!["Jack Antonoff Emphasizes It's Unusual to Repeat Collaborators: Open to Not Participating in Taylor Swift's New Album, The Life Of A Showgirl, While Discussing the Idea of a 'Rant Bridge'"]](https://backingtracksfullcollection.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Jack-Antonoff-Emphasizes-Its-Unusual-to-Repeat-Collaborators-Open-to-758x426.jpg "\"Jack Antonoff Emphasizes It's Unusual to Repeat Collaborators: Open to Not Participating in Taylor Swift's New Album, The Life Of A Showgirl, While Discussing the Idea of a 'Rant Bridge'\"] 1")
If you’re a songwriter and producer who’s worked extensively with an artist on their previous seven studio albums, there must be a part of you that assumes that you’re going to get the call to collaborate on the next one.
Jack Antonoff, however, says that he totally understands why Taylor Swift chose to go in a different direction on The Life Of A Showgirl, and suggests that it was a “weird miracle” that the two of them had such a long run together prior to that.
The Bleachers frontman made his remarks in an interview with Howard Stern, explaining that “I only feel grateful for the work that has happened.”
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In light of a question about his absence from 2025’s The Life Of A Showgirl, which Swift made with Swedish producers Max Martin and Shellback, he added: “Maybe it’s only because I write my own songs and sing them, but I understand that need to have different collaborators and jump around.”
In fact, says Antonoff, it’s actually the constant creative partnerships that should be the ones that raise eyebrows.
“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,” he confirms.
One of the calling cards of the Swift/Antonoff songwriting partnership has been the ‘rant bridge’, which Antonoff told Stern is “very her” [Swift].
Describing the concept, Antonoff says: “You spend a whole song verse and chorus, you know, being super poetic and dancing around something and giving details and holding some back and, you know, creating a lot of mystery, and then you get to this bridge and you just crash the fuck out and you just, you know, at that point you’ve earned it.
“So it’s almost like you can be so free… It’s something that I feel 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.”
Interestingly, Swift has also been speaking about her songwriting process this week, in an interview with The New York Times, and she too touched on the rant bridge trick.
After calling Antonoff “one of my best friends,” she said: “We established this thing that we love to do, and we call it the rant bridge. I could point to examples – Out Of The Woods, Is It Over Now, Cruel Summer – and oftentimes we love these rant bridges, where it’s basically like, stream of consciousness, endless, pouring out of emotion, intrusive thoughts, blended with metaphor, with discussion, with shouting. Like, 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 kind of be a crescendo.”
So powerful are these rant bridges, says Swift, that she and Antonoff often use them multiple times in a song, sometimes using the chorus chords underneath on the second go round.
It seems almost inconceivable that Antonoff and Swift won’t work together, but even if they don’t, it seems like their relationship will be just fine.
“The friendship is very deep,” says Antonoff. “You live an amazing artistic life together in that room, and then it lives on. It’s extremely powerful.”
