hit. But now he’s created a void in the industry, sending some of the most powerful artists in search of producers willing to separate themselves from “that creep.” Antonoff’s rise has shown that, in 2017, being loudly anti-Luke is now good business.
In August 2013, Katy Perry released “Roar,” a midtempo fight song that was written and produced in collaboration with Max Martin and Dr. Luke. Many people criticized the song for sounding too similar to Sara Bareilles’s recently released “Brave” — which, of course, Jack Antonoff cowrote. You can take this similarity one of two ways. Maybe you see Antonoff’s sudden ascent as a comeuppance to the pop-music mathematicians who were more concerned with scoring a hit than coming up with original songs. Or maybe it’s just proof that the old boss sounds the same as the new boss: “Brave” had to sound enough like a Katy Perry song for Katy Perry (and her collaborators) to rip it off in the first place. Jack Antonoff is quickly becoming one of the most powerful producers in pop, although I don’t think that’s because we were looking for a new sound — just a new story. He’ll be the first to remind you that he was already in the process of writing it.
