Jack Antonoff’s new song ‘Hey Joe’ is not about Taylor Swift’s ex-boyfriend Joe Alwyn – it’s actually a tribute to his dad.
The musician is due to release a new self-titled record with his band Bleachers next year and he’s revealed fans of his longtime collaborator Taylor have already looked and the track list and speculated one of the songs is about her ex Joe but Jack is adamant they are going to be disappointed
He told the Guardian newspaper: “There’s a community of people that will be pretty disappointed when they find out it’s [‘Hey Joe’] a meditation on my father and his friends walking the Ho Chi Minh trail in their 60s.”
The 39-year-old musician went on to add that the album touches on his grief after losing his younger sister Sarah to brain cancer in 2001 when she was just 13 and the death of his cousin fighting in the Iraq war.
Antonoff said the album explores “tribute living” which he says it a way of living for a lost loved one. He explained: “It was about a character – myself, when I was sort of stuck – who wants to find something outside of this living-in-tribute, where every move in one’s life is for the person who can’t be here .. [I wrote] songs that were extremely present. I started to see my writing not beyond, but in addition to, the lens of grief.”
He added of recording music: “The truth is, when you make records, you’re not thinking about it at all – because if you are, you know what it is and it’s not interesting. All of the songs that I’ve ever written, they feel like something that scares me and is really deep, and I’m figuring out as I’m doing it.”
Bleachers is due for release on March 8.