By Paul Grein
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Jack Antonoff attends the “Honey Don’t!” red carpet at the 78th annual Cannes Film Festival at Palais des Festivals on May 23, 2025 in Cannes, France.
Stephane Cardinale/Corbis via Ge
The biggest surprise of the 2025 Grammy Awards season didn’t occur on Grammy night, but when the nominations were announced on Nov. 8, 2024 and Jack Antonoff was not in the running for producer of the year, non-classical.
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He had been nominated in that category for five straight years, winning in the last three years. Had he been nominated again last year, he would have become the first producer or producing team to be nominated in the category six years running since Jimmy Jam & Terry Lewis, who were up every year from 2001-2006.
Antonoff’s omission was especially perplexing because he was nominated for album of the year with two albums last year – Taylor Swift’s The Tortured Poets Department and Sabrina Carpenter’s breakthrough collection, Short N’ Sweet.
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One of the big questions going into the 2026 Grammys is whether Antonoff will return to the producer of the year, non-classical finals. Another question is whether he will receive double nods for album of the year for the third year in a row. He very well may, thanks to his involvement with Kendrick Lamar’s GNX (where he is credited as a producer on 11 of the 12 tracks) and Carpenter’s Man’s Best Friend (where he is credited as a producer on nine of the 12 tracks).
Antonoff first received double album of the year nods two years ago for Swift’s Midnights (which won) and Lana Del Rey’s Did You Know That There’s a Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd.
Prior to that, he had been nominated for album of the year six times, but never with more than one album in a given year. His previous album of the year nominees were with his alt-pop trio fun.’s Some Nights (2013), Swift’s 1989 (2016, which won), Lorde’s Melodrama (2018), del Rey’s Norman F***ing Rockwell (2020), and Swift’s Folklore (2021, which won) and Evermore (2022).
Thus, Antonoff has received 12 album of the year nominations and could very well up that total to 14 when this year’s nominations are announced.
Antonoff’s failure to land a nod for producer of the year (non-classical) last November was seen as a desire on the part of the committee which made the final choices to give other producers a chance at Grammy glory. Indeed, three of the nominees – Alissia, Ian Fitchuk and Mustard – had never been nominated in the category before. The other two nominees, Daniel Nigro and Dernst “D Mile” Emile II, were on their second and third nominations in the category, respectively. Nigro won.
Here’s how the producer of the year, non-classical voting process works, taken from the Rules & Guidelines booklet for the 68th Grammy Awards: “The first round of voting is in the hands of the general voting membership via the first ballot. The second round of voting, however, takes place in a national craft nominating committee. The top 30 selections from the general voting membership appear on the ballot for the national craft nominating committees, made up of 25-30 voting members representing all the chapters. The committees review the recordings and vote by confidential ballot to select the five nominations.”
The process is exactly the same in songwriter of the year, non-classical as well as these three other categories: best instrumental composition; best arrangement, instrumental or a cappella; and best arrangement, instruments and vocals.
The question now is, having given other producers a chance to get some Grammy love, will the committee let Antonoff again compete in the category he has dominated for the past decade — and which he’ll have an extremely convincing case for once again in 2026?
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