He had his signature thick, dark-rimmed glasses and close-cut hairstyle, and was wearing a gray sweatshirt with the sleeves cut short, and rolled-up jeans, which made him seem like a young boxer straight out of the ’50s. We sat at a small table in the middle of the restaurant and I laughed so, so much. We talked about our insecurities and neuroses and his first date with Lena Dunham and first-date vomiting in the bathroom and my hopes for my record and how much we love Tegan and Sara and how weird the music industry is and on and on. We managed to skip over all the politeness and chitchat, something I seem to have become more allergic to as I have gotten older. We agreed a writing session would indeed be fun. We made arrangements for a time to meet up back in NYC, when he had a little time off. During our month of e-mailing I had wondered if I would fall in love with Jack (because I think that about every new man I meet). I did fall for him, but as a friend from the very beginning, which made everything moving forward delightfully uncomplicated and easy.
As you might recall, cowriting is not my favorite experience. Despite how much I liked Jack, I was playing out how horrible it all might go in my mind as I went up the ten or so floors to a little writing room in a big studio in Times Square. I was the first to arrive. I unpacked my computer and a notebook and tried to figure out what you are supposed to do when you are the first one to arrive at a writing session. There was a huge recording console that I couldn’t even pretend to know how to use, some massive speakers I couldn’t figure out how to turn on, and a mute little keyboard that was connected to all of it. I poked around the adjacent lounge for a minute, very disappointed not to find a coffee machine anywhere, which would have been a task that I was pretty sure I could stretch into taking up at least ten minutes. I was flooded with relief when Jack came fumbling in with his backpack and lightning-fast conversation and a couple of crinkly bags from a pharmacy where he goes frequently because, he told me with a smile, he’s a self-diagnosed hypochondriac. I began to relax.
We chatted a little bit as the studio tech helped get everything up and running. Jack was in the midst of a world tour with his band, FUN., and selling out arenas all over the globe, writing songs with loads of different artists and for his new project, Bleachers, falling in love with Lena, and he somehow seemed completely in control of and energized by all of it. In addition, Jack was consumed with the launch of the Ally Coalition, his social justice organization built around inviting straight voices to speak out for gay rights. Marriage equality was all over the news, and we talked about how, state by state, we were watching history unfold. It was a very exciting time.
I told him about a past trip to New York where I realized how much more I wanted from my life. I was at a personal crossroads and change was nagging at me. I had just made the decision to leave Los Angeles, and also to strike out on a new creative path with this record. I was contemplating making changes having to do with my long-term band mates, and I hadn’t had the courage to talk about it with them yet. I was also considering embarking on my very first solo tour, but wasn’t sure if I could pull it off. Thankfully, this was easy to divulge to Jack, who, with his unapologetic honesty, can always somehow one-up your worries in a way that is both hilarious and utterly charming.
He makes me laugh, which makes me relax, which makes room for music.
This meeting came at a time when I was feeling pressure to get the new record done quickly, but was very stuck in my own writing. We jumped into Jack’s catalogue and listened to unfinished demo ideas from his computer. He scrolled through a catalogue of song seeds and we stopped because one of them grabbed me. It ended up being the genesis of Brave. The rolling drum loop began, and then a sound that felt like a starting-line gunshot signaled the plinking piano to begin its familiar chord progression at the top of the verse. It felt like some song I had known before and was now just trying to remember. The immediate connection made me want to create, and we spent the next couple of hours going over rhythmic ideas for the verses, homing in on a melody.
It was then that Jack gave me a gift I didn’t know I needed.
“You don’t need help writing lyrics,” he said, and basically sent me out of the room. I was a little stunned. Over the years I had made an erroneous assumption that cowriting had to look a certain way, where everything was shared, including the lyrics. I had always tried to be uncompromisingly inclusive of my cowriters through each step of the writing, and mostly I would come away feeling like something got diluted along the way. I feel silly admitting it now, but it had never actually occurred to me that it was okay to simply tell a story by myself while still collaborating. Hunting for the exact words that communicate my thoughts in a song is my greatest pleasure. My lyrics are my most private prayers, and I guess I don’t really know how to authentically share that part of my craft. At least not yet. And Jack saw that before I did. He gently gave me permission to own the story of my songs without apology.
Thanks, Jack.
I sat in the lounge next to the studio and the words poured out ferocious and fast. Partially sparked by the idea behind Jack’s advocacy organization, they became a love letter to a very dear friend of mine who was, as I was, facing big things at the time and feeling powerless and fearful. She was living between an internal and an external reality that didn’t match. After many years of keeping her private life very private, she was struggling to come out with her evolving sexuality to friends and family and didn’t yet see a way to do it. She shamed herself into believing that people wouldn’t be able to love her as she truly was, and who she was becoming. I had watched her turmoil and anxiety grow over the years. They had become bigger and bigger beasts that made her believe she was small and weak. Stuck. From the outside I could see that those fears kept her from considering the very possibility that there might be a better version of her life waiting for her. It mirrored so many things in my life. I recognized all of it. Although the issues at the heart of my situation were different, both of our stories boiled down to the same thing: fear of speaking our truth.
My friend became the conduit for the message that I needed to hear myself. I spoke directly to her with my lyrics. I wrote to her about how we can choose to reflect the places we see the lack of love in the world, or we could try to be stronger than our weaknesses, and shine a light on something better. We were facing down our own personal Goliaths. I wanted to invite her to stand with me and try the radical act of simply staying put. To tell the truth and trust that whatever comes next is going to be okay.
Jack was moved by the message and gave me the sense that anything and everything is possible. That this song had the potential to deeply connect with a lot of people. I felt something inside of me expanding. I am a creature of habit, and I live most comfortably inside intimate writing. I write songs about the nuance and minutiae of the heart’s condition, and when I imagine sharing those songs it feels like a conversation between my listeners and me. If I am a small theater with velvet seats, then Jack is a stadium with fireworks. This is another one of his very special qualities as a writer and collaborator. He has a talent for creating sweeping musical anthems effortlessly, broad and bright, and this doesn’t mean he doesn’t speak to what is intimate about the human condition; he just does it in a way that conjures up the feeling of a common purpose and oceans of people, lighters and all.
It was exciting to have an idea come this quickly; still, we left the studio that first day without a chorus. We felt that the verses were special, and we had played around with a few directions for what came next, but nothing felt right. At the end of the day, I went back to my hotel in SoHo and let things marinate. I decided I would go in early the next day to get some time alone with the keyboard and see if I could crack the code.
The next morning I walked through the bedlam of Times Square and had about an hour to myself before Jack arrived. I sat at the keyboard trying to condense the thoughts and feelings pinging around my head into its nucleus. My best friend’s journey. My belief in her undeniable strength that she didn�
��t see. The changing climate surrounding my friends in the gay community. Jack’s advocacy group. My own journey toward another city and a new life. My hope for my own ability to keep going. It all seemed to boil down to a request for a simple intention.
It wasn’t about prowess. Or outcome. My request was for courage. To turn and face the thing that scares you the most and do your best to stay there. I asked for honesty, which sometimes requires more strength than most things we do in our lives. I can put my hand over my heart and sing those words and mean them, every single time.
I want to see you be brave.
I felt chills when I sang them over the melodic hook that I had plunked out for the first time that day in the studio, the melody that also happened to be at the VERY, VERY top of my range. I was pleading for the strength to be courageous on behalf of my best friend, myself, and everyone I could imagine who needed it, and the request belonged at my vocal breaking point: a high E-flat. The break between my chest voice and head voice happens to occur on the first two notes of the hook of the song. Those two little notes have kicked my ass many times, and that song has taught me more about surrender and truth than I could have imagined.
Jack loved it. We finessed the structure and made a quick recording. I e-mailed our demo of the song off to my manager and it was the second song in my career that caused him to call me right after he heard it to tell me how special it was. We decided that Brave would be the first single from the upcoming record, which I was just about to start recording. I knew when the song was finished that we had made something that was undeniably honest, but it was also my most pop-oriented, commercial-sounding song up to this point. I wondered if that was going to come back to bite me.
Summer Shapiro and myself dancing like maniacs in downtown Los Angeles
The next few months went by unbelievably fast. I finished up the writing, began settling into my new home in New York City, and simultaneously started recording in both New York and LA with two different producers. I wanted to explore a range of stylistic approaches, and each producer brought something special and unique to the recording process. I coproduced most of the record at Electric Lady Studios with John O’Mahony and Kurt Uenala, and it was exhilarating and easy. We did almost everything by ourselves, drank red wine, ate vegan meals followed by non-vegan chocolate, and invited friends to play on the recordings. The music unfolded before us as something exploratory and exciting. Anxiety bled into excitement that told me I was making something that would commemorate the personal transformation I was experiencing in my life. At some point during those months, I received an e-mail from a friend with a quote in it. It gave me the title of the record.
“There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all of time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium, and it will be lost. The world will not have it.
It is not your business to determine how good it is, nor how valuable, nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open. You do not even have to believe in yourself or your work. You have to keep yourself open and aware to the urges that motivate you. Keep the channel open.
No artist is pleased. [There is] no satisfaction whatever at any time. There is only a queer, divine dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than the others.”
—MARTHA GRAHAM, to Agnes de Mille
I would call the record The Blessed Unrest. I talked myself into believing that even though I didn’t know exactly where I was going, the journey itself must be divinely ordained, leading me toward something better. The message of this quote seemed to seamlessly fit into the message of Brave and I was struck by a sense of synergy with how everything was coming together. I didn’t have time to get my SYNERGY tattoo, however, because things that come together can also come apart.
I recorded the song Brave in Los Angeles with a producer named Mark Endert, who was given the few songs we intended to service to radio. Mark has a great ear for pop radio, and a killer résumé. He is kind and funny and has big ideas, amazing stories, and a bulldozer work ethic. He saw me struggle internally in the studio with my worry that the song was sounding too pop and too commercial. I have spent my whole career worrying that the big bad pop monster was going to eat me when I wasn’t looking, and it speaks more to my stubborn streak than anything else, but that familiar fear was there in my stomach, gnawing away. I wrestled with myself to reserve judgment until I heard the finished product. I struggled to make something meaningful to me and still gently shape it for what we hoped would be a life on the radio. I was very emotional during the recording, feeling like I was being invisibly bullied—by whom, I’m not sure—but I gave a lot of space for his ideas and we made something together that was very rhythmic and bright and pretty perfect for radio. He added a lot of programming at his studio in Florida and sent me the initial mix of what we had done together.
I absolutely hated it.
It was slick and shiny and I felt that I had lost my hold on the essence of the song. Like I had “sold out” to get my song on the radio. Nothing makes me more panicky and rage-filled than the worry that I’ve done something in order to position myself for business over the art. (And yes, my label and management LOOOOVE that side of me.) I sat in my car listening over and over again, afraid that I had contaminated something that could have been pure. We were running out of time to get the single on its way, and I made the decision to take my own advice. I talked honestly to Mark about it, and although he didn’t hear quite what I was hearing, we agreed to make some adjustments and had another session to try and get on the same page. I walked into that session ready to hate everything including Mark, and feeling absolutely certain the whole song was going to need to be completely rerecorded.
We started by simply hearing everything that was there, piece by piece. The programming. The string parts. The synthesizers. The background vocals. The live drums. Bass. Guitar. I sat with my arms crossed and my temples throbbing with anger and begrudgingly realized I really liked 90 percent of what was there. It was beautiful. Slick, absolutely, but also bold and hopeful. It was leaning into that shiny pop place that I always fight against but secretly really love, and this song wore it well. We did decide to strip some of it away to leave a little more space, and then Mark made some sonic adjustments to accommodate something slightly more natural. The heart of it stayed very much the same, and the song settled into where it is now. I had been so afraid that my essence would get lost in all the bells and whistles that I couldn’t allow myself to think that it might also feel authentic to have a song that sounded like that.
After we had made our changes, I wanted to double-check my own instincts by doing what I never do—I asked for opinions. From my family. My friends. My management. Jack. I cringed listening along with them, waiting for them to hear something fake or paper-thin, but every single one of them loved it. I started to listen without fighting back, and began to hear what they heard. I’d asked for honesty and I got it. They heard a pop song with heart. I smiled internally and realized that this was going to be a really special song in my life.
* * *
JACK ANTONOFF
I was having dinner with Mike Birbiglia and Sara Quin, and the two of them were really getting intense about how much I would love Sara Bareilles. They were really going in hard about her. Sometime after that dinner, Sara Quin put us in touch over e-mail and we kind of hit the ground running.
I remember one specific e-mail from Sara B that was nearly three thousand words, separated into small paragraphs chronologically outlining her day from four a.m. to midnight. She went to the airport a day early and walked me through all the actual events and bizarre emotions that come along with getting yourself to LAX crazy-early the day before you were supposed to be there. I just loved her immediately.
We met
in person at a small restaurant in West LA for breakfast. I don’t remember the exact time, but it was during this specific period when FUN. was working at an insane pace and I constantly felt like I couldn’t breathe. When life is crazy like that I always remember so little; everything is fast and blurry, but meeting Sara that day existed outside of everything crazy. It was strange like that. I saw her and felt oddly comfortable immediately.
Jack Antonoff and I in New York City, May 2015
We talked about relationships, death, anxiety, strange career feelings, etc. We laughed a lot—I remember actually laughing. Sara was talking about a strange and transitional place she was in and I remember feeling very much there myself at the time. I had been doing a bunch of different production and writing sessions on my days off; some of them were so inspiring, some of them made me want to shoot myself.
I’ve always written songs in a very safe and lonely space, and working outside of that was terrifying for me. Two artists in a room creating something that is bigger than either one of them is incredibly beautiful. On the other side, working to create something with someone for an artist you don’t know is repulsive. I was in the midst of what my comfort zone was for writing and production. The week before I went to the factory-farming equivalent session for a pop star I won’t name. Sara and I discussed this. We talked about all the horrible and wonderful things that can come from stepping outside of your writing comfort zone. Knowing it could be a disaster, we said we’d try it.
Sounds Like Me Page 9