One of the calling cards of the Taylor Swift/Jack Antonoff songwriting partnership has been something that we now know they like to call the ‘rant bridge’.
Describing the concept in an interview with Howard Stern, Antonoff says: “You spend a whole song verse and chorus, you know, being super poetic and dancing around something and giving details and holding some back and, you know, creating a lot of mystery, and then you get to this bridge and you just crash the fuck out and you just, you know, at that point you’ve earned it.
“So it’s almost like you can be so free… It’s something that I feel is kind of one of our very special things that happens when we’re in a room together. We kind of egg each other on.”
Interestingly, Swift has also been speaking about her songwriting process this week, in an interview with The New York Times, and she too touched on the rant bridge trick.
After calling Antonoff “one of my best friends,” she said: “We established this thing that we love to do, and we call it the rant bridge. I could point to examples – Out Of The Woods, Is It Over Now, Cruel Summer – and oftentimes we love these rant bridges, where it’s basically like, stream of consciousness, endless, pouring out of emotion, intrusive thoughts, blended with metaphor, with discussion, with shouting.”
Swift also suggests that this device serves a far greater purpose than simply to provide a bit of variation. “You want this rant bridge to feel the most intense of what that feeling is that you’re trying to establish over the course of the song, and you want it to kind of be a crescendo,” she says.
In fact, so powerful are these rant bridges, says Swift, that she and Antonoff often use them multiple times in a song, sometimes using the chorus chords underneath on the second go round.
Although certain eyebrows were raised when it was revealed that Antonoff wasn’t involved on Swift’s latest album, 2025’s The Life Of A Showgirl, it seems almost inconceivable that they won’t work together again, but even if they don’t, it seems like their relationship will be just fine.
“The friendship is very deep,” says Antonoff. “You live an amazing artistic life together in that room, and then it lives on. It’s extremely powerful.”
