Jack White has often spoken about his fantasy of breaking a leg and being stuck in a hospital bed, with circumstances forcing him to clear and focus his mind. That was part of the inspiration for 2014’s Lazaretto, his second solo album. In 2020, nearly a decade into his post-White Stripes solo career, the Third Man Records chief got a monkey’s-paw version of his wish. The pandemic ground everything to a halt, leaving the rock star ample time to write new material. But the idea of stockpiling songs without any idea of when he’d be able to perform them — a driving force for his creative output — left him cold. So he held off writing and focused on other pursuits, like building furniture and planning the new London outpost of TMR, which opened in September.
After about eight months, however, songs began to flow. And they kept right on flowing, so much so that White finished two very different albums. The first and more bombastic, Fear of the Dawn, was released April 8, while the gentler, more contemplative second LP Entering Heaven Alive is set to land July 22. Also on April 8, White kicked off the Supply Chain Issues Tour, a trek that will take him across the country and around the globe through the late summer. He’ll be back here in his adopted hometown on April 30 and May 1 for a pair of shows at Ascend Amphitheater.
White still has plenty to keep him occupied outside of making music. In his personal life, he proposed to partner and fellow musician Olivia Jean onstage near the end of the first show of the tour, and they got married at the start of the encore. Many divisions of Third Man have big projects of their own. That includes The Blue Room venue at the label’s Nashville headquarters, which has ramped up activity, filling its calendar with excellent shows and opening up as a bar during off nights. Third Man Pressing in Detroit is churning out vinyl at such a rate that White issued a public call for the major labels to open their own pressing plants.
But the music still matters. On his 2018 album Boarding House Reach, White pushed himself to try new things, even if they didn’t always work. That didn’t stop people from getting excited about it, of course, and it debuted at No. 1 on the all-genre Billboard 200 chart. Fear of the Dawn (which at press time was No. 4 on the Billboard 200) brings back that experimental attitude. On Fear, White picks up production cues from heavy music of the ’80s and ’90s, in addition to blending in sampling techniques from hip-hop and dance music with the blues-schooled rock and punked-up funk that he’s shown his mastery of over the past 25 years.
Overall, the results are compelling. The first half of Fear is loud, leading off with the one-two punch of “Taking Me Back” and “Fear of the Dawn” — symphonies of nervous energy and effects that distort instruments till they sound like weapons. The record gets stranger — with “Hi-De-Ho,” in which White and master rapper Q-Tip riff on a Cab Calloway sample, and “Into the Twilight,” which samples vocalese outfit The Manhattan Transfer and Naked Lunch author William S. Burroughs — before riding out on the comparatively chill “Shedding My Velvet.” There’s a delicate balance required to make style and technique serve the story you want to tell, and White hits it much more often on Fear of the Dawn than on Boarding House Reach. Still, the new record works best as a unit; the dubby “Eosophobia” fits in its spot on the album, but I’m not likely to throw it on a playlist.
In interviews, White emphasizes that he wants to leave the stories in his lyrics open to interpretation. Judging by the advance tracks released from Entering Heaven Alive, that record will give listeners an easier grip on those story elements. Heaven ends with a swinging acoustic take on Fear’s opener, called “Taking Me Back (Gently),” that gives you more breathing room to focus on what White is saying as he plays around with different meanings of the phrase “taking me back.” In an interview with Spin, White notes that Heaven may be a bit of a sleeper.
”[My friends] think that the Fear of the Dawn will get a lot of attention because it’s big and it’s electric — it’s powerful,” White says. “But at the end of the day, people are going to come away liking Entering Heaven Alive three times as much, and it won’t get received that well and won’t be as big of a deal because [it’s the] second of two.”
Whatever your feelings about White’s albums, all signs point to the shows being as raucous and enthralling as you could hope for. For starters, reunited Nashville punk legends Be Your Own Pet open the Saturday show at Ascend and rocker extraordinaire JD McPherson opens Sunday. White’s band includes drummer Daru Jones and bassist Dominic Davis, who’ve been in his orbit for many years, and keyboard wizard Quincy McCrary, who joined up for Boarding House Reach; they nearly blew the doors off the studio when they played The Late Show last week. Set lists for this tour have included songs from all five of White’s solo albums, plus a smattering of tunes from other White projects like The Dead Weather and The Raconteurs, a couple of covers and a heap of White Stripes favorites.
White may find himself so busy that the old fantasy — about getting stuck by himself, “down in a lazaretto, bored rotten,” as he once sang — comes back around again. But the success of his various endeavors suggests that he does his best work with a team, and he’s pretty good at picking teammates.
