“Actually,” he says, “the colour of that tintype is the colour of the album,
I think. Those tones are not silver, they’re not sepia. That’s kinda the
sound of our record. You give colours to certain sounds. This is cool and
warm.”
The Dixie Flyer. The Hummingbird. The Florida Arrow. The South Wind. The names
of the trains that used to pass through Nashville’s Union Station, whistling
their way across Tennessee, are beautiful and evocative of days of yore.
Even if this grand former terminus wasn’t now one of the city’s fanciest
hotels, you suspect White would have chosen it as a nice place to do an
interview. This morning White, Benson, Keeler and Lawrence are slumped in
squishy seats in a small suite, buckets of ice and untouched drinks by
White’s elbow, coffee pots in front of them. We talk about the Raconteurs’
new album sleeve. As well as the lions, there’s a big wooden star propped up
behind the band. A child cradling a dove. A blindfolded woman. Some beardy
blokes following on foot. And a big ol’ banner bearing the legend “Consolers
of the Lonely”. The title is taken from an inscription on the side of the
main post office building in Washington DC, written by the 19th-century
academic Charles William Eliot: “Messenger of sympathy and love, servant of
parted friends, consoler of the lonely, bond of the scattered family,
enlarger of the common life.” This elaborate set-up was staged in the yard
of the home White shares with Elson and their two young children, Scarlett,
2, and Henry, 9 months.
What does it all mean? That you’re an old-fashioned bunch hankering after a
lost and simpler America? “It does have an American feel,” White
acknowledges. He enthuses about “the idea of consolers of the lonely and
raconteurs, people who are telling stories. Regaling, minstrelly, travelling
from town to town, on tour – you’re still doing the same things that have
always been done…”
To underscore the fact that the Raconteurs are very much a band, all four
members must be interviewed at once. Mostly this works OK: Jack Lawrence
doesn’t say much, Patrick Keeler chips in the odd joke, Brendan Benson makes
a good fist of trying to keep up with his more famous co-singer and
co-writer, but White does most of the talking. It’s a kind of false
situation. But it does seem to have the effect of relaxing White: a tall,
muscly and imposing figure, he’s a lot more affable today than he’s
previously come across in White Stripes interviews.
I ask Benson about how they feed each other’s songwriting styles. His pop
sensibilities and White’s enthusiasm for the blues seem to have intertwined
more on this record, creating songs that are – to put it simply – loud and
catchy but intricate, too, progressive and retro. “Since the beginning,
we’ve liked to experiment, to explore things,” Benson says. “I don’t know
about intricate though… The best songs are the ones that you’d never
describe as complicated. They maybe are complex, but they seem really
flowing and easy.”
His song Many Shades of Black, one of the album stand-outs, is a power-pop
number, but with thrilling dynamics; he’s satisfied with that. Similarly,
White’s Carolina Drama, which closes the album, is a psychedelic-blues
ballad about a kid named Billy, his brother and their “red-headed” mother
(Elson is a redhead), who witnesses her “triple loser with some blue
tattoos” boyfriend attacking a priest with a hammer. It’s a Southern gothic
novel boiled down into six minutes of tempestuous thrills. Where did that
come from? “Brendan was over at my house a year ago,” says White, “and we
were playing acoustic guitar, and I just said this line: ‘This is a story
about Billy and his brother and I’m going to tell it again…’ That line isn’t
even in the song any more but that’s what generated the whole story. That
line gave me the job to do – it told me to get to work. Billy and his
brother – what’s going on there?”
Wondering if this story was inspired by his own new domestic situation – the
two-kids-and-red-headed wife bit, not the priest-killing – I ask White what
impact becoming a dad has had on his songwriting. “Um, well I’m never naming
my kid Billy now!” he fires back, to laughter all round. “It affects you in
all ways,” he continues, “of course it has to. It’s the same thing as any
relationship does. And you have a relationship with your children, just like
you do with friends and girlfriends and parents.”
The White Stripes are renowned for their Stakhanovite approach to touring.
Last year, during the Icky Thump world tour, they played the Chelsea
Pensioners’ Hospital in London, and (purposefully) every province in Canada,
where they were also playing two shows daily. White says now that it was the
band’s tenth anniversary “and it was just time to go all out. We were like,
‘Let’s do things that we wished we could have done but never got to do.’”
But the result was burnout: they cancelled the tour’s last leg due to Meg
reportedly suffering from “acute anxiety”.
Did that stress, plus the fact that he’s now a father two times over, mean
he’s had to consider more carefully the demands of touring on his family?
“Well, most people go to work nine to five and have to leave their children
for that time every day. I’m at least lucky that I do mine in chunks and
come back for chunks, get to spend expanses of time with them. So it’s six
of one and half a dozen of the other.”
Anyway, he can work at home. As he did in his Detroit abodes, White is
building a studio in his Nashville house. Ever the sonic purist, he’s taking
care to cover the walls with different materials – subway tiles, glass and
the like. Renowned producer T Bone Burnett, who oversaw the soundtrack for
Anthony Minghella’s Cold Mountain, to which White contributed and in which
he had a bit part (he also played Elvis in the recent spoof music biopic
Walk Hard), tells me: “Jack White is one of the few musicians who
understands the importance of surface – every surface reflects sound
differently.”
White is also, typically, taking care to source the right equipment. “I’m
reconstructing an old mixing desk out of a TV studio in South Africa.” Will
he record the next White Stripes record at home? “For sure, and the
Raconteurs will be recording there too. We have B-sides to do – we have to
get cracking and get back in there.”
And would he perhaps produce a Karen Elson solo album there? He did a great
job on Van Lear Rose, the 2004 record he made with country icon Loretta
Lynn. And Elson has a decent voice, as attested by her appearances with New
York cabaret outfit the Citizens Band, and her duet with Cat Power on an
English version of Je t’aime… moi non plus on the tribute album Monsieur
Gainsbourg Revisited.
“If she’d let me, yeah!” he beams. “Oh yeah, she sings like an angel. Would I
sing with her? I dunno. I guess I’d have to see down the road. I wouldn’t
rule that out. We sing together a lot at home.”
And the name of this studio? The erstwhile proprietor of Third Man Upholstery
shoots me a grin. “Third Man Studios!” Your furniture’s not dead? In Jack
White’s hands, neither’s your thrillingly imaginative rock’n’roll.
The Raconteurs play Radio 1’s Big Weekend, Maidstone, on May 10, London
Hammersmith Apollo on May 14, and Liverpool Academy on May 15. Consolers of
the Lonely is out now on XL Recordings
