W
e used to dream more, Jack Antonoff muses one sunny spring morning on the top floor of Electric Lady Studios. He means it literally. “You used to dream at night, and you’d be filled with these weird feelings,” the hitmaker and Bleachers bandleader says, “and you’d wake up humming on those dreams. Maybe you’d have some coffee and they’d heighten. You’d go for a walk, feel that subconscious and collective unconscious too, bouncing off those things. Now, the second you look at your phone, all that disappears.”
With a Bernie Sanders-esque flourish, he adds, “The relationship to the phone has, only for the benefit of billionaires, robbed us of that time.”
The phone, and all it represents — as a tiny mass communication device, a font of information, a distraction mechanism, a reality warper, a black mirror to the soul — was front of mind for Antonoff as he made Bleachers’ fifth album, Everyone for Ten Minutes (out May 22). The LP even takes its title from the AirDrop setting that allows you to fling open the floodgates, for a brief window, and let the world (or at least the world of nearby iPhone users) barge into your phone.
Antonoff gets stuck on the eternal conundrum of having a device that ostensibly offers access to the history of human knowledge, yet all anyone wants to do is “look at your own damn face and read about other people’s problems.” He worries about how people get “desensitized to certain things,” acknowledging that even though images from two Gulf Wars and the 9/11 attacks inundated TV screens during his youth, it still felt like there was “space to take it in.” Now, we mainline atrocities daily, those images looped alongside all the others in our algorithms. Antonoff — who has to get his songwriting done first thing in the morning, before anything external has the chance to intrude — says his timeline is filled with dog videos and reflections of his “very stressful relationship” with food. “Having food on the way — and bad food, bad, bad, bad food — it’s a real high for me,” he admits, adding, “My algorithm has been well trained to be, like, slicing of steaks, frying of fries, and cracking of eggs.”
