Jack White talks new music and the White Stripes' mainstream success in new interview
Jack White, of White Stripes, Raconteurs and Dead Weather fame, has not been known to take part in many interviews.
However, he has opened up in a brand new interview with The New Yorker and touches on everything from the White Stripes rise to the mainstream to working on new music.
Read more: Jack White goes on indefinite hiatus
The New Yorker writes that White has been recording on a “reel-to-reel tape recorder that he bought when he was fourteen with money he made mowing lawns” in a Nashville hideaway. White explains that he's more of a vocalist than a singer. “I don’t have a sing-the-national-anthem voice,” he says. “What I do is vocalize characters.”
Writer Alec Wilkinson explains the space where he's currently working as having two bedrooms and a dining room, all of which are empty. The living room is where he works, and there are four windows—all of which have the shades drawn. Besides a few photographs, he writes that there’s only a cot. Wilkinson further explains that White “habitually entertains fantasies of confinement.”
“If I could just break my leg and be in the hospital for six weeks, what would it be like?” White says. “Something about a room and a cot and a little space. You have nothing to do.”
And White's writing process has shifted as well, focusing more on the process within his head and in the silence.
“I’m going to try to write songs where I can’t be heard by the next-door neighbor,” White added. “And I want to write like Michael Jackson would write—instead of writing parts on the instruments or humming melodies, you think of them. To do everything in my head and to do it in silence and use only one room.”
Read more: Jack White’s neighbors have no idea who he is, so he crashed their potluck
White also talks about the White Stripes and the duo’s jump to the mainstream with the successes of Elephant, Get Behind Me Satan and Icky Thump.
“We had no business being in the mainstream… We assumed the music we were making was private, in a way. We were from the scenario where there are fifty people in every town,” White explains. “Something about us was beyond our control, though. Now it’s five hundred people, now it’s a second night, what is going on? Is everybody out of their minds?”
He also talks more about everything from having a bowling alley on his property to almost becoming a priest, which you can read in the full article here.
White’s last release of solo, original material was 2014’s Lazaretto.
Do you hope to hear new music from White sometime soon? Let us know in the comments below!
