What’s the most punk-rock thing you can do when you’re Jack Antonoff, superstar producer, wingman to Taylor Swift and leader of the rock troupe Bleachers? The answer, he recently concluded, was to invite his wife to be in one of his music videos. It’s a more consequential decision than it might otherwise be, given that she’s the actor Margaret Qualley, star of The Substance, Blue Moon and Ridley Scott’s upcoming The Dog Stars, among others, and that the couple’s combined celebrity has made them especially interesting to the outside world.“Any time I sit back and think, ‘Oh, but there’s all this attention on us,’ or this or that, my immediate reaction is, ‘Oh, fuck that ... You’re not going to tell me what to do,’” Antonoff says from New York, where the couple live.When they tied the knot, in 2023, the ceremony was big news. The guests at the wedding, on Long Beach Island in New Jersey, the state where Antonoff grew up, included Swift, Channing Tatum, Zoë Kravitz and Lana Del Rey. A nearby street reportedly had to be shut down after fans flocked to see Swift go for a prewedding drink.Antonoff was well aware of the pandemonium that fame can trigger, given that he’d worked closely with Swift since her blockbuster album 1989, which came out in 2014. And Qualley had been in the promotional video for the Bleachers single Tiny Moves, from the self-titled album the band released in 2024. But it hits differently when you’re the one in the spotlight. Did they really want to invite more publicity by having her appear in another Bleachers promo?Ultimately, Antonoff decided he wasn’t going to let all the attention change how he makes music or lives his life. His wife had been in plenty of music videos before, including for her sister, Rainsford – their mother is the actor Andie MacDowell – and she would be in them again.“Our plan was always to make one video for every album, so we could telegraph how we are experiencing the world in that time as our lives go on, as partners. I thought it was a beautiful idea,” Antonoff says.In his book, making a drastic allowance for his celebrity would be a defeat of sorts. That’s why Qualley is in the video for You and Forever, the first single from Bleachers’ new album, Everyone for Ten Minutes. It’s also the message of its catchy track Take You Out Tonight, in which he weighs up the pros and cons of hitting the town with Qualley before deciding to go ahead, as life’s too short not to. “I gotta take you out and show you off tonight,” he remarks in one line.“Changing too much because of that gives it a power that it doesn’t deserve,” he says. “That’s what Take You Out Tonight is about. This idea, ‘I don’t want to be seen, I don’t want to be observed ... But, damn, you look so good ... Just fuck it: we’ve got to go out.’ Just living life. Because these things don’t matter in a real way.” He adds, “I haven’t become more private because of being seen publicly. I haven’t become more angry. I haven’t become more anything. I give that part of my life no power.” Antonoff grew up in a small town in New Jersey, so it’s perhaps not surprising that the songs he writes with Bleachers are steeped in a Springsteenesque yearning to look beyond the four walls of your suburban life and ask if there’s something bigger out there worth striving for. There’s no cynicism in his music, which is splashed with saxophone and which celebrates, without embarrassment or self-consciousness, the importance of human connection (on We Should Talk) and the transformative power of love (on You and Forever).But Everyone for Ten Minutes is by far the most fraught album Antonoff has made. He appreciates that, as someone with a certain amount of name recognition, his experiences are not always universal. But he does believe there is still a commonality to human life and that more and more people are rejecting both the toxicity of the internet and the idea that technology is a shortcut to happiness. That’s a theme of The Van, one of the singles from the new album.“This is the first time in human history that pretty much all people on Earth happily reject the version of modernity they’re being sold,” Antonoff says. “It’s not one thing – like, you know, ‘Don’t eat the spam.’ It’s like all the functions of our world are poisoning us, and we know that. And so everyone, regardless of how divided we feel, is on this journey to get back to their humanity.“There was a connection to me between that moment in the world and this feeling in me of wanting to kick the door into the next phase of my life.”Bleachers: Jack Antonoff with his band Everyone for Ten Minutes features more personal songs, too. One of the most moving is I Can’t Believe You’re Gone, on which he talks about the grief that has been part of his life since he was 18 and his 13-year-old sister, Sarah, died from cancer.“I obviously get very personal, but at the end of the day I wanted to write a song about the randomness of grief and loss, and how it’s not a picture of the person or their favourite lake” that reminds you of them but the most random thing – “some dumb little toy or some Burger King crown or some weird thing that creates a sense memory to you that, even as years and years pass, brings you back into the utter depths of grief.”Antonoff is low-key and polite. But he is also among the highest-profile of music producers: in addition to collaborating with Swift, Del Rey and St Vincent, he has worked with Sabrina Carpenter, on her album Man’s Best Friend, and with Kendrick Lamar, on his album GNX. His personal life has also always gained a lot of attention: in high school he dated his classmate Scarlett Johansson and was later in a relationship with Lena Dunham, the Girls creator. She writes about him with fondness in her new memoir, Famesick, praising his “inherent goodness”.Superstar producer: Jack Antonoff on stage with Taylor Swift at Wembley Stadium during the Eras tour, in 2024. Photograph: TAS2024/Getty But it is for his work with Swift that he is most intimately associated – so much so that people jumped to conclusions when she looked to other producers for last year’s album The Life of a Showgirl. Had there been a tiff, a rift, a falling-out? Antonoff appreciates that their relationship will be under a microscope, but he says he has never felt joined at the hip with any artist.[ Famesick by Lena Dunham: Health hazards of the Hollywood dream machineOpens in new window ]“In the ecosystem of popular music, everyone wants to infer a lot of drama on to things. But there’s very little drama when making records. “When I go on a journey with someone to make an album with them, I’m not thinking about the next one or the one after that. If anything I feel very clear that what’s happening is a miracle, and I’m sort of sitting in that.“I almost think it’s more abnormal, or odd, to return” to make another record with them. Whenever that happens “I’ve felt almost a bit shocked, like, ‘Wow, we can still do this thing.’”He’s always surprised to be invited back, he says.“I have that perspective also, because when I make my own albums I move around, and sometimes I want to be with the band, sometimes I want to be alone, sometimes I want to be with this producer. It’s like everyone has this magical centre of themselves. “We live in such a time period where the currency is gossip and drama and whatnot that people want to infer a lot more than just the truth, which is people who really love each other just wanting everyone to make their best work.”Coming from New Jersey, he believes, has made him an eternal underdog, imbued with what he calls “the Irish spirit” of growing up in a place steeped in immigrant music and a sense of outsiderness. So he’s okay that not everybody gets Bleachers – the band aren’t meant to be playlist fodder. He recalls pushing RCA, their label at the time, for the first Bleachers single to be I Wanna Get Better, which addresses the deaths of his sister and, in Iraq, of a cousin, as well as a bad acid trip. That song was both a rallying cry and a warning that a good time is not guaranteed. It remains his credo 12 years later.“Should we end up on a playlist talking about someone who is dead, it can upset the vibe,” he says. But he wanted to make sure that people knew what kind of music Bleachers were making. “I don’t want to trick anyone into coming into the tent. This is what I’m writing about. This is what the band is about. That’s it.”On Everyone for Ten Minutes, Antonoff expands that focus on darkness to the fraught side of celebrity. “We had to board up all the windows and shoot out the drones,” he sings on Dirty Wedding Dress, an epic rocker that is both a rumination on how much of a pain it is to get married with the world watching and a commentary on the internet and its culture of surveillance.He sees it as a personal song with a wider appeal. You don’t have to be Taylor Swift’s producer or the husband of a Hollywood star to know what it’s like to be tracked or monitored whenever you step outside the house or any time you swipe on your phone.“I’ve always been much more interested in finding the things about my life that were more human. The experience of being commodified ... isn’t everybody feeling [that]? “Everything everyone does is commodified and thrown back in their face. Every choice they make, every text they send, every reel they look at. “And so it just felt like, for the first time in my life, some of the lonely experiences of being ‘public’ were starting to become communal.”Everyone for Ten Minutes is released by Dirty Hit