"I Wanna Get Better" was the first single from Bleachers, a side project Jack Antonoff set up while his band Fun was still active. The project grew from various song ideas he came up with while touring with Fun in 2012 and 2013 for their Some Nights album - he would often wake up in the middle of the night in the tour bus with ideas.
The song sounds downright ecstatic, but it's actually quite confessional, reflecting the mental, physical and emotional pains Antonoff was dealing with during that time. There was some unrest in Fun, but he was also battling depression and obsessive–compulsive disorder, while also managing increased expectations. "It's the first song I wrote where I was like, 'Man, you can all f--k' off,'" he told Rolling Stone.
When Antonoff made a demo for this song in 2013 he had both Taylor Swift and Hayley Williams give it a listen. Their feedback convinced him to put the song out as his first single.
Antonoff is very much a studio rat, so he was concerned with technical aspects of the song, particularly the mix, but Swift and Williams were drawn to the honest expression in the lyrics. "It was one of the first songs that I really loved that spoke to mental health in the way that it did," Williams said.
The song was released in 2014 around the time Fun was winding down (they declared a hiatus in 2015). A few months later it was included on Strange Desire, the debut album from Bleachers.
Antonoff co-produced the song with John Hill (M.I.A., Shakira). He also sang lead vocals and played all the instruments, a change from Fun, where he was mainly the guitarist (Nate Ruess was the band's lead singer). Antonoff recorded some of the vocals in a hotel room in Malaysia during Fun's tour, shouting out the chorus in an empty room while Nate Ruess prepared for their upcoming concert. He continued to work on the tune as he toured the world.
Antonoff told MTV News: "I did the vocals in my hotel room in Malaysia, with a laptop and a mic, and then the next day I was in South Korea, and I started mixing, and then I flew home from South Korea and John and I met in New York and we went though it there. And that's the vibe of all of it; do a guitar part here, a vocal part there, build this thing all over the world."
The girl on the cover of the single with the colorful hair is the daughter of the photographer, Autumn de Wilde.
At the time, Antonoff was dating Lena Dunham, creator and star of the popular HBO series
Girls. She tweeted when the single was released: "I would be in love with this song even if I wasn't in love with its singer."
Lena Dunham directed the song's music video, which finds Antonoff playing a therapist. We see him listening to a mixed bag of patients complaining about their problems, with the twist being he's worse off than any of them. You might recognize Mary Kay Place, who is best known for portraying Loretta Haggers on Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman as a troubled housewife, and Parks And Recreation actress Retta as a woman annoyed by her husband.
Antonoff told Rolling Stone that he sees this song as "the story of my existence so far and a lot of the things I struggled with."
Antonoff's struggles include a damaging acid trip and the death of his younger sister in 2001. "A lot of things on the album, including this song, are about loss," he added. "It feels joyous, but for me it's very desperate."
"I Wanna Get Better" was the hardest song to finish on the Strange Desire album. Antonoff explained to MTV UK: "I did that first, and the track was really exciting. The track stood on its own as its own thing. I thought maybe I'd give it to a rapper because it kinda felt a little bit in that world. But I had the concept, and I wanted to put that in that track."
"Then it got really stressful because I knew I wanted to tell my whole life story condensed into three verses to give weight to the idea of 'I Wanna Get Better,'" he continued. "And you have to say something beyond that to make it feel real. It had to be perfect because I was condensing all of me into one song."
"Lyrically it was really hard, but also the melody," Antonoff added. "The way I wanted the lyrics delivered. How it's kinda jerky and spoken and sang at the same time. I feel like when you hear 'I Wanna Get Better' it feels very off the cuff. It feels like I'm sorta talking and singing and then singing the hook and chorus. But sometimes those things that feel really natural feel the longest."
On September 28, 2015 Bleachers released
Terrible Thrills Vol. 2, a re-imagining of the
Strange Desire tracks featuring a selection of female vocalists. The record acted as a follow-up to
Terrible Thrills Vol. 1, which saw Scarlett Johansson,
Charlotte Caffey,
Amanda Palmer and Tegan and Sara, among others, covering tracks by Antonoff's previous band Steel Train's self-titled 2010 album.
This song was re-worked by R&B singer Tinashe. Antonoff commented to
Billboard magazine: "It's a really personal song, and it was hard for me to imagine anyone else doing it, but stylistically her and I are so incredibly different that I was fascinated to hear what she'd do with it, and I completely loved it. It just felt like the different expression of a song that, to me, was so stamped in one way."
