Of all of the unpredictable inventive exchanges Jack Antonoff has skilled, just one has been digitally immortalized endlessly — and it was the one. Throughout classes for Taylor Swift’s 2017 album, Repute, there was a second the place she was so charged from the magic within the room that she actually screamed — as followers noticed in a video she captured on her cellphone.
Antonoff had been staggering his approach by way of the epic bridge on “Getaway Automotive.” “I’m in a getaway automotive, and I’m dropping my … one thing,” the artist-producer provided. The pair have been in his house studio in Brooklyn, inching nearer to the climax of Swift’s high-speed exit from the wreckage of a relationship that by no means stood an opportunity. “I’m in a getaway automotive, you’re within the motel bar,” she countered. Within the subsequent 10 seconds, they nailed it: “I’m in a getaway automotive/I left you in a motel bar/Put the cash in a bag and I stole the keys/That was the final time you ever noticed me.”
Off-camera, Antonoff has shared dozens of those moments with Swift over the previous decade. Since 2013, the pair have appeared as some mixture of co-producers and/or co-writers on 88 songs. That quantity is up by 16 since final week’s launch of The Tortured Poets Division, Swift’s eleventh studio album. Antonoff has now appeared on every of the musician’s final 11 releases, counting her ongoing album-rerecording course of that retroactively slots the producer into information she made earlier than they ever knew one another through beforehand unreleased vault tracks. They typically communicate of their course of with a way of protected, kinetic power that solely the 2 of them really perceive. However their new batch of songs collectively are the most recent indication that the Swiftonoff collaboration has run its course. Their pairing not sounds pretty much as good — and even as understandable — because it should really feel within the studio whereas they’re making them.
Antonoff’s inventive course of often consists of some model of him stumbling his approach towards a breakthrough. “You got down to do one thing, and when you do precisely what you got down to do, then the magic most likely didn’t occur,” he informed Billboard in 2021, a 12 months that noticed him seem on releases with Swift, St. Vincent, Lorde, Clairo, and his personal band Bleachers. “It occurs in each track, or else it might be like, ‘Yep, that’s the track. It’s well-recorded. However the place’s that fucking factor that makes me need to fly out of my seat and play it for everyone?’” The expertise of listening to The Tortured Poets Division poses the identical query, one which was left equally unanswered on Swift’s final Antonoff-produced album, 2022’s Midnights. The place is that factor?
That feeling doesn’t all the time should manifest in a type of pop as grandiose and alluring as Lover’s late-blooming hit “Merciless Summer time,” or the late-night dramatics of 1989’s “Out of the Woods.” It could actually simply as successfully take the form of Folklore’s balmy “August” and the swelling “My Tears Ricochet.” Apart from a number of songs, like Crimson (Taylor Model)’s “All Too Nicely (10 Minute Model)” and Fearless (Taylor Model)’s “Mr. Completely Fantastic,” Swift’s drawn-out rerecording course of is, in some methods, a reminder of how a lot uncooked emotion she used to often inject into her music. Throughout the brand new variations of the previous albums, Swift typically sings with a sure weathered fatigue, disconnected from the sensation with which she first carried out them.
Midnights and The Tortured Poets Division each fall into this identical numb rhythm. The previous is crammed with self-referential callbacks, like “Snow on the Seaside” working on the identical melodic line because the Antonoff-produced Folklore deep lower “Illicit Affairs.” The Tortured Poets Division, a 31-song anthology on which Antonoff formed 16 songs, hovers in a homogenized consolation zone of hollowed-out percussion and piano chord progressions that by no means attain the height they’re constructing towards. Of their sonic monotony, these information additionally sound like new variations of previous albums. At a sure level, it begins to really feel as if Swift and Antonoff are merely going by way of the motions whereas working in place.
Perhaps they’re doing so to make some extent. One of the vital outstanding themes on The Tortured Poets Division particulars the methods by which Swift has discovered herself trapped within the gilded jail of pop stardom, the place nothing she does is ever sufficient, proper, or obtained with out criticism. Antonoff appears to be uninterested in it, too. Final month, he reportedly shut down an interview with the Netherlands information outlet NRC for asking whether or not he labored on The Tortured Poets Division. In 2014, he informed Rolling Stone: “Simply having her songs on my laborious drive makes me really feel like I’ve Russian secrets and techniques or one thing. It’s terrifying.”
Antonoff has typically spoken in regards to the music trade’s pop machine with a selected kind of disdain. He resents large fits in boardrooms that preserve the gates shut for the actual artists, versus those that are extra simply molded into their money-making imaginative and prescient. In some ways, he’s indebted to Swift for serving to him over that gate with “Out of the Woods,” a document he sees as having been the last word producer co-sign. “Proper for the time being after I was anticipating some heavy was going to return in and do the manufacturing, she was like, ‘Can’t await this to return out,’” Antonoff informed Rolling Stone in 2021. “In a single day, you’re allowed to provide information, and it crammed me with pleasure and fucking resentment as a result of it’s a reminder of why I preserve myself extraordinarily separate from the enterprise.” There’s a sure naïveté in believing it’s doable to be each separate from the enterprise and a foremost character within the Taylor Swift Universe.
It runs parallel to the “Cerulean Monologue” Meryl Streep delivers as Miranda Priestly in The Satan Wears Prada — her scathing: “Oh, OK. I see. You assume this has nothing to do with you.” Up to now half-decade, Antonoff’s pool of collaborators has included Lana Del Rey, the 1975, Florence + the Machine, the Chicks, FKA Twigs, Kevin Summary, Carly Rae Jepsen, and others. He has been nominated for Producer of the 12 months, Non-Classical, on the Grammy Awards for 5 consecutive years, and he’s received at every of the previous three ceremonies. He’s labored, in some capability, on each single album Swift has launched since 2014. His sound has turn into so measurable that one listener, Caleb Gamman, has been capable of establish which songs on Midnights and The Tortured Poets Division have been Antonoff creations with near-perfect accuracy after solely enjoying a number of seconds of every track.
“The objective isn’t to ‘do your factor’ on another person’s music — the objective is to make the perfect, most alive model of this imaginative and prescient,” Antonoff informed Billboard. It’s unclear whether or not he doesn’t assume that he’s doing his factor on different artist’s music as a result of he doesn’t assume that he has a factor, or as a result of the tightknit friendships he’s constructed together with his collaborators fully blur these traces.
Over Midnights and The Tortured Poets Division, Swift — maybe unconsciously — adopts Antonoff’s melodic cadence, this sprawling supply that runs on like manic ideas chasing a breakthrough, so tunnel-visioned that there’s no time to return and edit them down. At what level does that cease being an Antonoff factor and begin merely being a Swift factor? In 2021, Antonoff’s collaborator Lorde expressed annoyance about this type of query. “I haven’t made a Jack Antonoff document,” she informed The New York Instances about their Melodrama follow-up Photo voltaic Energy. “I’ve made a Lorde document, and he’s helped me make it and really a lot deferred to me on manufacturing and association. Jack would agree with this. To offer him that quantity of credit score is frankly insulting.”
It’s true that the failure to credit score and heart non-male producers is one in every of pop music’s most evident pitfalls, and Swift, like Lorde, is sort of all the time co-producing her music with Antonoff. However giving correct acknowledgments to the ladies he works with doesn’t default him to the place of a silent, omnipresent pressure bearing no duty for the ultimate product of what he’s placing his identify on. There’s no push with out the pull. However neither Antonoff nor Swift appear to be pushing the opposite in any significant course anymore. She’s spiraling, and he’s stagnant, and their inventive lives are intertwined in some ways with their private ones. Particularly at this explicit second of Swift sinking in her personal overwhelming presence, it would simply be simpler to proceed this fashion. However the music will probably proceed to undergo.
If Midnights was a document that required familiarity with Swift’s sonic historical past, then The Tortured Poets Division requires masterful data of the who, what, when, why, and the way of the previous 15 years of her life. It should streamline the method for Antonoff to have already been there for all of its new developments. On the title observe, Swift name-drops him for the primary time, singing: “However you informed Lucy you’d kill your self if I ever go away/And I had stated that to Jack about you, so I felt seen.” This group-chat-message-dump method leaves nothing however a cluttered narrative backstory and nebulous manufacturing the place the expertise of with the ability to pay attention and — on the very least — take pleasure in an important melodic association ought to be.
Swift recorded 4 studio albums with nation producer Nathan Chapman, from Taylor Swift (2006) by way of Crimson (2012) earlier than she finally began to outgrow him on 1989 (2014). Christopher Rowe has been re-creating most of Chapman’s entries in her discography for the Taylor Model rerecordings. His absence — particularly on Converse Now, which wrapped her solo songwriting in a lush sonic blanket — doesn’t go unnoticed. In her enlargement into pure pop, Swift labored extra ceaselessly with Max Martin and Shellback. However she additionally discovered a curious inventive reference to Imogen Heap on “Clear” because the deep lower’s sole writers and producers. Very briefly, Jeff Bhasker and Greg Kurstin additionally make appearances on Swift information, whereas Lover introduced Publish Malone collaborators Frank Dukes and Louis Bell into the combination, too.
Bell’s look on The Tortured Poets Division’s “Fortnight” stemmed from Swift’s admiration for Malone’s music, although the collaboration spends little to no time exploring something exterior of the Swiftonoff bubble. The album’s non-Antonoff songs are helmed by Aaron Dessner, who first appeared alongside Swift on Folklore and extra extensively on its sister album Evermore. There’s a bounce to his manufacturing that creates an air of immediacy and presence round Swift’s efficiency. She sounds engaged and in movement on these information. She as soon as seemed like that with Antonoff, too. That isn’t to say the answer to her present sonic rut is extra Dessner, lest that pairing additionally burns itself out. But when there’s a sense to go chasing after, it’s that one.
Profitable producer-artist pairings have yielded a few of pop music’s most defining releases. Michael Jackson and Quincy Jones. Brandy and Darkchild. Justin Timberlake and Timbaland. Max Martin and Ariana Grande. Extra not too long ago, Olivia Rodrigo and Dan Nigro discovered a near-perfect rhythm, not not like Finneas and Billie Eilish. A few of these artists took years off in between their collaborations to experiment with different producers and sonic approaches. Some pushed their partnership to its restrict, whereas others haven’t but reached one. A couple of by no means hit a ceiling, and a few lack the notice to acknowledge after they have already got.
What would an Antonoff-produced Swift document sound like after they’ve spent two or three full album cycles fully exterior of one another’s musical orbit? What if, throughout that low season, Swift settled in to create a document fully written and produced on her personal? It wouldn’t be so dangerous if it took a few years away to actually get it proper. It feels like everybody concerned might use a ways.
From Rolling Stone US.
