Jack Antonoff on Lana Del Rey’s ‘Beautiful Darkness,’ and How Taylor Swift ‘Validated’ Him as a Producer

variety.com:

Jem Aswad Executive Editor, Music It may come as no surprise that Jack Antonoff — polymath collaborator with Taylor Swift, Lana Del Rey, Lorde and most recently Kendrick Lamar — thinks of his brain as a hard drive. “Yeah, it’s full of folders,” he says, in the middle of talking about the new Christmas single from his band, Bleachers (and a long digression about Christmas songs in general). “I think of them as literally compartments in a hard drive in my brain.” It’s an unusual perspective but one that’s certainly working for him, because there really was no other choice for a Variety Hitmakers producer of the decade than Jack Antonoff.

Yes, he’s won the Grammy producer of the year award for the three consecutive years, but that’s just one indication of his dozens of culture-shifting collaborations with Taylor, Lana, Lorde and Kendrick, and also St.

Vincent, Sara Bareilles, the 1975, the Chicks, and dozens more. And in a characteristically busy year that also saw him releasing and touring behind the latest album from Bleachers (the band he’s fronted for a decade), he’s collaborated on three songs in the Hitmakers 2024 top 25, including Sabrina Carpenter’s shimmering hybrid of Dolly Parton and ELO, “Please Please Please” — a song he and the singer cowrote with Hitmakers songwriter of the year Amy Allen.