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This is Medium Rotation, a newsletter about the bands we used to play on my college radio station, 88.3 WSBU-FM, St. Bonaventure. Today, we’re looking back at New Jersey indie-rock band Steel Train, who are no longer together.

How do you write about Jack Antonoff now? Earlier this year, a fascinating Billboard cover story delved into his process, so that’s one place to start. Or you could read this incredibly titled 2019 Vice piece “Jack Antonoff Makes a Lot of Music and None of It Is Good,” or take a deep plunge into all 214 songs of his production catalog with Consequence’s ranking. I don’t particularly agree with a lot of that evaluation (or Vice’s take, as it will soon become obvious), but it will give you an idea of just how dramatically this one bespectacled dude from New Jersey has remapped the entire pop soundscape over the past seven or so years.

But this newsletter isn’t about Jack Antonoff: Pop Supermaven. I don’t need to tell you who Jack Antonoff is, really. He does that plenty by himself, making confessional solo music and winning awards with Taylor Swift and railing against “patriarchal” bass playing in interviews and talking again and again and again about New Jersey. Let’s talk about who he was before. Let’s talk about me eating wings and drinking beer in Queens in February 2013 and catching him accepting a Grammy with Fun on the TV above the bar. In that moment, I thought, wow, I’ve touched that guy’s arm! And now he’s winning serious awards! It was, in no uncertain terms, mind-blowing for me at that age (22) and I texted a lot of people about it. Namely, I recalled with fellow college-radio chums how his great indie band Steel Train played at our school in 2009 while he pulled off some terrific frontman moves in perhaps the tightest jeans I had seen at that point in my life.

It was Spring Weekend, an excuse for college kids to drink too much and get sunburned playing softball, when Antonoff and his four Steel Train mates set up on the blacktop outside our school’s basketball arena. It had been only seven years since they’d formed, and Antonoff was still a few years away from conquering the pop world. The most exciting thing I knew about him at the time was that he had dated Scarlett Johansson when they were both students and that some of the material in Steel Train’s catalog, including possibly on their great 2007 indie-pop album Trampoline, was inspired by this. Also, he was no longer in the band by then, but former vocalist/guitarist Scott Irby-Ranniar apparently originated the role of Young Simba in The Lion King on Broadway — sort of like the Spencer Fox/Charly Bliss story of its time (or possibly an update of the Blake Sennett/Rilo Kiley scenario). Anyway, I was more concerned with the interesting personal details than the music, but that quickly changed once I saw how they — especially how Jack — performed.

The band had begun in 2002, formed after the breakups of two other Garden State punk bands. Antonoff was 18, and most of the other members were around that age. (Bassist Evan Winiker has led a fascinating post-Steel Train life as a successful artist manger, and I’m pretty sure he wrote his own Wikipedia page.) They released two early EPs, For You My Dear and 1969, on emo/pop-punk label Drive-Thru Records. Both were indebted to the sounds of classic Beatlesesque pop-rock and other ‘60s lite psych; the latter was, in fact, a straight-up covers collection, diligently and impressively recreating Jackson 5, Bowie, and Creedence tunes nearly note-for-note. Together, they display a remarkably clear and vivid sonic picture of Antonoff’s interests and ambitions before he discovered gated reverb and entered the ‘80s ouroboros he currently inhabits. The band focused more on songcraft than pop bombast or even texture, two tools that now define his work. But this was also just the beginning.

On 2005’s full LP, Twilight Tales from the Prairies of the Sun, with its spot-on Billy Corgan title, folk jaunts, and Santana shredding on two songs called “The Lee Baby Simms Show,” the band breezes through the easy ‘70s. They got Stephen Barncard, who’d helmed albums by Grateful Dead and David Crosby, to produce it. There are tunes called “Gypsy Waves” and “Road Song” and “Catch You On The Other Side” that are as far from 2005’s contemporary indie rock as you could get without going deep into, like, reggae or jazz fusion. The guitar noodling does throw a passing nod to Incubus, though even they’d trotted into fuzz-bass terrain by then. Banjos and acoustic ballads and chewy stoner music-student rock — again, this was on Drive-Thru! The one-time home of New Found Glory, Finch, and Midtown. Today, this band would tour with Real Estate and Whitney and Tonstartssbandht. In 2005, they played with Rx Bandits and hit Bonnaroo with Jack Johnson and Matisyahu and Citizen Cope. This all checks out. Notably, they opened for The Format at a show in Kansas City in October 2005 — this will be important later.

A few years later in 2009, Steel Train took the stage at St. Bonaventure directly after the fun Pennsylvania power-pop band Punchline and the Girl Talk-inspired party band Big Ass Manatee. They played a bunch of songs from Trampoline, a crisp, bright, indie-pop record produced by Mark Trombino, the same guy who helped Blink-182 make Dude Ranch and who helped Jimmy Eat World sound like that on Bleed American (and pretty much every other album they made). I remember “I Feel Weird,” which I was pretty into at the time, seeming like an anthem. The song opens with Antonoff diving straight into how his life got torn apart by 9/11 and the deaths of his sister and a cousin. The heaviness is cut by a treacly glockenspiel, bouncy piano, and a general lightness that cuts through the darkness like milk in tea. I loved it so much. One time I was smoking a cigarette with a friend on his porch listening to Dog Problems (there’s The Format again) and he said to me, “Sad songs that sound happy. That’s the best.” I’m inclined to agree even still. We played “I Feel Weird” a lot on WSBU in the lead-up to the concert. It was already almost two years old, but it was all brand new to me. Back then, I watched a solo acoustic performance of it on YouTube once a day, Jack with huge curly hair and a flared-collar polo. When he sings, “I just sing what I have in the heavens above,” that was the good shit. I, too, felt weird! But I was determined, like Jack, to not stop me from feeling other things, like hope.

Trampoline is idiosyncratic and blends bell-bright enthusiasm and more twee offerings (“Firecracker,” “A Magazine”) with riff rockers (the hilariously titled “School Is For Losers”) and earnest folk show-stoppers (“Women I Belong To”). But right in the middle of all that is “Alone On The Sea,” a suped-up seven-minute engine that sounds beamed in directly from Jack’s future. It’s purely proto-Bleachers, though it still sounds discernibly human thanks to more organic and analog instrumentation. Think of the Bleachers Unplugged show from 2017 and you’re not far off. Every bit of action here is in service of ramping up to yet another peak, punctuated by lightning-bolt electric guitar lines and stadium-stomping drums. Sound familiar?

At that set in the parking lot, Steel Train was about a year away from releasing its final album, a self-titled collection that leaned into the largesse that is now utterly synonymous with the Antonoff brand. “Bullet,” that album’s first single that they performed on Letterman in summer 2010, is a further refinement of what “Alone On The Sea” did and sounds even closer to the unveiling of Bleachers, which was only four years away. It also has great glockenspiel. But in this, and in most of the Steel Train album, you can absolutely hear the slick DNA of “Getaway Car” and “Out of the Woods” and “Supercut” and “Perfect Places” and “Stop Making This Hurt.” This is the blueprint of Jack’s future.

I can’t remember exactly if they demoed some of that Steel Train stuff when they played my school in 2009, but I like to think they did. I mostly remember him smiling a lot onstage and performing like he was at Madison Square Garden despite being in a parking lot in front of (charitably) 50 intoxicated college kids who mostly did not know the words to his songs. And I don’t mean MSG in an obnoxious way; there were no Jesus poses or Bono heroics. But he gave it his all, and when he left the stage and came to talk to some of us who worked at the radio station, he was gracious and received our compliments in a genuinely touching way. I actually literally touched him on the shoulder when I said that the show was amazing. He was nice about that, too.

Four months later, in August 2009, his new band Fun released its debut, Aim and Ignite, which has some absolutely monstrous bangers. Chief among the album’s successes is its vocalist, Nate Ruess from The Format, whose powerful, acrobatic Freddie Mercury pipes sound perfectly at home amid the orchestral, chipper, chamber-pop-meets-indie-pop bed of sound Antonoff created with Andrew Dost. Excuse me for phrasing it this way, but the first Fun album remains so completely fun over a decade later — something easy to forget in the wake of their sweeping turbo-engine mainstream pop success just a few years later. Before they rewrote “Cecilia” for soccer stadiums and offered a new “Here’s To The Night” for millennials, they first filled the smaller rooms they were in. “Benson Hedges” and “All The Pretty Girls” are party songs, loaded with shapeshifting hooks and instrumentation that changes the moment you get a lock on it. Aim and Ignite is the effervescent Dog Problems sequel where everything’s bigger but not yet unmanageable. When Some Nights dropped in 2012, it became harder to manage, but it earned them some Grammys and the chance for Antonoff to start working with real Pop Stars like Carly Rae Jepsen, Sara Bareilles, and notably, Swift.

All that started him on a path that led, eventually, to the Avalon nightclub in Hollywood in August 2017. His band, Bleachers, had just released its second album, Gone Now, and were booked to perform both at the MTV VMA pre-show telecast and at a related showcase. I quite enjoyed Gone Now but I also knew it to be supremely over-the-top and thus not for the skeptics. “Antonoff clearly believes that Gone Now is his masterpiece,” the praiseful yet ultimately dismissive Pitchfork review went. I bought in. I still felt weird (yet hopeful), and via Antonoff’s latest plunge into his own shortcomings and self-doubt, I felt seen about my own. I also felt seen when MTV News assigned me to interview Antonoff about it ahead of that show at the Avalon. Everyone wanted to talk to him, especially about “Look What You Made Me Do,” Swift’s venomous single that dropped at the height of her feud with Kanye West and Kim Kardashian — remember when she was the villain for a little while? Insane! — that he had produced. But instead, he wanted to talk about Bleachers. So we did. But first, before the camera started rolling, I brought up seeing Steel Train in the parking lot in 2009.

“Oh, right on,” he half-smiled. “What college was that?” St. Bonaventure, of course. “That’s in New York, right? I remember that.”

We talked about the heaviness of Gone Now, how he translated that to a celebration during live shows, and how he doesn’t typically wear his trademark glasses onstage so he can’t fixate on any particular face in the crowd. Pretty quickly, he did what he usually does, whether in interviews, on record with a handful of beloved bands, or shouting at you from a makeshift riser on some asphalt. He told me exactly who Jack Antonoff is. “The fact that the songs can be very intense and serious, that’s for people to figure out later in headphones. But when we play, it’s—” He looked up to the rafters of the venue. “Screw it. The world’s falling apart. This is the only thing that matters.”

ABOVE VIDEO: Steel Train perform “I Feel Weird” on Late Night With Conan O’Brien on July 7, 2008, preserved by the official Steel Train band YouTube page.

ABOVE PHOTO: Steel Train perform outside the Reilly Center at St. Bonaventure University on May 2, 2009.

STRAY OBSERVATIONS:

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