You’ve heard it blasting from the car next to you at the traffic lights, you’ve heard it in movie trailers, and if you’re the kind of insomniac who stays up to catch late-night talk shows, you’ve heard it there as well. It features on the soundtrack to the first season of Girls (a natural hook-up considering the indie power-coupledom of Antonoff and the show’s creator and star, Lena Dunham), and it even received its own sugary-sweet rendition from the cast of Glee, the young performers emoting on every note and them some. Earlier this month, the band were nominated for a swag of Grammy Awards, and We Are Young picked up two – one in the Record Of The Year category, and another for Song Of The Year.
Some Nights, the album that accompanied We Are Young, is an energetic and highly theatrical record, its arrangements bursting at the seams, its songs featuring soaring, highly emotive choruses – but where the arrangements are epic and uplifting, the lyrics are more introspective. “I think that’s just a consequence of how we learned to write,” Antonoff explains. “I like the idea of being on the radio with a big pop song and having a really dark lyric or a really dark element to it,” he says. “You don’t have to follow the rules. You don’t have to write a big happy lyric just because you have a big happy melody on the chorus, and you don’t have to go balls-out in the lyrics just because you’re writing a big rock song. You can do whatever you want. The bottom line is that people are complicated, and music is complicated … When you write a complicated song, people can find different meanings in it, and find different ways to connect with it.”
The record’s ornate sound is even more of a surprise given that it was produced by Jeff Bhasker, who is better known for working with Kanye West and Alicia Keys than he is with rock bands. According to Antonoff, though, the contrast between their two approaches made for an ideal collaboration. “Jeff comes from a certain world, we come from a very different word, and that was the key to the relationship,” he says. “We were excited about what he was doing, and he was excited about what we were doing, and it created quite a unique environment in the studio. I mean, when it came to choosing a producer, we could have chosen someone who came from a similar musical background to ours, but that wouldn’t have been very interesting – it would have been a case of, ‘Okay, we all know exactly what we’re doing here, that’s it, let’s get down to business’. Working with Jeff made it much more of an adventure. He comes from that hip hop background so he brought a whole different set of experiences to the studio, which ultimately made things a lot more interesting.”
After the storming success of We Are Young, the band released the album’s title track as the second single. Though it took a while to get there, Some Nights became another big hit around the world, its success all the more surprising given that the band never considered it to be a single at all. “That’s such a weird one,” Antonoff says. “I mean, it’s my favourite song on the album, and I certainly like it a lot, but to me, it’s just such a bizarre piece of music that I never really saw it working as a single.” After all, the song barely has a chorus, and has more in common with weird ‘70s prog rock than it does anything on the charts right now. “I just never saw it catching on to the extent that it has. I mean, I’m really glad that it’s been so successful as a single, and in a way, it’s very heartening, because that track is just so damn weird. It really breaks the mould of what a pop song is supposed to be and what a pop song can sound like.”
With six Grammy nominations and a lot of touring in the near future, including a trip to Australia for the upcoming Future Music Festival, I ask Antonoff about his and his band mates’ ambitions for the future. He thinks about this for a while. “Our only ambition is to have big ideas and keep putting them into music,” he says. “That’s why we all got into this, and that’s what gets us really excited about what we do.”
BY ALASDAIR DUNCAN
