Strings attached
He’s one of the world’s most original and influential six-string guitarists, so it’s a surprise to find Jack White doesn’t actually like playing it.
Jack White doesn’t consider himself much of a guitarist, which is strange because if you’ve paid even fleeting attention to popular music during the past 15 or so years there’s every chance you’ve come to associate him with that particular instrument.
White is known worldwide as one of the most original and influential six-string players of his generation; his best-known melody — the ominous riff of 2003’s Seven Nation Army — has even made the rare leap to soccer crowds, who regularly and joyously belt it out en masse inside teeming stadiums.
Under four distinctive creative outlets, White has added more colour and flair to popular music than most contemporary musicians. First came the White Stripes, a garage rock duo that burned bright for more than a decade before its final performance in 2009.
That act overlapped with rock band the Saboteurs — which he’s bringing back to Australia this month after an eight-year performance hiatus — and another group named the Dead Weather, as well as a solo career that includes three albums since 2012. In most of these acts, White has played guitar. It’s curious, then, to hear him speak of it not with the affinity of a lover but with a kind of resigned bemusement.
“It’s funny because I’ve never felt like I know whether that’s really my instrument,” he tells Review. “I always pick it up and think, ‘Oh, I guess people like when I play this thing sometimes.’ As a kid I wanted to be a drummer, and that’s what I feel really comfortable as. I love that instrument, and I know it really well and I want to do it. I don’t think I’m an amazing drummer or anything, but I do feel comfortable. When I’ve got a guitar on, I sort of feel uncomfortable, and maybe if anything good comes out of it, it’s because of that. It doesn’t feel like an extension of me — it feels like a lot of hard work.”
He sits behind the kit with the Dead Weather, whose third album was released in 2015. “The drums feel like they flow easily from me,” he says. “It’s great that you learn those things about yourself, and what people like [about] what you do. I’ve played piano a million times and I’ve never really seen anybody come up to me and say, ‘Wow, I love your piano playing!’, because it doesn’t connect with people. It’s interesting for me, but it doesn’t do anything for other people, whereas guitar, for some reason, people come up and say: ‘I really like that!’ I have no idea why; I don’t know what they’re hearing.”
Nonetheless, guitar is what he plays with the Saboteurs — a quartet known everywhere else in the world as the Raconteurs, owing to a Queensland band that refused to give up the name here. Founded in 2005 by White alongside singer-guitarist Brendan Benson, bassist Jack Lawrence and drummer Patrick Keeler, they have released two albums to date in 2006’s Broken Boy Soldiers and 2008’s Consolers of the Lonely.
Work on their upcoming third, Help Us Stranger, took place between White’s touring commitments for his third solo album, Boarding House Reach, which was released last year.
In 2011, the quartet — aided live by keyboardist Dean Fertita, who also plays with the Dead Weather and Queens of the Stone Age — went through a hiatus that will be broken today in Nashville at the home of White’s label, Third Man Records, followed by a date in New Zealand, then three Australian shows.
Beyond festival dates booked through August, White is unclear whether the band will remain an ongoing concern. “I never really plan anything too far ahead. If you asked me a year ago, ‘Are you going to make a Raconteurs album and tour?’, I would have said, ‘Wow, that would be strange’ — and here we are,” he says with a laugh.
With all four members occupied by other musical projects during the eight-year break, it wasn’t just a case of finding the time to work together again. For White, core questions included: Is everyone still interested? Do they still want to do something like this together?
“Even if you made an album six months ago, every band has to keep asking themselves that question: ‘Are we going to keep doing this?’ ” he says. “Sometimes people are in bands because they need the money, or they don’t know what else to do with themselves, or whatever the hell reasons people have. But this band, luckily we’re together for positive reasons. It’s inspiring and really cathartic for us to write together.”
With just two songs from the forthcoming album heard so far — Now That You’re Gone, with Benson on lead vocals, and White’s raucous Sunday Driver, featuring an impressive 360-degree performance music video — the fruits of that inspiration and catharsis are yet unheard, although audiences at the upcoming Australian shows will get a taste of the new material. As for that timeless melody of Seven Nation Army, which he first eked out while sound-checking for a White Stripes show at the Corner Hotel in Melbourne in 2002, before it later evolved into a kind of folk song for soccer fans everywhere, including A-League team Melbourne Victory — how does White feel about its crossover to sporting events?
“I love it,” he replies. “I just absolutely love it. I couldn’t ask for anything more as a songwriter. When you put something down, you find something that you yourself think is interesting. I thought that was an interesting melody riff, and I had obviously no idea that it would connect with people in that way. You really can’t control those kinds of things; they just happen on their own. For a melody like that to become so worldwide, chanted, is just shocking to me. I’ll never be over that.”
As an avid baseball fan of the Detroit Tigers, White has encountered that strange sensation of sitting in a stadium when those seven notes emerge from the speakers, to be taken up and sung by thousands of voices. “I’ve also been in a stadium where they’re singing it and the camera shows me on the screen sitting there, and I don’t know what I’m supposed to do,” he says.
Smile and wave, perhaps? “I guess so, yeah,” he says with a laugh. “That’s good advice for anything in life: smile and wave.” In moments like that, White can’t help but bask in the reflected glow of a job well done — even if he still doesn’t really think of himself as a guitarist, despite the abundance of evidence to the contrary.
The Raconteurs perform in Melbourne on April 18, followed by Sydney (April 20) and Bluesfest Byron Bay (April 22). Help Us Stranger is released on June 21.