Bleachers

They piled into Antonoff’s family minivan, Book Your Own Fucking Life in hand, and set out to tour America, albeit with a very New Jersey chip on their shoulder. “When we started, I was 14, we were playing in fire halls and VFW halls, and 15 miles away The Strokes were playing their first shows at the Mercury Lounge in Manhattan,” he remembers. “We wouldn’t have even fucking considered going to see them, not because we were too poor, not because we couldn’t get out of the house, but because we were like, ‘oh, fuck that New York scene’. We were from another planet. New Jersey, it’s separated from Manhattan by this body of water, like a medieval moat, which people do not cross. There’s this whole sentiment of, ‘oh well, that’s how they do it in the city’, that everything New York is famous for is better in Jersey: bagels, pizza, sleaze, all of it. Which is true.”

Touring with Outline and his subsequent band, the folkier Steel Train, was a hardscrabble life. “We must have played 250 shows a year, for five to ten years straight, in a time when being in a band wasn’t something that, like, your parents would brag about,” he smiles. “And it was magical. It left me with a massive love of being a touring artist. Why does a person have that bizarre bone in their body that makes them want to be onstage in front of all these people sweating and screaming together?” He shrugs. “I do.”

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