After many years of playing in the indie music scene as the lead guitarist of the band Fun., you had your breakout moment in 2011 with the song “We Are Young.” Thirteen Grammys later, you’re now associated with the sound of a generation, producing and writing for artists like Taylor Swift, Lana Del Rey, and Kendrick Lamar. Do you ever think about your influence on culture?
It’s really hard to think about. I don’t want to be a part of culture—I want to have my own culture. I want to move culture in the directions that I feel necessary. It’s what I’ve done since I was 15. I say, “This is what I think is the shit,” and then I go do that.
This month, you’re releasing Everyone for Ten Minutes, your fifth studio album with Bleachers, the rock band you formed in 2013. What’s the title referencing?
The whole world right now is this endless gallery of people talking who have no knowledge or intentionality. I was sending myself a song when I saw that “Everyone for 10 Minutes” feature on AirDrop, and I thought, How interesting, the machine knows there have to be protections in place for who you let in. The album is about love and loss, but the lens this time is things I really want to leave behind.
Your song “Dirty Wedding Dress,” about your and Margaret Qualley’s wedding, touches on this.
The lyric is “Only my people can see me / Only my people come in.” At our wedding, there were people taking pictures outside the venue, and a big scene, but we closed the door. We’re all gonna live, we’re all gonna die. I don’t want to spend my time on the temporary thoughts or feelings of a dissolving culture.
Prada shirt and pants.
Why do you think culture is dissolving?
The biggest lie of our time is that community exists on the Internet. I went to a very typical high school in New Jersey, where it looked like Abercrombie had vomited on the place. Freshman year, I remember seeing this one guy, Pete, wearing a shirt of a band I liked, and I gravitated toward him. We would go to shows and meet up with other people who felt like us. That’s how I see the world, and that’s how I see being an artist.
Loneliness is a theme that runs through your music, from albums you’ve produced, like Swift’s Folklore and Midnights, to your own work in Bleachers.
I’m always in touch with the lonely part of myself. The lonely are a beautiful group of people. We get some of our greatest art and wisdom from the lonely.
The first two songs on the album, “Sideways” and “The Van,” are about your memories of being 15. Why start there?
A lot of people got to know me publicly in my late 20s, and that’s a funny time in your life. When you get known for different things, you can feel really seen, but you can also feel like other parts of yourself get erased. That’s where I got the line “Shouted hello bastards / As we left our ancestors.” For my whole lineage—an Eastern European, Holocaust-surviving immigrant story—the theme was just to get safe, get a house, earn a wage, have a family. But at 15, I left [that path]. You make decisions you don’t even think twice about, but they set you on a complicated course.
The Row sweater, shirt, pants and shoes.
You described working on Kendrick Lamar’s latest album, GNX, as being part of a “secret society.”
You know you’re doing the right thing when you’re supposed to be somewhere at 2, and you get there at 1:30. There was nothing we made—and we made a lot of music—that didn’t completely touch my heart. When I’m working with people, I get really obsessive about where they’re at, what it’s like to be them, and then trying to take all that and put it into something that you can hit play on. I don’t think in terms of genre. Great is great.
You and Lana Del Rey started working together in 2018 and have made three albums together. How does a collaboration stay alive for so long?
I never expect to work with people over and over. You just get called back to each other or not. With me and her, it’s just “Where are you? Maybe let’s catch a day.” We caught three days in New Orleans randomly, and that’s when we did [her single] “White Feather Hawk Tail Deer Hunter.”
Where is pop music heading?
I think pop music will become way more organic, and anything that is very algorithmic will probably get swallowed by AI—honestly, as it should. What survives will be a more direct expression of hearing or feeling someone in the room. People are screaming and crying for that because they can’t take another second of their humanity being reduced to something getting their attention.
Photo assistants: Jeremiah Cumberbatch, Ricardo Lara; digital technician: David Gannon; fashion assistant: Juje Hsiung.
