Doing all those Number 1s with Taylor Swift has its stresses, secrets, and leak fears, Jack Antonoff says. The Bleachers frontman, who first collaborated with Swift during her 2014 "1989" album, said he keeps all her unreleased tracks on his hard drive as if they're "Russian secrets."
"Just having her songs on my hard drive makes me feel like I have Russian secrets or something," Antonoff confessed. "It's terrifying."
Antonoff has been one of Swift's most trusted musical collaborators since their first collaboration, contributing to "Reputation," "Lover," "Folklore," and "Midnights." However, protecting unreleased material has been a high-stakes job behind the scenes.
Taylor Swift Went to Extreme Lengths to Prevent Leaks
Swift has been vocal in the past about how scared she is of leaks and how far she has gone to prevent them. For a music video shoot back in 1989, she had blacked out windows and codenames and had to hire a security team to keep it all under wraps.
"Don't even get me started on wiretaps," he told Rolling Stone in 2014. "It's not a good thing for me to talk about socially. I freak out."
Swift also confessed that sometimes she'd start suspecting all of her friends.
"[For example,] the janitor who's being paid by TMZ," she said. "This is gonna sound like I'm a crazy person – but we don't even know. I have to stop myself from thinking about how many aspects of technology I don't understand."
Fans Played a Role in Protecting Her Work
Even under the tightest of controls, Swift's "1989" leaked online a scant 48 hours before its release. However, due to the intervention of her fans, the leak did not bloom — at all.
Once the album was finished, Swift invited small groups of 89 fans to her home for secret listening sessions, pleading that they keep the album a secret.
"I would invite 89 people over to my living room, play them the entire album, tell them the stories behind it," Swift said in an interview with NPR. "And I'd say, you know, you can share your experience, but please keep the secrets about this album a secret."
She added, "They didn't talk about lyrics. They didn't spoil the secret for other fans... It was the first time I've ever had an album leak without it trending on Twitter — because my fans protected it."
According to Swift, fans responded to illegal uploads with strong messages like, "Why are you doing this? Why don't you respect the value of art? Don't do this. We don't believe in this."
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