Highlights
- Jack Antonoff’s grief and drug abuse in his youth led to a frightening experience that made him change his ways.
- The loss of his younger sister inspired him to use songwriting as a way to process his pain and connect with others.
- Antonoff is grateful for hitting rock bottom early on, as it helped him avoid a potentially dangerous path in his music career.
Jack Antonoff has had a lot of accomplishments, both as a singer-songwriter and producer, but few people know about how hard it was for him to turn some of the darkest moments of his life into art. When he was 18, very early in the beginning of his career, he suffered the loss of his younger sister, and that completely changed him as a person and an artist.
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Recently, he reflected on the bad decisions he made in his grief, and expressed his gratefulness for how everything turned out. He could have gone down a very rough road, which many musicians have sadly taken, but he managed to use his art as a way to heal.
Jack Antonoff Shared A Frightening Experience With Drugs
Producer and frontman Jack Antonoff recently opened up about one of the hardest moments in his life involving drug abuse and grief, which happened when he was just starting his career in music.
Reflecting on his youth, he shared that he and his friends would “get really f***ed up” on drugs as they were starting their artistic journey. This coincided with a very difficult time for him and his family: the death of Jack’s younger sister, Sarah. She was 13 years old and suffered from brain cancer, and her loss changed Jack’s life forever.
He was, understandably, struggling to get through that dark time, and it led to him using drugs in an irresponsible way. Thankfully, nothing serious happened to him, but after a bad mushroom trip, he realized he couldn’t go on like that.
“We were touring a lot and I was obviously just so f—ed up emotionally that I took a whole bunch of mushrooms one night with some friends and I completely freaked out. I completely lost my mind,” he admitted. “I think it was a combination of how much I took and the grief and the long story short is I was so f***ed up from that experience that to this day I feel allergic [to drugs].”
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Although it was a very frightening experience, Jack Antonoff is grateful to have gone a little too far in his youth. It made him step away from his drug use before it became an addiction or had dire consequences for his health, and led him to find new, healthy ways to process his grief.
“I’m grateful that I made that stupid mistake because a lot of my friends struggled, I know a lot of people who have struggled and continue to struggle. I got lucky that my rock bottom was more one that was mixing psychedelics and grief and not needles and fast cars and whatnot,” he explained. He also said the experience made him realize he “never wanted to be out of control again.”
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Jack Antonoff found in music, and songwriting particularly, a way to process his grief both by channeling his feelings into his art and by sharing his pain with other people who suffered the same kind of loss.
“Songwriting can be this tool to connect with people and talk about what you are going through,” he said. “I used to write from a very lonely place, like, ‘Here’s my story, this is it.’ Now I’m writing from a place, like: ‘Well, everybody has that! Everybody’s got a then and now, and everybody’s trying to figure out how you not let go of the then but also not compromise the now.’”
Source: NewsFinale
