The musical Willy Wonka has mellowed – 2022 Jack White Laughs; 2022 Jack White hasn’t had sugar in two years; 2022 Jack White has been transformed over the past two years.
“There has been a complete rebirth on all levels of my life throughout the pandemic,” he says. “I made it my goal that no matter how long it lasted, I would come out of it with a totally different scenario to look at life.”
The proof is in a new double album, of sorts, that runs the gamut of old-school White Stripes, Beatlesque experimentation and American jazz brilliance: fear of dawn, April 8 and Enter alive in paradise, July 22. The accomplished frontman has taken a break to polish his upcoming albums even though they’ve pledged to wax – donda-style – and shop at big-box retailers to talk about her transformation.
You recorded two LPs during the pandemic. Was it hard to stay still for so long?
I don’t usually write much about myself, but I wrote a song a few years ago [“That Black Bat Licorice”] about a hospital, a prison, an asylum, any place I could lay on a cot and clear my vision and clear my head. I push myself so hard that sometimes I find myself in the middle of a 16 hour day. I might dream of breaking my leg, that way I’m forced to lie in a hospital bed and forced to take a break and reevaluate what I’m working on.
I have to rework on some furniture [during the pandemic], and it cleared my head. I didn’t write a song for eight months. Creatively, it took me to a place I had missed.
So why two albums?
I started writing a lot of songs, and they went in all directions: some incredibly heavy; almost some like speed metal; some seemed so sweet. I ended up with 20, 25 songs. People don’t react well to double albums these days. I wanted to release them the same day, but there’s no way to squeeze all that vinyl and release them the same day.
You made your first foray into sampling on fear of dawn, specifically Cab Calloway on “Hi De Ho”. How did it happen?
I heard this Cab Calloway song on the radio in the kitchen one day, and I thought, “I love this song; it’s so powerful. So I sampled it, then played a drum beat that seemed to go with it. Then I grabbed a bass and wrote a bassline for that drum beat, and it just went on and on. Pretty soon I thought, “Man, this is so interesting. I wonder if Q-Tip would find anything interesting about this? »
Five minutes later, he threw his own scatting back at me. I like to synthesize different moments, different areas of music, different eras. Best of all, everyone I played it to kept thinking Cab Calloway was me. I thought, “Do I really talk like that?” So it was absurd.
Where do you see rock going?
The genre has been done by thousands and thousands of artists, and some of the greatest people to ever do it did their thing a long time ago. But look at the hope that we have, because people thought hip-hop would only last a few years, and look at how long it lasted. They still do amazing things. Like what Kendrick Lamar is doing with hip-hop right now, it’s amazing. It still has room to grow, but it takes that kind of angst, ambition, and youthful, adolescent energy. And that really means people walking into a room and playing music together, sweating it out.
What was the piece of which you were most proud during these eight months of work on the furniture?
[A bench called] My sonic temple. He came from a Masonic temple a hundred years ago. I rebuilt it from scratch, and you can plug an instrument into the side and play music through this bench. I did it for Johnny Walker; we arrived together on the Detroit garage-rock scene. I never explained what made it make the sound. It’s very mysterious.
Do you have anything special planned for the vinyl editions of your records?
There are going to be a lot of variations. I’m really glad that pop stars have embraced this and released several variations of their records. Nothing gets me more excited when I walk with my kids to Target and say, “Listen, you can buy a Ramones t-shirt here, and you can go buy a Sex Pistols vinyl record here.” I mean, it’s amazing. I think it’s very, very cool to make this available to as many people as possible.
I’m on a campaign that I want to air in every interview I do this year, which is to beg the majors to put their money into building new factories like they had 40 years ago. They have more money than God.
So tell us about your new hair. I like blue !
I don’t know… but it’s really nice to no longer be recognized by a target! Let me buy my Ramones t-shirt in peace, please! No just kidding. People have always been nice to me. I’m not complaining. Everything was a rebirth for me. I have a new team that I work with. I don’t suffer anyone who seems to bring negativity. And I guess that’s also illustrated by my appearance. Everything is new to me.
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