It’s remarkable to think of Jack Antonoff’s unlikely trajectory to one of the music industry’s most in-demand producers and songwriters out there. It’s also remarkable to think that most of his decade-long win streak comes from his work with pop princesses like Taylor Swift, Lana del Rey, Lorde, St. Vincent and Florence Welch. Jack isn’t just a producer either – he’s friends with all of his ladies and he’s very much part of the gang. His work with Taylor alone just earned him his third producer-of-the-year Grammy in a row, and Taylor’s Midnights (produced by Jack) won Album of the Year. He’s got two big things coming out: he produced Taylor’s The Tortured Poets Department, and he’s gone back to his band Bleachers and they’re releasing a new album. He recently chatted with the LA Times about all of this and more. Some highlights:

He doesn’t like LA’s music industry vibe: Artists and producers “are expected to fly into all these rooms and mine the deepest parts of their soul, then throw it out there and go to the next one,” is “kind of bulls—. It’s not how good things are made. Great things are made by a small group of people yes-anding each other all the way to the moon.”

When he described Damon Albarn as a “herb.” It was after Albarn suggested in an interview with The Times that Swift doesn’t write her own songs. “I’m a little bitch sometimes. But you come after my friend Taylor, you’re toast to me.” Questioning Swift’s songwriting, he adds, “is like challenging someone’s faith in God. You just don’t go there.”

On Kanye West: He’s had harsh words for another of Swift’s antagonizers, Kanye West, whom he says “just needs his diaper changed so badly.” Does he ever think twice about roasting a well-known musician he might someday want to work with? “It’s been a long time since I would’ve taken Kanye’s call. I’m so incredibly bored when someone doesn’t have the sauce anymore, so they go elsewhere to shock. It’s just a remarkable waste of space.”

He’s also been working on Del Rey’s next LP, which she’s said will be a country album titled “Lasso.” “We’ve been cooking. It’s f—ing brilliant.” (Of the current country craze that’s also drawn Beyoncé and Post Malone toward the genre, Antonoff says, “The bubbling is about to blow — I feel it everywhere.”)

He’s about to turn 40: “To me, you express your age the way you express it. Look at Bob Dylan: ‘Rough and Rowdy Ways’ felt so bitchy and cool,” he says of Dylan’s 2020 album, “whereas when he was young he was being such a little poet.”

He wants kids with his wife: Antonoff wants to have children with Qualley, but he knows the demands of parenthood will fundamentally alter the life he’s built in music. “I see that as the next big shake-up. The first time in a while I’ll be doing something I have no idea how to do.”

[From The LA Times]

“It’s been a long time since I would’ve taken Kanye’s call. I’m so incredibly bored when someone doesn’t have the sauce anymore.” F–king brutal and true. Like, we can debate Jack’s work and yeah, it gets repetitive when you listen to the stuff he produced for Lana and Taylor back-to-back, but Jack knows what he’s f–king doing and he’s got his finger on the pulse of pop music. He has relevancy in a way Kanye simply doesn’t have anymore. Kanye is worse than a has-been, to the point where someone like Jack has no qualms about making sure everyone knows that he does not f–k with Kanye.

As for what he said about Albarn… Albarn has been a full curmudgeon for years now, I remember when he had sh-t to say about Adele too. Of all the criticisms to make about Taylor, don’t try to say that she’s not writing her songs. Sometimes I wish she would actually work with a lyricist just to give her music some maturity, because she’s going to be in her 50s and still writing songs about high school, but I digress. She actually writes those songs.

Photos courtesy of Avalon Red.