THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “I didn’t sleep or call home enough,” recalls singer-songwriter Jack Antonoff, thinking back to the creation of his indie-rock band Bleachers’ 2014 debut album Strange Desire.
“The hotel at night had me restless. I wrote from there. A burning I felt was set to take me down if I didn’t name it and know it. From the low Juno 6 in my headphones to the chopping piano hits of early I Wanna Get Better — as the most unlikely bed to tell my life story in three verses — I saw the way out. It was odd to run away when everything was coming together on paper for me, but you do not get to control the direction your gut points no matter how inconvenient.
“Strange Desire was born in this rough time with the full armor of sonic chaos. Voices fluttering around me, hotel room walls echoing in the vocal takes, layers on layers and the low end of that Juno gluing the kitchen sink together as it still does for my band. It was the sound that I called Bleachers. That feeling of being there but in no way at the center. Watching and dreaming. Shouting from a corner. In the shadow. I wrote from that misunderstood place and I still do.”
A decade later, to mark the album’s 10th anniversary, Antonoff and his bandmates have retraced their steps and gone back to the beginning, rerecording the 11-track album as A Stranger Desired.
“On this anniversary that feels so sacred I have realized something: It wasn’t only a strange desire to write these songs, there was something unknown to me happening. I was looking for you: My people. I hadn’t been honest enough in my life and as result I let the wrong ones in. The only path was to tell the story comically unfiltered. My great loss, transcendent anxiety, and an unearned hope that would remain the thread in my writing to this day. It was more than a strange desire to make this album, it was a stranger desired.
“So here it is. The first Bleachers album with me and the band knowing what we know now. All 11 tracks reimagined without the armor I needed at the time, a different kind now. Reimagined after that stranger has become the great rock of my life and the band’s. Knowing how that chapter ends, feeling so sorry for myself then, as well as inspired by that person who laid it all down for something better. I’d do it again.
In search of myself and my people. A stranger desired.”
