You're listening to Song Exploder, where musicians take apart their songs,
and piece by piece, tell the story of how they were made.
I'm Rishikesh Hirway.
Bleachers is the moniker of Jack Antonoff, a songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, and producer.
He won two Grammy Awards as a member of the band Fun,
and another for his production work on Taylor Swift's album 1989.
He's also co-written songs with Saint Vincent, Lorde, Carly Rae Jepsen, Sia, and more.
In June 2017, Jack Antonoff released his second album as Bleachers, Gone Now.
In this episode, he breaks down a song from that album called I Miss Those Days.
He traces the process of making it from the original demo to the final song.
Hi, I'm Jack Antonoff from Bleachers.
So the way this started was I bought an emulator.
I think it's called the Emu2.
It was one of the first sampler systems.
It's like a big machine that takes floppy disks.
I put one of the floppy disks in, not knowing what it was, and just held down one D note.
So that is me just holding down a D, and there's this arp on the emulator playing the piano pattern.
The machine is so from a different time that when you switch between sounds,
it takes about 45 to 60 seconds.
The screen literally says, this will take a minute.