People love to complain about Jack Antonoff, but we, as a population, evidently have not reached the Antonoff saturation point. Antonoff has won the Producer Of The Year Grammy for two straight years, and right now, he’s the co-producer and co-writer of the #1 song in America. Last week, Taylor Swift’s four-year-old fan favorite “Cruel Summer” ascended to the top of the Hot 100, and now it’s back for a second week. There’s a very good chance that Antonoff will also have his name on the next #1 hit, too. Last night, Antonoff was the lead guest on Jimmy Fallon’s Tonight Show, and he had some optimistic things to say about the state of the music business.

If you don’t want to watch a conversation between Jack Antonoff and Jimmy Fallon — an understandable position — I’ll summarize it for you. Antonoff pretty much said all this stuff up top, as soon as Fallon brought up “Cruel Summer”:

I’m loving where the music business has gone because it’s just melted down into nothing but what people like. And you could talk your crap about this or that, but the fans are God. What they say goes… “Cruel Summer” is a testament to that. It was always our favorite song on the album, and then with nothing — with no gas on the fire, with no one on the business side doing anything — kids started playing it more and more and more. It’s happened with that song. It’s happened with a bunch of things. And I just think that the music business is in a fun place for just the work.

Antonoff’s point is that fans, rather than label people, are essentially the people who pick the hits these days, and it makes sense. It’s a little disingenuous to claim that there was no record-label muscle behind the recent ascent of “Cruel Summer,” but that effort did start from general Taylor Swift fan enthusiasm for the track. We learn more fucked-up things about the business side of music every day, but that kind of bottom-up excitement and motivation is a new phenomenon. It makes sense that Anotoff is fired-up about that, since he’s a real beneficiary of the change. (He’s also probably a benefit of the SAG strike; he presumably wouldn’t be the lead guest on Fallon otherwise.) But it might not be the worst thing for the rest of us, as well.

In the interview, Antonoff also chopped it up with Jimmy Fallon about Bruce Springsteen, and the two of them improvised a songwriting session. You really don’t have to watch all that, but if you want to, it’s below.

Later on, Antonoff and his band Bleachers played “Modern Girl,” the single that they released a few weeks ago. It’s an energetic performance, with a lot of aerobic sax-player action, and they did it on the same checkerboard floor that they used in the video. Here’s that:

Antonoff was in the unenviable position of following a guy who could play the Killers’ “Mr. Brightside” backwards.

“Modern Girl” is out now on Dirty Hit.