Bleachers

The third track on Bleachers’ fifth album is called We Should Talk. Ultimately a song about reconnecting with a lost friend, it’s also a track by the band that Jack Antonoff considers “the core” of his creative work that touches on Antonoff’s start in music. “We had a band, we had a life, we had dreams,” he sings, “in a van we wrote our own bible supreme”, a poetic summary of the years when a teenage Antonoff escaped small-town New Jersey with Outline, a quartet who absorbed the influence of the punk underground, self-releasing their EP, cropping up on compilations called things like Bottled Violence and Punk Will Never Die, booking their own shows in anarchist bookstores and community venues with the aid of a directory called Book Your Own Fucking Life. “We called what we were doing emo”, he notes, “but emo to us at the time meant Fugazi and Texas Is The Reason, so a very different context from today”.

They piled into Antonoff’s family minivan, Book Your Own Fucking Life in hand, and set out to tour America, albeit with a very New Jersey chip on their shoulder. “When we started, I was 14, we were playing in fire halls and VFW halls, and 15 miles away The Strokes were playing their first shows at the Mercury Lounge in Manhattan,” he remembers. “We wouldn’t have even fucking considered going to see them, not because we were too poor, not because we couldn’t get out of the house, but because we were like, ‘oh, fuck that New York scene’. We were from another planet. New Jersey, it’s separated from Manhattan by this body of water, like a medieval moat, which people do not cross. There’s this whole sentiment of, ‘oh well, that’s how they do it in the city’, that everything New York is famous for is better in Jersey: bagels, pizza, sleaze, all of it. Which is true.”

Touring with Outline and his subsequent band, the folkier Steel Train, was a hardscrabble life. “We must have played 250 shows a year, for five to ten years straight, in a time when being in a band wasn’t something that, like, your parents would brag about,” he smiles. “And it was magical. It left me with a massive love of being a touring artist. Why does a person have that bizarre bone in their body that makes them want to be onstage in front of all these people sweating and screaming together?” He shrugs. “I do.”

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