“I’ve been writing and performing songs since I was 15, and for the first decade I absolutely ate shit,” Jack Antonoff said. “[I did it] because I felt compelled to, not because the universe was sending me any signal that it was ever going to work out.”
In addition to the performance, Antonoff was scheduled to join Fallon for a chat segment. If writing about music is like dancing about architecture, then interviewing a musician can be like trying to tango with a block of concrete. Antonoff is a rare exception: eager to talk about the work, able to take a joke, adept at reading the room. He set his iPhone down on a folding table, waiting for a producer to call him for a pre-interview.
Her next question was about Springsteen. Antonoff looked up and raised his eyebrows: Told you so. The following question was about Swift. Another eyebrow raise, and a triumphant finger point. When the clip of Antonoff chatting with Fallon made its way to YouTube, it was called “Jack Antonoff Reacts to Taylor Swift Folklore Grammy Win.” “I can be a cynic and a purist all I want, but these people have a TV show to make,” he told me. “Album of the Year is something anyone can understand.
He didn’t take the hint. Instead, he started a new band, Steel Train, which transitioned away from punk and toward fingerpicking psychedelia. “I don’t disavow any of it, but I will say that I was smoking way too much weed at the time,” he told me. By then, he had transferred to the Professional Children’s School, in Manhattan, for kids who spend most of their time onstage.
Not long ago, I spent a rainy Saturday afternoon at Antonoff’s Brooklyn Heights apartment, which includes a home studio. An elevator opened directly into a big, airy space with wide, low tables and a grand piano. Rachel let herself in and out, first arriving in Lycra to use Jack’s Peloton bike, then returning in a sweater to stand in the kitchen and eat handfuls of leftover challah.
Last summer, after Kohl and Antonoff broke up, I started to notice the actress Margaret Qualley stopping by the studio. By August, she and Antonoff were tabloid-official; this past winter, when Qualley was in Panama shooting a Claire Denis film, Antonoff joined her there. Her co-star in the film is Joe Alwyn, Taylor Swift’s boyfriend.
The criticism of Bleachers can be even harsher. In the hours before “Take the Sadness Out of Saturday Night” was released, Antonoff did a live-streamed interview with Fantano, the online music critic. As a conversationalist, Fantano was easygoing, even a bit fawning. Closing his laptop afterward, Antonoff said, “It would be kinda funny if he was super sweet to my face and then trashed me after the album came out.
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