‘Take the Sadness Out of Saturday Night’ by Bleachers Review: Inside Jack Antonoff’s Music-Loving Mind

[peekaboo]

The superproducer who has collaborated with stars like Taylor Swift, Lorde and Lana Del Rey offers a new record from his own indie project that reveals his joyous passion for music.

 

Jack Antonoff of Bleachers performing on Thursday

Photo: NBCU via Getty Images

 

On Spotify there’s a user-created playlist called “The Great Jack Antonoff Collection,” which gathers songs the 37-year-old songwriter-musician—best known for his work with Taylor Swift, Lorde and Lana Del Rey —has produced or co-produced. Its 190 tracks include many by very big names, including Sia, the Chicks and Pink, in addition to the aforementioned stars. 

Also on the playlist are artists a tier below that echelon: those who will never be ubiquitous pop icons but who have cult audiences and critical respect—shape-shifting singer-songwriter St. Vincent, indie-pop phenom Clairo, rapper Kevin Abstract of the popular collective Brockhampton. And then there are songs by Mr. Antonoff’s own indie rock-leaning project Bleachers, including a few advance singles from the group’s new album, “Take the Sadness Out of Saturday Night” (RCA), out Friday. Mr. Antonoff has been wildly successful writing and producing with others—he’s won Grammys for collaborating on Song of the Year, Album of the Year and Best Rock Song, in addition to about a dozen other nominations—but his creative essence can be elusive. The Bleachers LP drives home just how much Mr. Antonoff’s work, both as a partner and in his own projects, is a celebration of music itself. 

Before his time in studios with pop superstars, Mr. Antonoff was a journeyman. Born and raised in Bergenfield, N.J., he had modest success with the jangly folk-rock outfit Steel Train and joined the Queen-like prog-pop band Fun late in the 2000s. The group had a surprise No. 1 hit with “We Are Young” in 2012 and went on hiatus three years later, just as Mr. Antonoff’s songwriting career was taking flight. 

Almost all of his high-profile collaborations have been with women, though Mr. Antonoff doesn’t have a ready answer for why, other than saying that he imagines women’s voices when developing ideas. “When I’m writing I don’t think about Lou Reed or Bowie. I think about Kate Bush, Björk, Fiona Apple,” he told the Guardian in a 2017 interview. And when he sits down to write with others, he encourages them to dig deep for emotionally revealing material. 

Photo: Carlotta Kohl/RCA

Mr. Antonoff is a great admirer of the gloomy pop of new wave bands like Depeche Mode—“What speaks to me about the ’80s was the willingness to accept dark feelings in some big songs,” he told the recording magazine Tape Op in a 2020 interview—and he’s a huge fan of the films of John Hughes. Some tracks he’s worked on, like Taylor Swift’s “Look What You Made Me Do” and St. Vincent’s “Sugarboy,” have strong ties to the decade. If Mr. Antonoff’s uptempo numbers bear the marks of the Reagan era, the ballads he’s contributed to can be disarmingly spare, hearkening back to the singer-songwriter era of the ’70s. Joni Mitchell is a common reference point for tracks like Ms. Del Rey’s “California” and a significant portion of “Sling,” the new album by Clairo. 

He tends to write in short melodic phrases, piling hooks on top of each other rather than stretching a single line across multiple bars. And he packs his songs with tuneful asides, nuggets of melody inserted between verses that suggest he always has far more ideas than he needs. That abundance keeps Mr. Antonoff from repeating himself. While his collaborative work is broad and often radio-friendly, it avoids sounding formulaic. 

Setting aside the technical details of his compositions, one listen to Bleachers’ “Take the Sadness Out of Saturday Night” reveals what may be Mr. Antonoff’s most prominent theme: the power of music to bring communal joy. This comes through less in the lyrics, which sometimes hint at melancholy and uncertainty, and more in the arrangements, which seem designed to make audiences scream along. The album is in part about his breakup with writer and actress Lena Dunham, creator of the HBO show “Girls,” but it requires no knowledge of their relationship or even of Mr. Antonoff’s work with superstars to glean its essential quality. There are plenty of famous guests on it—Ms. Del Rey, the Chicks, and Annie Clark of St. Vincent all make appearances, and author Zadie Smith co-wrote a song—but they mostly don’t draw attention to themselves. They’re here for Mr. Antonoff this time. 

It’s a spirited bear-hug of an album, one sometimes awkward in its wild exuberance and easy to get swept up in. Though Bleachers is Mr. Antonoff’s solo project, he recorded a portion of it live in the studio with his touring band, and they sound like they’re having a blast. Many tracks feature a gang of voices on lead vocals shouting the copious hooks in unison as a saxophone bleats lower in the mix. There’s an infectious feeling that anything goes, and this is easily the best of the three Bleachers LPs. 

Bruce Springsteen, unsurprisingly a hero to Mr. Antonoff given his New Jersey upbringing, even shows up to sing at the end of “Chinatown,” one of several tracks that channels the fist-pumping anthems the elder songwriter perfected in the 1980s, and quite a few lines here sound borrowed from the Springsteen cinematic universe. But Mr. Antonoff’s careful study of the emotional contours of his mentor’s work keeps these nods from seeming gratuitous. 

Here and there, Mr. Antonoff packs catchy fragments of melody into open spaces unnecessarily, almost as if he’s showing off. And the ballads that make up about a third of the record are uniformly less inspiring than the uptempo cuts. But it’s enjoyable to hear him applying the musical skill coveted by the rich and famous in a setting where the stakes are considerably lower. The best moments on “Take the Sadness Out of Saturday Night” remind us how much the right song at the right moment can make life so much better. It’s something Mr. Antonoff understands as well as anybody, and that knowledge is why so many have sought him out.