Rambling and gambling rocker
Jack White’s latest solo album, Boarding
House Reach, has generally been received either as an object of complete bafflement or a work of madcap genius since its release this past March, with very few listeners taking a position in the middle ground.
Playing Toronto’s Budweiser Stage on Saturday night, the Third Man Records boss and onetime White Stripes frontman made no bones about his unwavering “You’re either with me or you’re not” artistic stance, ripping — with the aid of a mercilessly versatile five-piece band consisting of two keyboardists, a bassist and superhuman Autolux drummer Carla Azar — through a blazing two-hour set that veered wildly from scorching blues jams to near-jazz fusion to honky-tonkin’ reinterpretations of Stripes tunes to towering synth ballads to blasts of the Raconteurs and the Dead Weather to pseudo-hip hop to a showy crooner number inspired by Dvorak and lifted from sheet music handwritten by Al Capone during his incarceration in Alcatraz.
Coherent it was not, but as with the lunatic pastiche of styles and sounds that make up Boarding House Reach, White consistently sold it through the sheer strength of his talent, his convictions and his musicianship. You might not dig everything White gets up to, but there’s no denying that he freakin’ means it, nor that he really doesn’t give a toss what anyone else thinks. He’ll be on to the next thing soon enough, anyway. He’s like Neil Young in that regard.
White, 42, is a hard man to pin down, but the Star was fortunate to grab a few hurried minutes with him early Saturday afternoon. Here are some excerpts from that conversation. And yes, we can confirm that Toronto’s Broken Social Scene will be recording a live album at Third Man sometime very soon. Congratulations, you’ve just put out the record that people will be arguing about for the rest of your career. You must be enjoying the response. I definitely am enjoying people discussing a record, which I haven’t heard happen in a long time. I haven’t really heard those kinds of conversations which I used to hear when I was younger all the time in record stores, you know — the debates over the merits of whatever the new record was at that moment. It just seems like divisive records don’t happen that much anymore. They happen in hip hop now, here and there, but that’s about it. I kinda like that, after wilfully putting yourself in such small creative boxes in the past with projects like the Stripes, you’ve just thrown the doors open and let everything in on the new album. With the interviews I’ve done, people have asked me “How did you do this? “How did you do that?” and I would say, “Well, I did it like this and this was the methodology I used for this record or that song” and it’s been detrimental to me.
It’s very hard for people to resist saying “Oh, then everything he does is that.” No. I was just talking about that one thing. You know, people say “He wants everything to be like it was back in the old days.” That’s not really how I look at life. I like to try to combine the new with something that’s forgotten and see if there’s some synthesis that can happen and get somewhere new with it. So, yeah, it’s a matter of with this record trying so many different styles of songwriting and so many different attempts at attacking spoken word, in all of its different incarnations, from poetry to different cadences that are in hip-hop and the punkrock sort of “speaking without singing.”
It’s not stuff that can translate live, a lot of it. It’s like it’s hard to sell poetry live. But I’ve always thought that with singing, we put melodies to poetry to sell them to people.
Was it a challenge bringing the new songs to the stage?
Yeah. It was the most difficult record I’ve ever rehearsed with a band to play live. It took weeks for us to figure it out and I’ve never used samples or triggers before, so that was new to me and to the rest of the band. So there’s a lot of things I’ve never done before in that process and the live shows are very, very bizarre.
There’s still no set list. And there are screens behind us with images on them, which I’ve never used before because I always thought they’d be distracting to people.
So I’m trying that for the first time and seeing if there’s something interesting about that. I have a video person who doesn’t know what the next song is going to be, trying to figure out how to incorporate these images. A lot of people, when they have screens up, they become a slave to that set and they have to play it exactly the same way each night, which makes me think “Oh, my God.” I could never do that. I would want to quit after a week.
I assume doing the new album has inspired some drastic reinterpretations of your older material, then?
I’ve always done that. The last band I had on tour had a lot of bluegrass and country instruments — pedal-steel guitar and fiddle — reinterpreting punkrock and rock ‘n’ roll songs through that idea. I’m always trying to find a new way to do it. Sometimes it’s hard to change the cadence or the rhythm or the melody of it so you have to stick in general to the way it was originally done, but a lot of songs can be changed and reinterpreted and you can get somewhere new with them. The wrong thing to do is to be a nostalgia act and just try to play it exactly the way it was when it came out, which is not useful to anybody.
It’s pretty amazing that an album as wild as Boarding
House Reach debuted at No. 1 in Canada and the States.
It’s crazy. It should not be No. 1, that’s for sure. When you’re mixing a record like that, you know it’s going to be divisive. It’s going to be divisive to people who like what I’ve done in the past, people who’ve never heard of me, people who don’t like me to begin with. You definitely know it’s going to get people to take sides in their minds about certain aspects of it.
But it’s wonderful that I’m able to still do this in 2018. I can still make a record that I feel I need to put out and it’s interesting to explore what music is to the world in 2018, what appeals to people, what appeals to the masses, what appeals to radio, what appeals to the internet. It’s a whole different game. It used to take three, four, five years for the environment to change. Now it seems like it’s every six months.
Do you feel like you can do whatever you want now after making this album and everyone who doesn’t like it can just f-k off?
The only rules I’ve ever followed throughout my methodologies have been imposed by me, so if I break them the only person I should be upsetting is myself, in a sense. I don’t tell people what I’m going to do next because I don’t know what I’m going to do next. When I was working on this album I didn’t even know it was going to be an album. I just kept working by myself in an apartment and go to a studio here and there for a couple of days. I didn’t know it was going to sound like or what it was going to be.
You just try to trick your brain into being inspired every day.