POP IS NOT A DIRTY WORD
JAC K A N TO N O F F M AST E RS EV E RY T H I N G H E T U RN S H I S H A N D TO. F RO M H I S OW N G E N REJ U M P I N G FO R AYS , TO H E L P I N G H I S A L L- STA R BU DS SO U N D T H E I R T I P P I T Y-TO P B EST, H E ’S O N E O F T H E M OST I N T E REST I N G C H A PS I N P O P. Words: Jamie Muir. Photos: Corinne Cumming.
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never wanted to be anyone specifically, I always wanted...” Jack Antonoff pauses, halfway through eating a breakfast of mango slices and pastries, and thinks. After adjusting his cap and gazing around the room, looking to pull together the words racing around his head, another direction pops into frame. “I think about this a lot, it’s not really an answer to your question, but it just reminded me of something... “I feel like there are two different ways to be an artist and create, as in there are artists that make you want to be them and then there are artists that make you want to know them. For me, I never really loved
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anyone who was especially beautiful or slick and I just never wanted to be them. But when I grew up listening to Springsteen, I wanted to know him. He’s saying things that I feel and have felt my entire life but have never been able to put into words that I could understand. Or take The Beatles and the first time I heard ‘For No One’, which I think was the first time that I was heartbroken. I listened to it and thought, ‘Oh my God, everything I’ve been feeling for months about this relationship screeching to a halt - they just said it in three words’. I tried to sum it up in ten thousand words, and they did it in three. “REM, and the first time I heard ‘At My Most Beautiful’, was when I was in love with someone, and Michael
Stipe is singing about counting eyelashes. Like, If I said to you, I have this song that goes ‘I found a way to make you smile’, you’ll be like, who gives a shit? But the way he says it, and the music, and the fact that his voice is sort of dry and sounds like he’s just speaking to you. Those words you’ve heard someone say a million times - but in that one moment he manages to encapsulate every poem or sonnet or essay ever written about love in some of the simplest words ever written. “That’s the magic. That’s pop music at its absolute best. I could go on for days about songs, writers, artists, painters, movies - like in The Royal Tenenbaums where Margot Tenenbaum gets off the bus and ‘These Days’ starts playing with
everything else drowned out and in slow motion. Right there, the feeling of loving someone is perfectly captured. Or in The Godfather at the wedding where the old Italian guy is singing, and pure joy is captured. That’s the whole point, to capture these moments.” Like flicking through the emotional scrapbook we all subconsciously tie ourselves too, Jack Antonoff lives for those moments. Hearing that sound, that hook and that lyric at the right moment can change lives, and it’s an experience Jack has had time and time again. If ever there was a mission statement that could be etched underneath everything Bleachers is, then that’s it - an outpouring of the heartbreak, loss, dreaming and love we all long