Jack Antonoff found himself back in the woods when it came time to help Taylor Swift rerecord 1989.
Antonoff, 39, worked with Swift, 34, in 2014 on that landmark album, cowriting and producing the tracks “Out of the Woods,” “I Wish You Would” and “You Are In Love.” So, for the Taylor’s Version of 1989, the Bleachers’ frontman went back into the studio to discover an unexpected challenge – and he needed some help.
“I don’t work with any soft synths, so everything is a sound that’s made in the room,” he told Vulture in a new interview. “It became a really fun project for me and the band. It was like, ‘All right, Mikey [Freedom Hart of Bleachers], here are the Juno tracks, do your best.’ ‘Sean [Hutchinson, Bleachers’ drummer], here’s the drum stuff, see what you can do.’”
“And then I’ll have X amount of tracks that are just sound from the room,” added Antonoff. For example, the seagull sound in “Is it Over Now?” was “really fun” to make “because it was all these analog instruments that we know and love: Moog model Ds, Juno-6s.”
The two-time Grammy Award-winning Producer of the Year told Vulture that the whole experience of recreating the decade-old music was like “finding an old diary.”
“There are so many things on so many of those sessions that I was like, ‘Oh, you little freak,’” Antonoff told Vulture. “Little layering I would do then, ’cause you go through phases, and it made me feel really sweet. That younger version of me that was just piling s–t on, I mean, ‘Out of the Woods’ is just like [the] kitchen sink.”
Antonoff says that the “glory” of his work on 1989 was that as “someone who didn’t really have any success as a producer,” there really wasn’t a reason for him to “pile all that s—t on” other than for his own amusement and creative vision. “It was just giving me a lot of joy. And it made this weird, messy symphony and I love it to this day.”
1989 marked a creative partnership between Swift and Antonoff that has seen them work on all her subsequent albums – Reputation, Lover, Folklore, Evermore and Midnights. Antonoff has also been a sturdy hand in producing some of the “From The Vault” tracks on Swift’s rerecordings. Swift began the project after Scooter Braun acquired the rights to her first six albums when his Ithaca Holdings bought her old music label, Big Machine Label Group. Swift has hinted that Taylor’s Version of Reputation is next for release, leaving the rerecording of her self-titled debut album for last.
In October, Swift revealed that “Sweeter than Fiction,” a “From The Vault” track on the rerecorded 1989, was the first song she wrote with Antonoff. “Watching him challenge himself and make beautiful art over the years has been the thrill of a lifetime,” she gushed.
Later in the interview, Antonoff revealed the “hardest project he’s produced,” saying he almost went mad getting Lorde’s second album, 2017’s Melodrama, right. On “Hard Feelings,” Antnoff noted that he was “so obsessed with wanting it to be these crazy Transformers fighting sounds, but also really warm. I went really crazy on that. Melodrama was a really intense process. We were just tearing stuff apart. We’d do one thing one day, zero it out, try a whole other thing.”
