"I've been coming here for so long," Jack Antonoff says of SXSW while waiting for a breakfast table at the Driskill Hotel in downtown Austin. "The first time I came, in 2003, I had one show at a sushi place that like nine friends came to. Which I thought was the coolest thing because I was like, 'I'm at South by Southwest!'"
We asked Antonoff to share one of his SXSW rituals with us, and he suggested brunch at the Driskill. "We used to come here and we'd run into people we knew and liked," he says, "so all my memories of this place are getting a second to talk about the craziness of everything that just happened." In his own band Bleachers and as the guitarist for fun., Antonoff specializes in songs that turn big, disorienting emotions into explosive, ecstatic sing-alongs (which he now plays for a few more than nine friends). But on a Thursday morning at brunch with his band mates the day after playing a set at the Fader Fort, he displayed an equal tendency to be charmed by the little things, like having a free cinnamon bun delivered to the table.
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