Jack Antonoff recently talked with Vulture:
There’s a song called “Tiny Moves,” which no one’s heard yet. The real story there is I started writing music when I was 14 or 15, and my younger sister was sick then. She died when I was 18, so all my formative experiences with writing music were writing about this massive, heavy, big loss and grief. Then, obviously, that grief grows and changes. It’s such a fertile place to write from, and I’d felt a little bit resigned, not in a comfortable way, just like, Okay, my place in life as a writer is to write about loss through the lens of age. And don’t get me wrong, there’s tons of that on this album. But I met my now-wife, and it feels like a lot of the mythology and armor that I wore — we all say, like, “I can’t get relationships right,” “I don’t do this,” “I’m bad at this.” And when you have a big shift like that, which was really meeting my person, it’s brilliant and amazing, but it’s also destabilizing ’cause you have to deal with all of the past, where you lived by this code that was bullshit. And within that, I found myself writing more conversationally, very deep and very intense. How do you have such a great loss and then also explore other parts of life? I wasn’t able to do that in the past, because I felt like it was not honoring my loss to write about anything else. So, this is the first album where I explore other things, and there’s presence to it that I haven’t had.