Jack Antonoff on Divorce, Ticket Prices and the Cost of Confession

Jack Antonoff is on a US tour singing songs about a marriage that has already ended. Weeks before he and actor Margaret Qualley announced their split, Bleachers released an album full of tributes to her and to marriage itself — including the track You and Forever, which came with a video starring the couple together.

Sitting in a Denver hotel restaurant mid-tour, Antonoff says he considered changing the setlist and decided against it. "The deal I've made with my audience is that I'm going to tell you honestly how I feel and I'm going to risk at any moment having to stand behind it for fucking forever," he says. "I would rather live through something publicly than even escape it privately."

He frames the experience as unexpectedly positive. "It's actually been really beautiful," he says of audiences holding the songs' new meaning together with him. "I don't rewrite the past, I have no shame about the things I've said."

Who is Jack Antonoff?

For 12 years, Bleachers have released albums of strikingly personal songs: I Wanna Get Better, Everybody Lost Somebody, Stop Making This Hurt, I Can't Believe You're Gone. The debut single depicted Antonoff screaming in grief after his younger sister died aged 13 of a brain tumour. He insisted his then-label release it first "to let people know what they were in for".

Before Bleachers, he played guitar in Fun, whose 2011 single We Are Young sold 10 million copies in the US alone. He says he "hated" the experience "because I wasn't the leader, they weren't my words, and I needed to write a song that if I fucking died tomorrow would be my life story".

Around the time he started Bleachers, he met Taylor Swift at an awards ceremony; they bonded over 80s synth duo Yazoo. That meeting made him perhaps the most in-demand pop producer working today: 11 Taylor Swift albums, plus records with Sabrina Carpenter, Lorde, Lana Del Rey, St Vincent, Kendrick Lamar and Gracie Abrams. Bruce Springsteen is a friend, collaborator and mentor; his advice to Antonoff: "Don't live in the dream, let the dream live in you."

The new album, Everyone for Ten Minutes, functions as an origin story: songs about touring the US as a teenager in his parents' minivan with the emo band Outline. "Teenagers, in a van, drinking a lot, smoking pot, taking psychedelics, smoking what we thought was hash but turned out to be black opium," he recalls. "I'm amazed we survived." His parents only agreed to the tours because his sister's illness meant "they could not give a fuck about anything that didn't really matter."

What does the dual career actually change?

Antonoff insists neither producing nor fronting Bleachers takes precedence. "I'm in a very narrow group of people who truly do both, probably," he says. "Usually someone's slumming it on one side." He rejects the common account of his work as shadowy and controlling — Pitchfork once called him "the designated steward of Tasteful Pop" and accused him of "musical manspreading". "One of the great misconceptions of how it works in my world is that I write songs and hand them to, like, a pop star, which I've never done once in my life," he says — then declines to explain how it does work, "because it doesn't really matter". He argues the internet's compulsion to explain everything is "killing people's imaginations".

The Kendrick Lamar collaboration is a case in point: he dropped into a studio to visit a friend on what became the Grammy-winning 2024 album GNX and "didn't leave for three years".

Notably, his drive is something he interrogates rather than celebrates. He worries it is bound up with "survivor's guilt" over his sister's death — "not the best way to live. There's a difference between joyfully seizing the moment and something that's predicated on anxiety."

A producer at war with Live Nation

Antonoff is also openly fighting Live Nation over ticket prices, proud that Bleachers tickets are "as low as they can physically possibly be". "Live Nation keep missing the point, because every time I say something, they'll call my people and say: 'Let's have a meeting.' You don't get it, I don't want to fucking talk to you people," he says. He objects to "the idea that if you're rich, any ticket you want is yours at any time and if you're not, you have to go through this demoralising online experience where you get whacked and kicked and fucked around."

His social channels currently carry abuse over his saying "free Palestine" onstage — he says he said it long before the recent Ed Sheeran/Macklemore controversy and feels "way more emboldened" now. "They're going to let some fucking promoter tell me what to say? Don't book me. I'll play for free outside," he says, criticising Sheeran for missing "a massive, beautiful opportunity" to cancel and play free shows outside venues instead.

The strange economics of Bleachers

Bleachers have never come "even close", by Antonoff's own account, to a huge crossover hit, yet they fill Madison Square Garden with an audience he says is not there to see "that producer's band". His celebrity remains largely by proxy: his 2023 wedding to Qualley drew paparazzi mostly because Taylor Swift attended.

At Colorado's Red Rocks Amphitheatre, after the show, the audience — twentysomething women, middle-aged couples, grizzled Deadheads in tie-dye — bellowed You and Forever and I Wanna Get Better loudly enough to nearly drown him out. The setlist stayed. It likely will in the UK too: Bleachers tour Britain and Ireland from 23 November to 4 December, starting in Kingston upon Thames. Everyone for Ten Minutes is out now.