It turns out a world tour with a smash pop band is the perfect place to be alone. “In a hotel room, writing songs, there’s no one to tell me I’m not allowed to dream too big,” says Jack Antonoff, bassist for fun., who spent his offstage hours creating an album for a new band called Bleachers. “Making music in that environment is liberating to me, just so connected to that feeling of trying to create something that’s larger than life.”
Antonoff, 30, unveiled Bleachers a year ago with a bouncy first single, “I Wanna Get Better,” then put out “Strange Desire” in July. The debut album has the ambience of heavy-keyboard ’80s bands such as Dream Academy and Tears for Fears, and Antonoff’s lyrics aim for hope in the dark. “I’m trying hard, but I can’t win,” he sings in “Like a River Runs.” There’s no “We Are Young” radio anthem here; Antonoff’s voice isn’t soaring as that of fun. lead singer Nate Ruess, but he’s perfect for the Bleachers’ kind of power pop.
“‘Strange Desire’ was felt, lyrically and musically and productionwise, from writing in a diary and getting an idea in my head,” says Antonoff, who for all his musical success is most famous for dating Lena Dunham of HBO’s “Girls.” “It was much more personal, and not just lyrically, than anything I’ve ever done. It was the first thing I’d ever made where I wasn’t getting much influence from anyone else, just myself, alone in the room.”
Born in Bergenfield, N.J., Antonoff was a kid when he began playing in bands. One of his key early projects, Steel Train, was at first a busking duo on the streets of New York. (The shaggy-haired musician attended Professional Children’s School and dated actress Scarlett Johansson for two years before she took off for Hollywood.) Antonoff wrote most of Steel Train’s straightforward rock songs (some of which are explicitly about Johansson) through the band’s last album in 2010.
In 2008, he hooked up with Ruess, whose own band, The Format, had just broken up, and they formed fun., which grew big enough to tour the world. Antonoff changed his style and his look, evolving from a shaggy-haired teenager to a crew-cutted adult with a flat-top Mohawk and big, Elvis Costello-style glasses.
Antonoff appears to be in a better place after saying what he needed to say in “Strange Desire”; his relationship with Dunham is stable and supportive. They occasionally comment on each other’s writing — both songs and scripts. “She’s a good bouncing board for me,” he says. “And I don’t write films and TV, (but) I can read something or watch something and have this gut reaction; that is supervaluable, to have a reaction with someone you love and trust, who isn’t down the rabbit hole with you.”
After finishing much of “Strange Desire,” Antonoff decided to invite his pop idols to participate. He hired Vince Clarke, the British synth hero who’d made ’80s hits with Erasure and Depeche Mode, to produce several songs, and he coaxed Yoko Ono to the studio for her distinctive talking-and-shrieking vocals on “I’m Ready to Move On.”
With “Strange Desire,” fun. and Steel Train on his resume, Antonoff has recently been able to carve out a side career as a songwriter and producer for other pop stars; he just collaborated with Grimes on a single called “Entropy.” (He says fun. remains active, although “right now we’re in a phase of everyone doing their own thing.”) He wrote “Out of the Woods” and other tracks on the biggest-selling album of last year, Taylor Swift’s “1989,” prompting the Daily Beast to call him “The Taylor Swift Whisperer.” Asked about the challenge of making great pop music — Antonoff once compared Swift to Michael Jackson in this regard — he becomes a bit defensive.
“I feel like (there’s) an attitude that is unacceptable in pop, which is to make the greatest thing in the world, not necessarily to make ‘great pop music.’ Hip-hop has that attitude,” he says. “It’s more like just shoot for the moon in terms of artistic ideas. Anything less, it’s like, ‘What’s the point?’ It could be the saddest song you write or some ballad; just shoot for something that gives you a feeling you can’t really describe.”
When: 7:30 p.m. Wednesday
Where: Riviera
Theatre, 4746 N. Racine Ave.
Tickets: Sold out; 773-275-6800 or jamusa.com/riviera-theatre
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