NO LIMITS
Jack White refuses to play it safe
If there’s an easy way to make music, Jack White isn’t interested in finding it. He could have easily slid into the repetitive riff-rock that helped make the one-time White Stripes frontman a star.
“Anybody in my position could go to the fanciest studio in town, hire the hottest producer at the time, get a bunch of pop writers to help maintain your celebrity status — that stuff is easy and anyone like me can do that,” White, 42, says down the line from his adopted home in Nashville.
So when it came time to record his third solo album, Boarding House Reach, he secluded himself in a Nashville apartment then recorded the LP with musicians he’d never played with in two cities (New York and Los Angeles) he’d never recorded in.
To make matters more interesting, White tapped musicians he’d seen backing hip-hop acts like Jay-Z, Kendrick Lamar and Kanye West to help him craft Boarding House Reach’s 13 tracks.
“It’s more difficult to put yourself in tough conditions and try to push yourself over a cliff,” he says. “That’s what I like to do. It’s very risky and hard to accomplish successfully, especially in the mainstream world. But I like those goals. Those challenges are interesting to me.”
The result is a wildly inventive listen that pulls from gospel, rock, hip-hop, country and psychedelic rock.
Listening to this record was a bit like Christmas morning. I really didn’t know what to expect musically as the album progressed. How did you get yourself to that place?
It’s difficult for me to tell people how I’m doing something because a lot of people will read the buzz headline, or hear the sound bite and it kind of turns into, “Here we go again with some pretentious thing that Jack’s done. Did you hear? He locked himself in an old World War II submarine to get that right reverb sound.”
But I’m trying to get somewhere new. And to get somewhere new, you really have to put yourself through the ringer. You really have to build obstacles for yourself. At the end of the day I can look back and say, “I didn’t take the easy way out when I wrote this song or this record.”
That’s not something I would be very proud of.
Does trying to make something that’s going to sound brand new to the ears still scare you?
I think it should be scary for me. … When we recorded this album I went to L.A. and New York and recorded with people I’ve never met before. We walked into the room and set up and started playing. That’s a scary scenario. These could have been people I did not get along with and I took a big chance. But it worked out. I wanted a lot of different personalities on the record, which I really like.
Why did you seek out musicians that have backed Kendrick Lamar and Kanye West in a live setting to help you record this?
A lot of hip-hop recordings don’t have live musicians on them in the original recordings. But when Kanye or Kendrick or Jay-Z go out on tour, a lot of times they have a live band behind them. Those guys are the ones I was interested in seeing if I could work with. … It takes a special type of talent to pull that off and be able to back up a hiphop artist onstage.
Almost a decade ago you launched your plan to bring back vinyl with your Third Man Records label and operations in Nashville. Here we are in 2018, you’ve got a second store and plant in Detroit and vinyl is now one of the few areas of the music industry still growing. How do you feel about this success?
It’s wonderful to see a lot of that come to its fruition. … Vinyl was almost completely dead at the turn of the century. We were on the Craig Kilborn show in 2000 and when we asked him to hold up our vinyl record when they introduced us he looked at us and said, “Why would we do that?” That showed the spot that vinyl was in. It was almost completely gone.
But keeping it alive became our goal when we opened Third Man. Anything we thought of that could help this format, we did. We did stuff like putting liquid into the record, holograms on the record, sending a record player into outer space. We did all these things to get people’s attention. Things like Record Store Day and making limited-edition records and seeing lines around the block. We’re still doing that and that’s incredible to see.
On the upcoming tour for Boarding House Reach, you’ve decided to ban cellphones. Why?
I was hoping it would be more of an art project. I wanted to surprise people. I thought it would be great if people showed up and they found out right when they got there that there were these pouches for the phones. I thought it would excite them and possibly make some of them upset. But it’s funny. I go to movies and everyone turns their phone off. You go to the symphony, there’s no phones. Church, no phones. There’s all these places where it’s already happening. So let’s try a rock ’n’ roll concert and see what happens.
I want people to live in the moment, and it’s funny that the easiest way to rebel is to tell people to turn off their phone. If your phone is that important to you that you can’t live without it for two hours, then I don’t know. Maybe it’s time to see a therapist.
White’s Boarding House Reach tour hits Toronto on June 9 and Vancouver on Aug. 12.