#Jack white pro#

(There were also a statistically improbable number of redheads.) White stopped in front of one cute girl in bluejeans and Vans. The boys wore black ties and yellow shirts the girls wore black tights and yellow Anna Sui dresses. Roaming the hallways were several young employees, all color-coordinated, like comic-book henchmen. The décor reflected his quirky junk-art aesthetic: African masks and shrunken heads from New Guinea antique phone booths and vintage Victrolas. Albums from Third Man artists, including White’s other bands, the Raconteurs and the Dead Weather, filled the racks. He is most famous as the singer for the White Stripes, the red-and-white-clad Detroit duo that played a stripped-down, punked-up take on Delta blues their gold and platinum records adorned the walls. White, looking like a dandyish undertaker in a black suit and matching bowler, was in the record store, which doubles as a tiny Jack White museum. It’s a one-stop creativity shop as designed by an imaginative kindergartner - a cross between Warhol’s Factory and the Batcave. But then I started designing the whole building from scratch.” Now it holds a record store, his label offices, a concert venue, a recording booth, a lounge for parties and even a darkroom. “When I found this place” White said one day last April, “I was just looking for a place to store my gear.

This is the home of Third Man Records: the headquarters of Jack White’s various musical enterprises, and the center of his carefully curated world. The inside holds all manner of curiosities and wonders - secret passageways, trompe l’oeil floors, the mounted heads of various exotic ungulates (a bison, a giraffe, a Himalayan tahr) as well as a sign on the wall that says photography is prohibited. Contradictions are nothing new for Jack White but he's never been as emotionally direct as he is here, nor has he been as musically evasive, and that dichotomy makes Blunderbuss a record that only seems richer with increased exposure.In an industrial section of south-central Nashville, stuck between a homeless shelter and some railroad tracks, sits a little primary-colored Lego-block of a building with a Tesla tower on top. This too is a divorce album with every song concerning love gone wrong, yet it's easy to ignore all the pain roiling underneath because Blunderbuss plays so sweetly, its melodies easing into memory and its surface warm and pleasant. If it resembles any Stripes album it's Get Behind Me Satan, the dark, odd 2005 set written in the wake of a breakup and filled with songs of paranoia and recrimination. When Blunderbuss gets furious, it's hard not to miss the chaos Meg brought to the Stripes - with her at the drums, 'Sixteen Saltines' would fly off the rails - but it's a mistake to think of this album as a professionally produced White Stripes record as it relies as heavily on ideas White explored on his handful of old-timey acoustic cuts and the '70s guitar rock of the Raconteurs.

#Jack white pro#

Jack still pulls out some standards from his bag of tricks - clenched blues explosions, squealing guitars, and a cool breeze of electric piano - but musicians matter and this bunch of pro players tightens and softens his attack (sometimes to its detriment, as on a clumsy cabaret version of Little Willie John's 'I'm Shakin''). All the restrictions are entirely of a comforting variety: he's abandoned the primitivism of the White Stripes, something that came easily with Meg White bashing away on the drums, and has chosen a quieter, polished route, rotating in different musicians for different tracks. Here, he's once again placed restrictions on himself but they're not quite as clearly defined as they've been in the past, as when he's gotten great dividends by working with a limited palette. And so it is on Blunderbuss, his first official solo album, arriving five years after the White Stripes' last but seeming much sooner given White's constant flurry of activity with the Raconteurs, Dead Weather, Third Man Records, and countless productions. He's a rock & roll auteur, bending other artists to fit his will, leading bands even when he's purportedly no more than a drummer, always enjoying dictating the fashion by placing restrictions on himself. Jack White leaves such an indelible stamp on any project he touches that a solo album from him almost seems unnecessary: nobody has ever told him what to do.