White puts the band back together
The Raconteurs are glad they can still get along 11 years after scattering
Jack White and Brendan Benson apologize for not having a really good yarn to explain the Raconteurs’ sudden return to active duty this year.
There was no magical, catalytic moment that inspired the Detroit-bred four-piece to reunite in early 2019 after 11 years of silence, just a series of “baby steps” that casually drew its far-flung players — former White Stripes frontman/guitar hero White, esteemed indiepop singer/songwriter Benson and the formidable ex-Greenhornes rhythm section of bassist Jack Lawrence and drummer Patrick Keeler — back into one another’s orbits long enough for their identity as a band to assert itself again.
And subsequently long enough for a sufficient number of new songs to emerge to merit an album and committing to tour dates through to the end of the year, including one at Toronto’s Sony Centre tonight.
One of the year’s most pleasant rock ’n’ roll surprises thus counts as something of a pleasant surprise to the four musicians involved, as well. As White puts it: “Last year, I had no idea I was gonna do the Raconteurs in 2019.”
To make that surprise all the more pleasant, the new Raconteurs record that arrived in June, Help Us Stranger — the effortlessly swaggering classicrawk sequel to 2006’s Broken Boy Soldiers and 2008’s Consol
ers of the Lonely — turned out to be the most satisfying Raconteurs outing yet.
Coming after the baffling splatter of White’s 2018 solo outing, Boarding House Reach, this oft-scorching, always tuneful mind-meld between co-songwriters and co-vocalists White and Benson is arguably the next best thing to that White Stripes reunion we all know in our hearts will never happen. It’s just a damn fine rock ’n’ roll record, hitting all the right marks from the Beatles and Big Star to the Stones and Skynyrd.
The Star had a grand chat with White and Benson from their homes in Nashville to tee up the local date. With very minimal editing, here are the highlights. So if there was no grand design involved in the return of the Raconteurs, have either of you at least squirreled away a tune or two over the years thinking, “Hey, that might work with the Raconteurs. Maybe I’ll save that one for later”? Or was this just a totally spontaneous burst? JW: It’s happened with me. I left a tune off my last album because it sounded like a Raconteurs song and that was probably one of the small baby steps involved. It was called “Shine a Light on Me” and it didn’t really fit with what I was doing with the other songs and I thought, “This really does sound very Raconteurs-y.” Sort of by accident.
Usually the sound of the band comes from me and Brendan writing together and the four of us performing that song together. I always say I like to cover my own songs. Like in the White Stripes, I felt like it was this two-piece band covering a song I wrote on piano and in my solo projects it’s whatever band I’ve built together and we’re covering the song I wrote.
And it’s the same thing with the Raconteurs. I feel like the four of us are covering a song me and Brendan wrote together. That’s where we get the sound from.
It must be nice to have this band kind of lurking in your back pockets and just be able to dip in and out as you see fit, then. It’s not like there was any pressure to do it or to make an album. BB: We’re very fortunate. JW: Yeah, the Ramones always pop into my head because I know for years they were making albums and they were not even speaking, but that was their band — their only band — so they had to keep doing it. And you think, “Oh, what a terrible thing for an artist.”
Y’know, painters can say, “Screw the world, I’m gonna go to my studio and lock the door, and you’re not gonna see me for a while and I’m gonna work on my art.” Whereas, in bands, you have a tough decision to make. A lot of people have to decide, “Am I gonna be able to work with these other people or not? Can I deal with it?”
So those band stories make you feel a lot more appreciative of the fact that we’ve been lucky enough to be so busy over the years that we could even take that long of a break and then still make a record, and still all be really good friends and get along and make music together. I think we’re all really appreciative of it.
Did you all just decide to block aside a bunch of time and go for it again?
BB: I think we blocked off a weekend to start with. I don’t know about the rest of the guys, but I was thinking, like, “I wonder if we still sound good. What is this gonna sound like?” We’d been apart for so long and we hadn’t played or whatever, so hence the baby steps: a weekend here and there. But the first time we got together, I think we all just subconsciously decided, “Oh, yeah. This is good. This is going to be good.”
Obviously, the two of you have a very real chemistry as songwriters or else you wouldn’t keep working together. At the risk of embarrassing you, what are the qualities you admire in each other’s creative processes? Feel free to flatter away.
JW: What I really liked about what Brendan was doing was that I was first introduced to him by the hipsters that we knew commonly together in the Detroit thing and that they really liked Brendan’s music.
I thought it was amazing that his brand of craftsmanship songwriting was appealing to some of these “hip” people, because usually they were more interested in people who were sort of too cool to care about that and (into) the garage-rock style, the threechord side of punk … He was, to me, the best songwriter in town and, really early on, we started writing together and playing together and just messing around in the studio, and that was what I admired about him.
And if I was going to pick anybody in town, these three guys — Brendan and Patrick and Jack from the Greenhornes — would have been the people I’d pick and it just ended up happening that way, anyways. It’s funny.
BB: I’ve always been a fan of Jack’s lyrics. I think he’s a great lyricist. This is funny talking about him like he’s not in the room, but I’ve always been a fan of his lyrics and just his sensibility … He’s got good instincts and he plays raw and it’s from the heart and I’m not like that. I think I used to be more like that but, in my age, I’ve sort of homed in on other things about music, about writing the perfect song or the craft of it, sometimes to the exclusion of feeling and what it’s supposed to be doing. So I struggle. And Jack doesn’t struggle. So I admire that a lot.
I like that you guys have put out a proper rock ’n’ roll album at a time when that isn’t at all the norm. I know that’s a bit overstated, but you put something like this on and you do have a moment where you go, “Wow, people really don’t make records like this anymore.” BB: No one in a moneymaking business venture would ever propose doing it, probably.
JW: It’s always interesting to watch the MTV Video Music Awards every year. There’s a funny article in The Onion this week saying, “Yes, life has passed you by. You have no idea who half these people are performing at the VMAs.”
And that’s the funny thing: I own a record label and I don’t know who any of these people are. You dedicate your life to music but, at the same time, you’re concentrating on things you think are interesting and that’s what you are compelled to do.
As trends go on, you’d see with a band like the Rolling Stones that they were kind of good at adopting the latest trend and making something interesting out of it and usually a hit song. If it was disco, they had a “Miss You,” and if it was glam rock or whatever they would do something else, and they figured out a way to have a hit song out of each period. So I think you kind of focus on what you’re good at and spread the boundaries of that as much as you can.
Did you really think this thing you started as a friendly lark all those years ago would still be kickin’ in 2019?
BB: I’m a little bit surprised, to be honest. I like to say that I believe in us and of course I do, but it is surprising how much people love it. It is very beloved. It’s a special band. It’s cool. It’s like people are cheering and rooting for us and we felt that, too, when we got back together after 10 years or whatever. And you can feel that in every room. You can feel the love and — not to sound hippie-dippy — it’s just good vibes.
Well, this feels like a real band doing what bands do. It doesn’t come off as forced or self-indulgent like some “supergroups” do, if you’ll pardon the expression.
JW: That got said a lot to us when our first album came out. We heard the words “supergroup” and “side project” every single day and, with this album, we haven’t heard those words very much at all. You can selflabel yourself and then there’s also the way that pop culture as a mob decides to label you as a group or something and, as time goes on, sometimes those labels change and it’s an interesting thing to see. You can’t predict it, you can’t plan it. I kind of want to go back to some of those interviewers and say, “See, I told you this wasn’t a side project.”