Jack Antonoff Shares the Hardest Part of Making ‘1989 (Taylor’s Version)’

Jack Antonoff found himself back in the woods when it came time to help Taylor Swift re-record 1989.

Antonoff, 39, collaborated with Swift, 34, on that groundbreaking album in 2014, co-writing and producing the songs “Out of the Woods,” “I Wish You Would” and “You Are In Love.” So for the Taylor’s version by 1989the Bleachers’ frontman headed back into the studio to discover an unexpected challenge – and he needed some help.

“I don’t work with soft synths, so everything is a sound made in the room,” he said Vulture in a new interview. “It turned out to be a really fun project for me and the band. It was like, ‘Okay, 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 have X number of songs that just sound out of the room,” Antonoff added. The seagull sound in ‘Is it Over Now?’ was “a lot of fun” to make “because it was all these analog instruments that we know and love: Moog model Ds, Juno-6s.”

Related: Taylor Swift and Jack Antonoff’s complete friendship timeline

Taylor Swift has had many collaborators over the years, but none of them have stuck around like Jack Antonoff. Since meeting in 2012, the two have collaborated on ten albums and a few one-off singles, becoming best friends along the way. “Sometimes he sits at the piano and we both just sit there […]

The two-time Grammy Award-winning Producer of the Year told Vulture that the entire experience of recreating the decade-old music was like “finding an old diary.”

“There’s so many things in so many of those sessions that I’m like, ‘Oh, you little freak,’” Antonoff said Vulture. “Then I would layer a little bit, because you go through phases, and that made me feel really sweet. That younger version of me that was just piling on, I mean, ‘Out of the Woods’ is like [the] sink.”

Antonoff says the “glory” of his work endures 1989 was that, as “someone who wasn’t really successful as a producer”, there was actually no reason for him to “pile all that stuff on” except for his own amusement and creative vision. “It just gave me a lot of joy. And it produced this strange, messy symphony that I love to this day.”

1989 marked a creative collaboration between Swift and Antonoff that saw them work on all her subsequent albums – Reputation, Lover, Folklore, Always And Midnights. Antonoff also had a heavy hand in producing some of the “From The Vault” songs on Swift’s rerecordings. Swift started the project afterward Scooter Brown acquired the rights to her first six albums when his Ithaca Holdings purchased her longtime music label, Big Machine Label Group. Swift has hinted at that Taylor’s version by Reputation is the next to be released, leaving the re-recording of her self-titled debut album for the last.

In October, Swift revealed that ‘Sweeter than Fiction’, a song from ‘From The Vault’ from the 1989 re-recorded song, was the first song she co-wrote with Antonoff. “It was the thrill of a lifetime to see him challenge himself and create beautiful art over the years,” she says.

Later in the interview, Antonoff revealed the “toughest project he’s produced,” saying it almost drove him crazy Gentleman‘s second album, from 2017 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.” That really drove me crazy. Melodrama was a very intense process. We were just tearing things up. One day we would do one thing, reset it and try something completely different.