Hey, there's Jack White on the cover of the Rolling Stone...
Guess we will be seeing/hearing a lot from him in the coming months as he releases his second solo album Lazaretto and plays several concerts and festivals across the land...
Jurassic 5 just released their first song in quite a while and it's based on Jack White's My Doorbell from The White Stripes' 2005 release Get Behind Me Satan. And it's pretty damned good! I always liked Doorbell, it will always remind me of Budapest, where I was in 2005 when it came out, and that doorbell at Bakats Ter.... And I guess he was asking then-recently-ex-girlfriend Renee Zellweger "How old are you now anyway?" in Blue Orchid, but it could have been anybody... That's the thing about great art, it means something to the artist, but it means something to us too. It takes on meaning from the meaning we assign it, based on our own lives, which may be similar to what the artist was going through when he/she/they wrote it... or it may be something completely different; singular, personal...
Download an MP3 of Jurassic 5 The Way With Do It, featuring a sample of The White Stripes My Doorbell here:
Speaking of Jack White and hip hop, in the Rolling Stone interview, he discusses the songs he recorded with Jay Z, which have yet to see the light of day, and which may never, based on Jack White's assertion that Jay Z didn't particularly care for the results.... Personally, I was hoping that Jack White would join Jay Z on stage at Coachella 2010 (Jack White played with The Dead Weather there the following night) to perform the then-fresh collaborations. But it was not to be.
Jack White also talks about proposed collaborations with Kanye, which never quite materialized.
The Black Keys have gotten a lot of ink lately about the so-called "beef" between them and Jack White. Yawn.... Forced to choose, I'll take Jack White any day...
You can read or listen to Jack's interview with NPR's All Songs Considered here....
A tease from the Rolling Stone article:
Few outsiders have ever been able to penetrate Jack White's private world. But in the new issue of Rolling Stone (on stands Friday), contributing editor Jonah Weiner gets a one-on-one furniture-upholstering lesson from the 38-year-old musician in his Nashville workshop — and captures a very rare glimpse into the mysterious life of rock & roll's Willy Wonka.
On the eve of the release of his second solo album, Lazaretto (hear an exclusive premiere of the album's pounding blues track "Just One Drink" here), White speaks candidly about Meg White, opens up about his children and fatherhood, gripes about his alleged "women problem" and much more. Here are five highlights from the interview:
Lazaretto's lyrics were inspired by his teenage years. A few years ago, Jack found a box of plays and short stories he'd written at 19, when he dropped out of Wayne State University. He calls this work "mediocre" but used phrases and characters in the album's songs. "It was a way of stimulating me," he says. "What if I talk to my younger self and work together with him?"
White's relentlessly critical nature has led him to compare himself to a very famous curmudgeon. "I'm very much like Larry David in my everyday," he says. "Complaining about, you know, why they make shoelaces so much longer than they need to be." White says if he's in a social situation where someone tells an offensive joke, "I'll be the only one to laugh, just to ease the tension in the room."
He's a fan of more popular music — including Kanye West — than most fans would imagine. White calls Daft Punk "amazing" and reveals he worked on several unfinished tracks with Jay Z ("I'm not sure he liked them"). Kanye West also asked him to collaborate on Yeezus, but never followed up — which bummed White out because he was so blown away by the MC's arena tour last year. "That might have been the greatest show I've seen in my life," he says. "It was more punk, more in-your-face than anything I've seen."
White says he's figured out why crowds at concerts can suck nowadays. "People can't clap anymore, because they've got a fucking texting thing in their fucking hand, and probably a drink, too!" he says. "Some musicians don't care about this stuff, but I let the crowd tell me what to do. There's no set list. I'm not just saying the same things I said in Cleveland last night. If they can't give me that energy back? Maybe I'm wasting my time."
White has a message for the female journalist who wrote he has a "Women Problem" in the Atlantic in 2012, accusing him of having retrograde attitudes regarding gender. "I've worked with more women than anyone you'll ever meet," he says, adding there's a difference between the narrators of his songs and his own beliefs. Referring to Lazaretto opener "Three Women," which references digital photography, he adds, "If you know anything about me, do you think I like digital photography? No. I don't. So obviously this song is not about fucking Jack White, so fuck you! If you're that chick who wrote that article — and I say chick on purpose — she won't understand that line, because she doesn't do her research."
May 22, 2014 11:00 AM ET
Jack White
Christopher Polk/Getty Images for NARAS
Next month, Jack White will release his second solo album, Lazaretto, and Rolling Stone is marking the occasion with White's first solo appearance on the cover. For that story, contributing editor Jonah Weiner visited White in Nashville, where he's lived since 2005, and where he recorded the new album's 11 songs. Here's what you need to know about the project.
It took him about a year and a half to finish the album – roughly 75 times as long as it took the White Stripes to make White Blood Cells.The initial sessions for the album happened in 2012 during gaps in the touring for White's solo debut, Blunderbuss; he holed up at his home studio with members of both his backing bands, the all-male Buzzards and the all-female Peacocks. "I wanted to catch stuff while we were still on tour, while we were still electric," he says. "‘We're a band right now, let's record right now.' I didn't wanna come back and reintroduce ourselves to each other." His creative methods were, as always, in flux. "I did a lot of things we hadn't done before, like, we'd record three live versions of a song and move on — 'I'll figure it out later.'" After these sessions, White spent the subsequent months refining, overdubbing, and editing: "I thought, ‘How about the challenge of working on something for a long time?"
White, famous proponent of analog technologies, had to use ProTools to make some of the songs work. The lead single, "High Ball Stepper," he says, was the result of "three different live" performances that White edited together after the fact. "Some of it I could edit on tape, but some of it, I had to print it to computer, edit it in ProTools, and print it back to tape, to make the edits work. I've done that in the past." He's quick to point out, "I've still never mixed and recorded an album in ProTools. I can't bring myself to live in that world."
The songs were inspired, in part, by short stories and plays that White wrote at 19 years old, recently rediscovered in his attic, and incorporated into new lyrics."Some of it's garbage, and I sort of laughed while I was reading it," he says. "I was going to throw away a bunch of it, but I was just coming up with new styles of attacking songwriting for the album. I try to do that as much as I can — trying not to do it the same way I did it last time. So that was a way of stimulating me: What if I talk to my younger self and work together with him? What if you write songs with your younger self's ideas? It wasn't, 'Let me take this page and set it straight to music.' That would be too easy. But rather, what if I pull from here and take it somewhere totally new, so I'm actually collaborating with myself from the past on a song."
The sound is more elaborate than the White Stripes' ever was, but the album still features White's unlikely minimalist impulses."High Ball Stepper" features no vocals beyond a catchy, wordless cry tethered to a violin. "That's the vocal," he says, connecting this less-is-more decision to "a big lesson I learned in the White Stripes: Meg's kick drum was the bass guitar. Take a song like ‘Psycho Killer' by Talking Heads. Bum bum bum bum bum bum buh-buh-bum… that could just as easily be a drum beat. When I realized that was going on in the White Stripes, that relieved a lot of structural worry for me as a songwriter."
He got back into guitar experimentation in a major way while making it. "I really love the guitar sounds and the solos that happened on this record," he says. "I didn't spent that much time on that on Blunderbuss. I was looking at songwriting in a different way. With this record, I got to new places. I never played in drop-D tuning before, for one thing, and the solos were recorded live, in the room, at the time, the first thought out of my head. That's different from mapping it out — 'This is the solo, then blah-blah-blah is here.' The guitar was in control of the song."
In directing his session players, he liked being at the top of a clear creative hierarchy — but he sometimes struggled to communicate his ideas."In a band, you root for everybody else to come up with something cool, and if it doesn't support what you're doing, you work it out," he says. "But when it's hired guns, it's a different thing." Still, he wasn't always sure how best to articulate his precise desires for how a part should be played. "Explaining art to the people who are making it? I'm not good at it. It feels to me that I sound like I'm full of shit. So I do it, rather than talking out loud. If I'm with session musicians in Nashville and I say, 'Guys, this character is dying, on his deathbed, and you need to play the bass like you're the sister of this dying person…,' those people are gonna say OK and walk off and tell funny, shitty stories about me. But if I'm in a Hollywood table read, and we say, ‘This is a bus driver, he lost his job, his rent is due, the kids are sick with polio,' everyone will say, ‘Yeah, and his brother could be in jail!' You can't give musicians notes like that. Sometimes I'm in those rooms and I say, this is where I'm supposed to be. I'm supposed to be directing this movie."
Read more: http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/jack-white-reveals-everything-you-need-to-know-about-lazaretto-20140522#ixzz32TetRctl
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Read more: http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/jack-whites-private-world-inside-rolling-stones-new-issue-20140521#ixzz32MyHSEW2
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