Taylor Swift’s “Anti-Hero” is just a couple of months shy of being one year old, and it remains one of the biggest songs of the moment. The single off of Midnights became Swift’s longest-running No. 1 song and remains high up on Billboard’s Hot 100 to this day. Taylor Swift wrote and produced the song with her frequent collaborator, Jack Antonoff, who recently broke down how the catchy hit about self-loathing came to be in the studio.
Jack Antonoff has been making huge hits with Taylor Swift since her 1989 album and served as a producer on every track of 2022’s Midnights album. While speaking to Time about his career, he shared the behind-the-scenes story about how “Anti-Hero” started. In his words:
‘Anti-Hero’ was mostly built around an OB-8, which is a really weird synthesizer that has a different attitude every time you turn it on. And then I had this Linn Drum beat that I made. These are all things I didn’t even have when I was producing ‘Out of the Woods.’ And I just put a tremolo on it. And that became the whole meat and potatoes of the thing.
Once he figured out the beat that very much grounds the hit melody, he showed the track he created to Taylor Swift. As he continued:
That tremolo is so singular, and it’s not something when I did that I had really heard. And then the way the OB-8 is, I always think of it as like a ballpark melody. Like something someone would play on an old organ in a baseball stadium. But, I heard those two things together, and I was just like, ‘Damn, that’s cool.’I had played her that track, and I remember, we were at my apartment in New York. And sometimes she gets this look in her eye where she’s like, ‘Oh, I’m going in.’ You know, she goes in many different ways and is just the greatest writer and vocalist ever. But on that one, I just remember watching her and being like, ‘Uh oh. We’ve got a live one.’
Once Antonoff constructed the music you hear in the background of the lyrics for “Anti-Hero,” Swift really attached to it and was inspired to write a particularly vulnerable song about feeling like she’s the “problem” in her life before imagining her daughter-in-law killing her for the massive inheritance before reading a will that has then thinking “she’s laughing up at us from Hell.” It’s truly an all-time great Swift song. As Antonoff continued:
And, that’s fun because not everything I do necessarily she automatically loves. There’s still a venn diagram of taste, but there is that space when we meet up and when we meet up it feels unstoppable.
Antonoff and Swift’s collaboration first was explored in a big way when they worked together on her first all pop album, 1989, ahead of its fall 2014 release. Antonoff has also been along the ride to produce 2017’s Reputation, 2019’s Lover, 2020’s folklore and evermore before 2022’s Midnights. Their partnership is now set to come full circle this fall with the next upcoming Taylor Swift project. 1989 (Taylor’s Version), which Swift recently announced, is going to be released this October.
Jack Antonoff makes the writing process seem so simple and straightforward but it’s not easy to make a hit like “Anti-Hero.” How are we not tired of this song yet? It’s just too good! Check out the music video that came out last October:
The “Anti-Hero” music video controversy aside, this video is just as good as the song and really underlines the message of the song. Both Swift and Antonoff are songwriting masterminds, and that’s been highlighted as Swift has made her Eras Tour a phenomenon. During the show, “Anti-Hero” is even the subject of one of many Eras Tour traditions. Antonoff made an appearance on Eras Tour during the singer’s nightly surprise song performances. They dueted “Getaway Car” on Night 1 of New Jersey’s run of shows in May.
Between replays of “Anti-Hero,” we can look forward to 1989 (Taylor’s Version) featuring five new “vault” tracks from the era (we’re guessing Antonoff is part of in some capacity) on October 27.