‘I’d rather live through something publicly than escape it privately’: Jack Antonoff on survivor’s guilt and still singing love songs after his breakup

Whether he’s playing the role of soul-baring artist or starry producer, the Bleachers frontman strives to keep his integrity intact. He weighs in on Ed Sheeran, his love of working on ‘high-stakes’ albums and why he’s standing by the songs about his marriage

Sitting in the restaurant of a Denver hotel, in the middle of a US tour with his band Bleachers, Jack Antonoff shrugs. “There’s this intense need to figure me out,” he frowns, “and I don’t really know where it comes from, because I keep explaining all of it.”

He has a point. For the last 12 years, Bleachers have released a succession of albums packed with Antonoff’s strikingly personal and frank songs. Being strikingly personal and frank was the whole point. Antonoff had previously been guitarist in Fun, a pop-rock band who went supernova with their 2011 single We Are Young. Despite co-writing a song that sold 10m copies in the US alone, Antonoff 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”.

He says he insisted his then-record label release said song I Wanna Get Better as Bleachers’ debut single “to let people know what they were in for”. It depicted Antonoff literally screaming in anguish, “losing my mind” with grief in the wake of his younger sister’s death, aged 13, from a brain tumour. You can tell it set the confessional tone of Bleachers’ oeuvre just by looking at some of their other song titles: I’m Ready to Move On, Everybody Lost Somebody, Stop Making This Hurt, Self-Respect, I Can’t Believe You’re Gone, We Should Talk.