The super-producer praised the three artists as people who built their craft and fan bases over time
As a producer behind a plethora of hit songs and albums by Taylor Swift and other supernovas, Jack Antonoff knows a thing or two about what pop stardom takes. In a new interview with Billboard, he points to time, using his collaborators Charli XCX and Sabrina Carpenter – as well as this year’s breakthrough Chappell Roan – as examples. “People call it Brat Summer — it should be called ‘artist development summer,’” he joked with the magazine.
“Sabrina [Carpenter], Charli and Chappell Roan — the three of them have had this shared experience of artists who have been crystallizing, and that’s where you get gems,” Antonoff said of 2024’s scene-stealers. “And that’s the story of being an artist. That’s true artist development. And it doesn’t matter where we are in tech or streaming or anything — the only way to win is to create your own language.”
Of Carpenter in particular, with whom he produced and co-wrote four songs on her album Short n’ Sweet, including “Please Please Please,” Antonoff said, “Sabrina’s been quietly growing, and her albums have been getting more awesome, and she’s been honing her sound and performances. It’s not like she just popped onto the scene — this has been a decade of grinding toward it.”
Antonoff has been grinding too, in rock bands since he was high schooler in the late Nineties, including the trio “Fun,” whose hit “We Are Young” kicked off his time in the limelight. He’s earned 11 Grammys throughout his career out of a whopping 24 nominations, for his work on albums like Swift’s Midnights and Lana Del Rey’s Norman Fucking Rockwell. He’s clinched the award for Producer of the Year and Non-Classical at the last three Grammys — a fourth win in 2025 (as his credits include Swift’s Tortured Poets Department) would make him the only person to consecutively take the category that many times in its history.
Looking forward, Antonoff has said he’s working with Del Rey once more for her forthcoming album Lasso and is fundraising to open studios in LGBTQ+ youth centers.
