Jack Antonoff has taken to the airwaves to address the rumors surrounding his relationship with Taylor Swift, setting the record straight on Tuesday, April 28, during an appearance on The Howard Stern Show. The 42-year-old musician, known for his work with Swift on a string of albums including The Tortured Poets Department (2024), Midnights (2022), Folklore (2020), Lover (2019), Reputation (2017), 1989 (2014), and the rerecorded versions of Fearless (2021) and Red (2021), was notably absent from Swift’s 2025 project Life Of A Showgirl.
Despite this, Antonoff expressed no hard feelings toward the “Opalite” singer, emphasizing that their bond remains strong. He described their friendship as “very deep,” adding, “We’ll Be Friends Forever.”
“When something’s done, I’m always like, ‘That’s it. We had this moment and I love you and we’ll be friends forever, but that’s it,’” Antonoff told radio host Howard Stern.
He admitted to being “utterly shocked” if he ever gets the chance to work with the same artist again. “When it happens, I go, okay, cool. ‘One more for some reason, but that’s it,’” he said.
Antonoff has worked with a range of other artists, including Sabrina Carpenter, Lorde, Lana Del Rey, Sara Bareilles, and Carly Rae Jepsen.
When pressed specifically about Swift, he doubled down on his message. “It’s really weird,” Antonoff explained. “It sounds kind of corny. I only feel grateful for the work that’s happened and maybe it’s because I write my own songs and sing them that I understand that need to have different collaborators and jump around.”
He added, “I don’t think it’s normal to have the same collaborators over and over and when I’ve had it with people, I think it’s a weird miracle.”
Antonoff recalled meeting Swift for the first time in Germany in 2012. “I was like, ‘Oh, you’re my people,’ and then we started sending music back and forth,” he remembered. “I sent her a track I had made, and then quite quickly, as she can do in five minutes, it felt like, sends back lyrics and melody on top of that track.”
Then, he made a song for her. “There’s total separation with me. I’m never working on something and thinking like, ‘Where does this go?’ It’s always super intentional,” he said.
Both Swift and Antonoff spoke highly of their “rant bridge” concept. “The concept of the rant bridge, which is a very her and I thing, is you spend a whole song verse in chorus being super poetic and dancing around something and giving details and holding some back and creating a lot of mystery, and then you get to this bridge and you just crash the f— out,” he told Stern.
Antonoff added, “At that point you’ve earned it, so it’s almost like you can be so free and — it’s something that I feel like is kind of one of our very special things that happens when we’re in a room together. We kind of egg each other on.”
In an interview with The New York Times published Wednesday, April 29, Swift called Antonoff “one of my best friends.” She described the “rant bridge” as a “stream of consciousness, endless pouring-out of emotion, intrusive thoughts, blended with metaphor, with discussion, with shouting.”
Swift continued, “You want this rant bridge to feel the most intense of what that feeling is that you’re trying to establish over the course of the song, and you want it to be kind of a crescendo.”
She listed 2014’s “Out of the Woods,” 2019’s “Cruel Summer” and 2023’s “Is It Over Now?” as tunes that enlist the rant bridge.
Antonoff is grateful for their collaborations. “The friendship is very deep,” he said of life with Swift. “You live an amazing artistic life together in that room, and then it lives on. It’s extremely powerful.”
