Jack Antonoff is using Bleachers’ new album, everyone for ten minutes, to draw a wide emotional map that moves between love, grief, touring life, and the strain of modern life. In a conversation with NPR’s Morning Edition, the Grammy-winning singer, songwriter, and producer said the record reflects both his personal world and a broader social mood.
Antonoff said the work he does with Bleachers is not separate from his collaborations with artists such as Taylor Swift, Lorde, and Bruce Springsteen. He described all of it as happening at once, adding that he no longer feels the need to force a distinction between the different parts of his music career.
A record shaped by frustration and connection
Antonoff framed everyone for ten minutes as an album that pushes toward a new stage of life. He said the writing came from a sense that people are more divided than ever, while still agreeing on one thing: modern life is not working for many of them.
He pointed to the growing desire for real-world connection as evidence of that feeling. Interest in movie theaters, vinyl records, and live concerts, he said, reflects a kind of nostalgia for something more analog and direct.
Touring memories still shape the songs
One track, “the van,” looks back on Antonoff’s early days on the road with Outline and Steel Train. He said touring taught him to see each person in the crowd as an individual with a story that led them to the show.
That mindset has stayed with him, even as the venues have gotten larger and the production has become more polished. Antonoff said the basic routine has not changed since he was a teenager: making records, writing songs, traveling, and performing them live.
Grief sits close to the center
Antonoff also said grief remains a major part of his songwriting. He said part of the new album reflects on how often death is treated as a subject people avoid, and he connected that theme to his own experience after his sister died when he was 18.
He described those years as a period when grief shaped much of his thinking and creative output. For Antonoff, making art has become inseparable from confronting mortality, even when the subject is uncomfortable.
Marriage, intimacy, and who gets in
The album also turns toward marriage, including Antonoff’s 2023 wedding to actor Margaret Qualley in his New Jersey hometown by the beach. In “dirty wedding dress,” he sings about being inside the venue with the people closest to him while the world outside stayed out of view.
Antonoff said that feeling reflects a natural limit to human empathy, noting a psychological study that suggests the brain’s empathy drop-off begins at around 125 people. He said that idea does not feel cynical to him, but rather like a realistic way of understanding personal circles and emotional limits.
He described that circle as made up of his partner, band, family, and audience, and said Bleachers is meant to welcome anyone, but not everybody. The album, he suggested, works in that same spirit: personal, expansive, and grounded in the relationships that matter most.
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