“Everybody Wants You,” by the trio Red Hearse, is sneaky — a song that creeps up on you, working its magic by insinuation. The song begins in a dulcet mode, with the singer Sam Dew crooning over synthesizer chords. Then other sounds surface and spread across the stereo spectrum: a beat that begins as an almost inaudible pulse; harmony vocals that swell and swoop; a distorted keyboard, panned hard to the right channel, where it buzzes in your ear like a housefly or a disquieting thought you can’t push from your mind. By the second chorus, the song has turned rhapsodic, a ballad of unrequited longing that seems engineered to fill a darkened high school gymnasium with slow-dancing couples. “I’m not the romantic type,” Dew sings, but the music says otherwise.

Taxonomically, “Everybody Wants You” is tricky to place. The song sits between genres and eras: a bit pop, a bit R&B, a bit hip-hop, with hints of ’60s bubble gum, ’70s easy listening, ’80s synth-pop and other vintage styles. Perhaps the best way to put it is that it’s definitively a song of right now, and Red Hearse is a very 2020 kind of band — which is to say, hardly a band at all. The group consists of Dew, a singer-songwriter from Chicago; the Los Angeles-based producer Mark (Sounwave) Spears, best known for his work with Kendrick Lamar; and the songwriter-producer Jack Antonoff. In 2017, the three musicians began hanging around an L.A. recording studio, batting ideas back and forth. When those impromptu sessions led to an album, Red Hearse did a few shows at small clubs and appeared on late-night talk shows. In those performances, the group replicated the conditions of the music’s creation, playing while seated at a small circular table: Dew clutching a microphone, Sounwave pecking at a laptop and a sequencer, Antonoff hunched over a keyboard. “It was cool,” Antonoff says. “We decided: ‘Let’s do it like what it is — let’s just let it be that.’ You know, just some friends that got in a room and made music.”

“Friends that got in a room and made music” is a tidy summation of Antonoff’s professional practice. At 35, he is one of the most prolific and in-demand musicians in American pop. In addition to Red Hearse, he is the frontman of Bleachers, an anthemic rock band. He’s best known as a studio whiz, who, over the past decade, has become a go-to producer for several of the world’s biggest and most intriguing recording artists, nearly all of them women. Taylor Swift, Lana Del Rey, Lorde, St. Vincent — these stars have gravitated to Antonoff because of his flair for hooks and cleverness as a producer and arranger. They are also drawn by Antonoff’s reputation as a generous collaborator who rejects the sexism and Svengalism that has often shaped power relations between male producers and female performers. But what sets Antonoff apart, above all, is that homey friends-in-a-room approach — a persona, a vibe, that is more artisanal “maker” than music-industry macher.

Yet he turns out industrial-strength product, at a fearsome rate. Last year Antonoff co-produced and co-wrote more than half the songs on Swift’s album “Lover.” He was the primary producer and co-writer of Del Rey’s critically adored album “Norman [expletive] Rockwell!” He also spent much of the year working on “Gaslighter,” the first new album by the Dixie Chicks in a decade and a half, slated for release this May. In between, he found time to record the Red Hearse album, work on a new Bleachers record, produce and co-write a song for Carly Rae Jepsen’s latest and produce an ambitious album by another friend, the rapper Kevin Abstract. “Basically, I only work with my friends,” Antonoff says. “Also, they’re kind of my only friends at this point. I mean, I have my childhood friends. But your friends are who you spend your life with. I spend my life in the studio, with these people.”

Arielle Bobb-Willis for The New York Times

On a Wednesday in January, Antonoff was in one of those studios, in West Hollywood. He was with Laura Sisk, an engineer who works with Antonoff on nearly everything he records. Antonoff lives in Brooklyn but he often travels to L.A., bunking down for weeks at a time at a boutique hotel. “I’m sort of the Eloise of that place,” he says.

It was a hectic week in Los Angeles. The Grammy Awards ceremony was taking place Sunday night at the Staples Center, and the event was engulfed in controversy following the ouster of the C.E.O. of the Recording Academy, Deborah Dugan. Antonoff and Sisk were exchanging Grammy gossip and gallows humor. Another topic was the annual pre-Grammy gala co-hosted by Clive Davis, the legendary record executive. “It’s one of the last things of its kind,” Antonoff said. “It’s like a scene from a movie about the music industry. Everyone sitting around getting drunk. Wall-to-wall famous people — and not just the people you expect. You know, you’ll see Nancy Pelosi and Magic Johnson rolling up.”

For Antonoff, the Grammys held the prospect of a coronation. He was nominated for three awards, including album of the year and song of the year, for his collaboration with Del Rey. He was also up for producer of the year. It was a validation of his increasing stature in an industry obsessed with pecking orders, with who’s hot and who’s not.

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But Antonoff projects — perhaps cultivates — the aura of outsider and oddball. He dresses the part of the hipster-nerd: chunky glasses, modishly anti-chic dad jeans, old sneakers. He grew up in New Jersey, a Jewish suburban kid dreaming of the wonders on the other side of the Hudson, and he embraces that sense of dorky alienation as a badge of honor and a muse. “New Jersey is this weird semi-crappy, semi-beautiful state that just hugs the greatest city in the world,” he says. “You’re there, but you’re not there. Everything’s possible, but nothing’s possible. That’s why New Jersey music has that desperation, the sound of hope and despair. Everything I’ve ever written comes from that feeling.”

That feeling was all over the music that first brought Antonoff into the spotlight. In 2012, fun., a trio featuring Antonoff, the singer Nate Ruess and the keyboardist Andrew Dost, scored a surprise smash with the single “We Are Young,” a soaring pop-rock ballad that topped the Billboard Hot 100 and won the Grammy for song of the year.

That song, like the others on fun.’s second album, “Some Nights,” combined the torrid confessions of emo with hip-hop beats and the grand crescendos of classic rock titans like Queen.

The same penchant for melodrama — soul-searching lyrics, cresting choruses — typifies Antonoff’s songwriting for Bleachers. That quality may also explain the chemistry between Antonoff and another talented self-dramatist, Taylor Swift. The pair first worked together on a song for a movie soundtrack in 2013, then collaborated on two more songs for “1989,” Swift’s 2014 album, which marked the erstwhile country star’s headlong plunge into pop. “Taylor’s the first person who let me produce a song,” Antonoff says. “Before Taylor, everyone said: ‘You’re not a producer.’ It took Taylor Swift to say: ‘I like the way this sounds.’”

One of those Swift-Antonoff recordings, “Out of the Woods,” helped establish Antonoff’s reputation as an ’80s revivalist. But what distinguishes Antonoff as a record maker is not a sound; it’s a sensibility and a skill set. He’s not “retro”; he’s a retrofitter, drawing fresh sounds and ideas from a well of pop references that runs decades deep. He has a knack for spring-loading his arrangements with surprising twists and turns. On Lorde’s “Melodrama” album, he found exciting ways to blend vast, chilly electronic soundscapes with earthier organic flavors. On Swift’s “Lover,” his contributions range across genres: synth-pop, piano ballads, punk-pop, folk-rock, Quiet Storm soul.

His biggest tour de force may be “Norman [expletive] Rockwell!” in which eerie, eccentric chamber-pop orchestrations combine with Del Rey’s mordant lyrics to conjure a Southern California filled with romance, melancholy and dread. “I’m so excited that that album got received the way it did,” he says. “There wasn’t any thought put into anything that was going on in the world. Lana and I were trying to build a world for that album, sonically.”

That emphasis on world-creation — on richly realized narratives that unfold over the course of a dozen or so songs — marks Antonoff as a kind of traditionalist. His success is part of a wider shift in music culture, a transition away from the “mega-pop” era of the past couple of decades, when the industry was focused on hit singles by indomitable divas, and a new Tin Pan Alley ecosystem developed around such wizardly songwriter-producers as Max Martin and Dr. Luke. Antonoff had a foot in that world: In 2013, he co-wrote a multimillion-selling single, “Brave,” for the singer Sara Bareilles. But his interests lay elsewhere. He is, to use an antiquated 20th-century term, album-oriented.

“In recent years, I’ve put all my energy into making albums,” he says. “That’s what I believe in. I’ve had hits, but I don’t want to get into sessions where I’m chasing a hit. Also, hits come and go. Great songs, great albums, last forever.”

Album orientation got a big endorsement at the Grammys, although not quite in the way Antonoff might have preferred. The major awards were swept by Billie Eilish, whose hit album, “When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?” signals a turn toward quirkier full-length musical statements. (Eilish’s collaborator and brother, Finneas, won the Grammy for producer of the year.)

The most consequential changes in today’s music business have been driven by the rise of streaming. For the first time in decades, the industry is raking in revenue and feeling its oats. But music-making in the age of the algorithm brings new complications, and brings out the traditionalist in Antonoff. “I’ve heard people say things like: ‘We have the data, and if your song fades out, it won’t react well in the playlist,.” he says. “Since the dawn of recorded music, the industry has marketed its product to the 10 percent of people who really care about and love music,” he says. “Now, with streaming, the other 90 percent — the people who listen to music but don’t care about music — well, now the industry is marketing to them. I’m supremely focused on people who obsessively love and live and die by music. That 10 percent who are going to see Frank Ocean in arenas, that 10 percent that are going to see Lana in arenas, that 10 percent who know all the Springsteen cuts, beyond the hits — no offense to everyone else, but those are my people. That’s who I make music for.”

He also makes music for, and with, his friends. Spend time in the studio with Antonoff and you may feel as if you’ve dropped in on a salon, with a rotating cast of artist-comrades. On that day during Grammys week, he arrived at the studio in the afternoon. The previous day, he had devoted the morning to working on the new Bleachers album; in the evening, Del Rey swung by for a session. Now another familiar figure entered the studio: Annie Clark, the singer, songwriter and guitarist who records as St. Vincent. Antonoff warned her that a journalist was present. “Don’t say anything that will get you canceled,” he advised. Antonoff and Clark worked together on her 2017 album, “Masseduction.” But this was a more casual session. “We’re just messing around,” Antonoff said. “Annie’s one of those people who, anytime there’s a chance, it’s like, ‘Let’s just see if there’s anything to mess around with.'”

Often enough these experiments yield revelations. “Everybody Wants You,” the Red Hearse song, is a beguiling example. “I was playing on a Juno,” a synthesizer, “and Sam and I were singing at each other. Wave was doing this sick, buzzy low beat. It was kind of driving, but so quiet. It was like, Who’s turning the drums down that quiet? We were thinking a lot about the Bee Gees’ harmony stacking, these huge blends. We were thinking about the end of prom, you know, that very last song of prom night. We were like: ‘Yeah. Let’s make that song.’”

Jody Rosen is a contributing writer for the magazine and the author of “Two Wheels Good: The Bicycle on Planet Earth and Elsewhere,” to be published next year. He last wrote about Colin Kaepernick and image management for a Screenland column. Arielle Bobb-Willis is a photographer from New York who was recently featured in Aperture’s “The New Black Vanguard.” This is her first assignment for the magazine.

Stylist: Savannah White. Grooming: Nicole Elle King.

Additional design and development by Jacky Myint.