Bleachers’ Jack Antonoff had a life-altering event at a Wawa when he was 16. He can’t wait to play the song it inspired during his Philly show.

Back in 2000, when New Jersey musician and superstar producer-to-be Jack Antonoff played a show in Philadelphia with his teenage band Outline, the group stopped at a Wawa to fill Antonoff’s parents’ van with gas.

As fate would have it, the song playing at the gas pump was “Just Don’t Want to Be Lonely,” the 1974 recording by Philly soul group Blue Magic, co-written by Bobby Eli, guitarist in Sigma Sound Studios house band MFSB.

That Wawa pull up is immortalized in “The Van,” a song on Everyone for Ten Minutes, the new album by Antonoff’s band Bleachers, which will bring its “Bleachers Forever” tour to the TD Pavilion at the Highmark Mann in Fairmount Park on Saturday night.

Speaking via Zoom from New York the night after a tour date in Montreal this week, Antonoff said, in retrospect, he realized that “Just Don’t Want to Be Lonely” crystalized a theme that’s run through his life and work.

“At the time, I wasn’t articulating it to myself,” said the songwriter, whose client list as a producer starts with Taylor Swift and includes Lorde, Kendrick Lamar, Sabrina Carpenter, St. Vincent, Lana Del Rey, and Doja Cat.

(He’s been named producer of the year three times and has won 14 Grammys in total.)

“But now that I look back on it, the idea of leaving [on tour], and the Blue Magic song, and we’re all sitting there and no one knows how to pump gas because we’re from Jersey: what ties us all together is not wanting to be lonely.

“It’s a funny way to encapsulate what it is to choose the life I’ve chosen. But one thread between all of us is — whether it’s with each other in the van or with our audience — it’s a group of people with a fear of loneliness.”

“The Van” is a celebration of the camaraderie of playing music together and belongs to an autobiographical album about how “a kid in the shadows” like Antonoff, who grew up in Bergen County in North Jersey, found his people.

The song and the album are also a celebration of Antonoff’s marriage to actor Margaret Qualley, whom he married in 2023 on Long Beach Island, where the couple chiefly resides.

Of course, Antonoff is Jersey proud.

On Everyone, he sings about LBI as a place with restorative qualities. “Maybe that’s why my mom stays down at the Shore most of the time,” he sings. “We’re always meeting her there to breathe … it’s nice to get a break from that cynical beat.”

Every year, Bleachers headlines the Shadow of the City festival at the Stone Pony in Asbury Park. This year’s Memorial Day weekend edition was rained out, so the band played a free show inside the Pony, with the full performance now posted on YouTube.

Shadow of the City — which along with Bleachers and a TBA lineup also features “The World Famous SoTC Dunk Tank” — has been rescheduled for Aug. 28.

“Music, to me, is very location based,” said Antonoff. “I’ve always felt like I’ve spent my life going around the world just to show people what it feels like to be where I’m from.”

Qualley, The Substance and Blue Moon star whose upcoming starring roles include Ridley Scott’s sci-fi thriller The Dog Star and Rachel Morrison’s romantic drama Love of Your Life, is ever present on Everyone.

She’s on Antonoff’s mind in “Dirty Wedding Dress,” “She’s From Before,” and “You and Forever,” where she plays with her dog while waiting for her husband to come home in the video.

Antonoff’s first meeting with Qualley on the rooftop of New York’s Electric Lady Studios — which Del Rey sang about in “Margaret” — is evoked in the last verse of “The Van.” The two realizing that, like Blue Magic, they “just don’t want to be lonely.”

In March, in advance of Everyone’s release, Antonoff did a solo Bleachers Free at Noon gig at World Stage and performed “The Van” in the city that inspired it.

Since he wrote that song, Antonoff said, he’s been waiting for “the day I get to play it in Philly. Trust me, I am jumping out of my skin to do that.”

He put in many years in indie bands before becoming collaborator of choice for the world’s biggest pop stars. In the ’00s, he released five albums with his band Steel Train, before joining Fun. with Nate Ruess, and breaking big with “We Are Young,” a duet between Ruess and Janelle Monáe.

The next year, he teamed with Swift to cowrite and coproduce “Sweeter Than Fiction,” from the soundtrack of One Chance: The Incredible True Story of Paul Potts.

Then, in 2014, Fun. split up and Antonoff formed Bleachers, and worked with Swift on four songs on her album 1989, which many consider to be her best. Swift, who was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in New York this week, “was about the first one who said ‘we’re not going to hire a big-name producer.’”

“It’s like that joke about the SAG card,” Antonoff said, referring to the Screen Actors Guild. “You can only get one if you’re in a SAG production, and you can only get in a SAG production if you have a SAG card.”

“Music can be that way,” he said, “I always had clear, deep feelings about what I was doing with the work I was making. But it was very hard to break in because you needed some big cosign.”

Now, of course, Antonoff is the big-name producer. “I’ve been very fortunate,” he said.

But there’s also been online backlash. Google him and the first question asked is “Why don’t we like Jack Antonoff?”

The AI answer blames him for “dulling the edges” of his collaborators because “his signature sound has become repetitive or overly minimalist” with “atmospheric echoes” and “lingering synths.”

“I Knew It, I Knew You,” Swift’s new Toy Story 5 single that Antonoff co-wrote, seems intent on countering that criticism. On it, Antonoff plays guitars, percussion, drums, banjo, mandolin, harmonica, celesta, and Mellotron.

Everyone is full of joy, but also copes with loss.

“I Can’t Believe You’re Gone” is about living with the grief over Antonoff’s younger sister, Sarah, who died from brain cancer at age 14.

“My whole career has been revisiting that through a different lens,” he told Pitchfork in 2021. In “I Can’t Believe You’re Gone,” he sings, “these hope-filled lies, these unearned traditions / If you repeat them enough, you can live with someone you’re missing.”

“It’s about loss,” Antonoff said of the song. “It’s kind of a choose-your-own-ending when it comes to grief.”

A handful of shows into the Bleachers tour, Antonoff said he’s been confronted with something he tends to forget when he’s off the road for too long. “Whenever I start a tour, there’s this completely life-affirming reminder that I have no ability to pace myself and every show is just like the last night on earth.”

“Every night has to be pushed to the brink of everything. So I’m pushing the band to the brink, myself, the audience … You wake up the next day and you feel like you’ve been hit by a truck. And you should. Fried and happy. It’s kinda my favorite feeling in the world.”

He has one more thing to add: “I cannot f— wait to get to Philly. That’s a place that has always had our back.”

Bleachers Forever with Hovvdy at the TD Pavilion at the Highmark Mann, 5201 Parkside Ave., at 8 p.m. Saturday. highmarkmann.org.