Over the past 18 months, Taylor Swift’s “Eras” Tour took the pop music world by storm, and in a show full of great moments, one stood out: “Cruel Summer,” a song produced by Swift and her boyfriend, Jack Antonoff:

It is difficult to overestimate Antonoff’s influence on pop music. He has written or produced some of the biggest songs with some of the biggest names in the industry including Lana Del Ray, Sabrina Carpenter and The Chicks. But his career as a producer actually started when Swift decided he was someone she wanted to work with.

In his final Grammy speech, Antonoff called Swift the one who “kicked that damn door open” for him. “Literal!” he said.

Literal? “Well, metaphorically!” he laughed. “It felt so affirming. Finally, someone hears what I hear and isn’t afraid to just say, ‘Ready. You know, hit the records.'”

Since then he has printed many records. In addition to his production gigs, Antonoff is the lead singer and soul of his band Bleachers. And he owns 11 Grammys, including Producer of the Year in 2022. He won it again in 2023, And 2024.

These days, when he’s not on tour, Antonoff often works from his studio in LA. He says a lot of it is “just playing around,” like the time he sat on the synthesizer and found the Bleachers’ signature sound—a riff that “became.” Rollercoaster’, one of the band’s biggest songs to date.

He’s become a reliable fountain of hit music, but Antonoff said he never knows when the creative lightning will strike: “You look at the story of every album, every song. No one ever says, ‘We planned that day to make the best song that we ever wrote. We got coffee when we went in. And that’s how it happened.’ The story is always like, ‘So and so’s plane was delayed. And I got kicked out of my hotel in Reno because of the things this person did while I’m walking down the street and I hear this… ‘You know, it’s like, always this randomness. That buzz is where it all comes from. I just never want to lose that all of it feels normal.”

And there is nothing remotely normal about Jack Antonoff’s life. Born and raised in New Jersey, Antonoff formed his first band in high school. But success came slowly. In 2017, “Sunday Morning” visited Antonoff at his family’s home, where he had lived until he was 29. (He had already had a number 1 hit.)

Last week he was back east for a personal milestone: His band played Madison Square Garden in New York City, and the butterflies came in. “Usually – even when a show is sold out – I have that level of surprise.

And speaking of milestones, his first Broadway show just opened. Antonoff provided the music for the play Romeo + Juliet. “When I think of ‘Romeo + Juliet,’ and I did this in music, I think of hope and love and finding something and running with it against all odds,” he said. ‘I always forget everything dead. And so I started to go back and kind of sew that into the score, just a little bit, not knowing this, but hinting that it was going to be terrible. “Because I forget!”

His own love life is less troubled. Last year he married actor Margaret Qualley. You may know her as the daughter of actor Andie McDowell. You may not know that she directed and danced the music video for the Bleachers song “Tiny Moves.” “It was real magic,” Antonoff said.

At 40, married to the woman of his dreams and possibly in line for a record as the fourth producer of the year Grammy, Jack Antonoff is on fire.

It feels, he says, surreal: “And it remains surreal because one of the only promises of the work I do is how fleeting it is – not the performance, not the audience, but that kind of success. So there is never a moment at which I am not so surprised.”

You can stream the Bleachers’ latest album, titled ‘Bleachers’, by clicking the embed below (free Spotify registration required to hear the songs in full):

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Story produced by John D’Amelio. Editor: Remington Korper.