Jack Antonoff on Bleachers’ newest album

SCOTT DETROW, HOST:

The songwriter Jack Antonoff spends a lot of his time behind the scenes, producing albums for the likes of Taylor Swift and Lana Del Rey. That work has earned him the producer of the year Grammy for the past three years straight. But then, when he feels like it’s the right time, he steps back into center stage.

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, “ME BEFORE YOU”)

BLEACHERS: (Singing) Crossfade in the dark, have a smoke, yeah. Take another drink or walk with the news playin’. That was me, too.

DETROW: Antonoff says releasing a new self-titled album from his band Bleachers feels like letting the world read his diary for the past few years. Those diary pages include happy events like getting married, but as he told my colleague Rachel Martin, he’s also still working through the pain of his past.

JACK ANTONOFF: I lost my sister when I was 18. And I’ve written so much about grief and the past and the future, what has happened, what could happen, this endless back and forth. And what I realized now is that I was working really hard and having a lot of fear about how to live in any sort of present way, and does that mean I’m giving up on her memory or something.

So through the lens of the deepening relationship with my band, my relationship with my audience, so these sort of, like, deepening relationships, I was finding myself more and more and more present, which is a beautiful thing. Getting married is obviously a part of that. And then the real dark side is, well, if I have this presence about me in my life and I’m not just someone who sort of, as I say, tribute lives, am I letting go of this memory of this person, this honoring, right? And so that’s the heart and soul of the album.

RACHEL MARTIN, BYLINE: It makes sense to me, though, that it would come from those two poles of inspiration, both the dealing with your sister and that loss and that dark and this, like, intense, bright light of love.

ANTONOFF: Yeah. Well, I mean, the song “Tiny…