Mert & MarcusAs 2017 comes to a close, super-producer Jack Antonoff is looking back on a song he wrote with Taylor Swift, appropriately titled “New Year’s Day.”
The song, which closes out Taylor’s album Reputation, has a different sound from the rest of the songs on the album. Jack tells Entertainment Weekly that was by design. He says it was the quickest song to record and they kept the “scratch takes” instead of re-recording it to make it sound perfect.
“You just want the song to feel like itself,” he says. “I don’t know what we would be thinking if we tried to f*** with it. I’m so proud of it because, personally, I think it’s some sort of hint at the future.”
Jack says that the writing process of Reputation was much different than his work with Taylor on her 1989 album. With 1989, he would send Taylor tracks and she would write to that. With Reputation, they wrote most of the songs from scratch sitting in a room together.
He tells EW that Taylor is great at “talking about what the hell is going on in your life and somehow finding a way to take that exact emotion and make a song out of it.”
Jack adds, “That was the theme of those sessions: ‘Let’s just tell this story, whatever that story is, because that’s the whole point.’”
In addition to “New Year’s Day,” Jack co-wrote five other songs for Reputation, including “Look What You Made Me Do,” “Dress” and “This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things.”
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