Jack Antonoff was playing a show at Los Angeles’ Troubadour on Tuesday when a fan called out for him to play “Let’s Get Married,” one of Antonoff’s band Bleachers’ most enduring hits. (It was also the fan’s wedding song.)
Antonoff laughed off the request, dropping a line that’s going straight into my lexicon: “Read the news, brother.”
The news, of course, being Antonoff’s separation from actress Margaret Qualley, which made waves in July (how could a relationship that creates the kind of art that makes you believe in love not be forever??). Yep, it’s hard to not feel a little parasocially sick about the whole thing.
Antonoff up by clarifying that he loves that song, and that he had written it eleven years ago, before even meeting Qualley. If he’s keeping love songs with no connection to Qualley off the setlist, BTW, fans of “Tiny Moves” and—god forbid—their cover of Lana Del Rey’s “Margaret” are in for a long, dark tour.
But great love songs aren’t always indicative of eternal love, I guess. This is the same guy for whom Taylor Swift wrote “You Are In Love,” which paid tribute to his former relationship with actress and writer Lena Dunham (who announced on Wednesday that she had welcomed a baby with her non-Jack Antonoff husband.)
And as at peace as we are with the truth that not all great love stories last, knowing that a random day in September may be the last time we hear the line “he met Margaret on a rooftop, she was wearing white, and he was like ‘I might be in trouble’” is… a tougher pill to swallow.
Still, it’s times like this I remember the great Swift/Joe Alwyn breakup of 2023, wherein was hard to imagine a world where Swift sang “Lover” 149 times on the Eras Tour. Though if Swifties could recover from that, there may be some hope for Antonoffies too.
