Jack Antonoff has been involved in some pretty big records over the past decade, but he says that there’ll never be another song quite like one particular Beatles classic.
The tune in question is none other than Happiness Is A Warm Gun, taken from 1968’s The White Album. With its complex structure and frequent timing shifts, it might lack the immediacy of the Fab Four’s pure pop works, and it isn’t their most famous ‘experimental’ song, either, but for Antonoff, it represents a gold standard, and the song that he’s previously said was his first “production memory”.
What does he think is so great about it, though? A lot, it turns out – in fact, he was happy to provide a running commentary on the song’s genius while in conversation with Howard Stern.
Article continues below
“I mean, listen, the guitar, the way they're plucking it, he's singing like that,” says Antonoff over HIAWG’s opening bars, but it’s not long before we get the first musical pivot.
“You don't expect this fill,” he says, as we arrive at the second of the song’s five sections. “Then, all of a sudden, the guitar is stabbing. Listen to the bass. It's amazing.”
Soon enough, we’re into the ‘I need a fix’ section, and Antonoff is certainly getting his from it.
“I've never felt anything more like heroin than this guitar here,” he says, bluntly. “I mean, I'm floating now.”
While Stern thinks it’s the guitar that’s delivering the high, Antonoff suggests that it’s more of a cocktail of things.
“I mean, there's the bending and the phasing, but it's something else. John's vocals doubled and they're kind of off.”
Next up, the ‘Mother Superior’ part, and there’s a production element here that Antonoff seems genuinely confused by.
“Like, why does the tambourine come in there?” he ponders. “Who decided that? It's totally random. It came in what, like, two bars late.”
And then, says Antonoff, “the greatest moment of any song ever 100%” – the switch to the doo-wop section, which contains more magical mysteries.
“So you focus on John, you know, doing his soul thing. You don't realise the band, they're just like just dropping beats here and there.”
What seems to impress Antonoff as much as anything else is that none of this comes across as contrived: “I mean, this is the genius of it: The Beatles were never annoying to be annoying,” he argues. “But tonight, Howard, sit down and play along to this. Blow your fucking mind [with] what they're doing timing wise.”
As we hit the outro, Antonoff has made up his mind. “I mean, this is the greatest recording ever made,” he says. “This is the greatest recording. And I think George Martin stitched it together from what I've read, but every fucking element of that recording – on an analytical point of view – I could break down why it's so good. The compression, the sound, the panning, blah blah blah, but more than anything, what the fuck were they thinking? And how did they end up with this? There's nothing like it. There never has or never will be.”
