Taylor Swift and Jack Antonoff’s Relationship Have Finally Reached Their Limit

OF ALL THE unpredictable creative exchanges Jack Antonoff has experienced, only one has been digitally immortalized forever — and it was the one. During sessions for Taylor Swift’s 2017 album, Reputation, there was a moment where she was so charged from the magic in the room that she literally screamed — as fans saw in a video she captured on her phone.

Antonoff had been staggering his way through the epic bridge on “Getaway Car.” “I’m in a getaway car, and I’m losing my … something,” the artist-producer offered. The pair were in his home studio in Brooklyn, inching closer to the climax of Swift’s high-speed exit from the wreckage of a relationship that never stood a chance. “I’m in a getaway car, you’re in the motel bar,” she countered. In the next 10 seconds, they nailed it: “I’m in a getaway car/I left you in a motel bar/Put the money in a bag and I stole the keys/That was the last time you ever saw me.”

Off-camera, Antonoff has shared dozens of these moments with Swift over the past decade. Since 2013, the pair have appeared as some combination of co-producers and/or co-writers on 88 songs. That number is up by 16 since last week’s release of The Tortured Poets Department, Swift’s 11th studio album. Antonoff has now appeared on each of the musician’s last 11 releases, counting her ongoing album-rerecording process that retroactively slots the producer into records she made before they ever knew each other via previously unreleased vault tracks. They often speak of their process with a sense of protected, kinetic energy that only the two of them truly understand. But their new batch of songs together are the latest indication that the Swiftonoff collaboration has run its course. Their pairing no longer sounds as good — or even as comprehensible — as it must feel in the studio while they’re making them.