Bleachers‘ upcoming album Take The Sadness Out Of Saturday Night may be a dance-ready ode to joy, but it first began while Jack Antonoff was in a dark place. The musician/producer recently announced his upcoming third studio album with the jubilant track “Stop Making This Hurt,” and he now says the record was born out of his painful breakup with Lena Dunham.
Antonoff and Dunham broke things off in 2018 following a five-year relationship. In a recent interview with Rolling Stone, Antonoff said he was feeling “darkness and depression” at the time, but began writing Take The Sadness Out Of Saturday Night after finally seeing the light:
“I was writing for a long time. The early process was, I got out of a relationship [with Lena Dunham], and I felt an amazing amount of darkness and depression. I fell in there. But the moment it starts to open up and you see a piece of light is a really amazing place to write from. There’s a lot of desperation in these songs, and I realized, ‘Oh, that’s the same feeling of being from New Jersey, that desperation of wanting out, of I want to break through into another part of my life.’ So that’s when I started to see the framework. And then a really amazing thing happened when the pandemic hit. It was like the final piece of the album, because everything I’m talking about in the songwriting is about sort of dreaming of a next place.”
Elsewhere in the interview, Antonoff mentioned that he always plays his music to Taylor Swift, Lana Del Rey, and Lorde for approval before finalizing it, but this time around, Bruce Springsteen also stepped in. “The best records are made with a small group of people that really believe in something,” he said. “My group is like me, my manager, my A&R person who doesn’t even work on my label anymore — he’s just a really close person to me. Then my family, and some artists like Lana. I always play some for Ella [Lorde]. Taylor, of course. Bruce [Springsteen] is deeply in the group. I played him the whole record the other day. We took a drive and listened to it.”
Take The Sadness Out Of Saturday Night is out 7/30 via RCA. Pre-order it here.