Eight days before the release of his third solo album Boarding House Reach, Jack White played the first of three surprise shows in the Blue Room of his Third Man Records in Nashville. At about the midpoint of his set — during which he debuted his new four-piece backing band and many of the songs from the forthcoming record — White made a joke. Something about how hearing new Jack White material in 2018 is a bit like hearing, say, REO Speedwagon debut new material a couple decades into their tenure. People mainly just want to hear the hits, right?
Like a lot of what White tends to say onstage, the REO Speedwagon line didn’t feel like part of a prepared treatise. He might carefully curate his music, his image and his record label, but when it comes to his banter, White is all gutsy id, shooting off at the mouth about whatever crosses his mind and seems funny or clever or weird at the time. Even so, there was truth behind that line. For a time, White was one-half of a band — the half that did most of the writing and performing — that was among the biggest in the world. Now, seven years after The White Stripes’ official breakup announcement, 11 years after their last new album and three albums deep into White’s solo career, he says there’s pretty much no chance The White Stripes will get back together. While he’s one of the most recognizable rock stars in the world, it’s still White Stripes songs he’s best known for. It’s “Seven Nation Army” playing in soccer stadiums around the globe, not “Sixteen Saltines.”
So how does a world-famous rock star navigate that? How does White stay relevant and compelling so far into his career? In a recent Rolling Stone cover story that refers to him as “the last guitar hero,” White explains that with Boarding House Reach, he began to step away from his famously anachronistic-by-design recording methods for the first time. He bought a signature-edition Eddie Van Halen guitar. He used Pro Tools during his editing process. “This album is the culmination of, like, ‘I don’t care,’ ” White told Rolling Stone’s Brian Hiatt. “I want it to sound like this. I don’t care how it was made.”
That sentiment contrasts pretty starkly with what White told noted rock journalist David Fricke in an interview more than a decade ago: “The whole point of The White Stripes is the liberation of limiting yourself. In my opinion, too much opportunity kills creativity.” If White’s new rule is “no rules,” how does the resulting material fare?
Boarding House Reach is, in a word, busy. Its 13 tracks are a frenzy of synthesizers, layered percussion, backing vocals and guitars. A large cast of recording personnel is nothing new for White — like 2012’s Blunderbuss and 2014’s Lazaretto, Boarding House Reach features contributions from nearly 20 performers — but gone are the rootsy instrumentation and arrangements that grounded the previous two records. Lazaretto’s “Alone in My Home” and Blunderbuss’ title track could be labeled Americana, perhaps even country. The closest White comes to that territory on Boarding House is a pair of spoken-word tunes, “Abulia and Akrasia” and “Ezmerelda Steals the Show,” and album closer “Humoresque.” The speaking part in “Abulia” is performed by Australian blues singer C.W. Stoneking, and “Ezmerelda” features White reciting an extended poem about a “barefooted fairy” who gains the attention of an audience of “fools” with their faces buried in their “gadgets.” “Humoresque” is a delicate ballad, like some long-lost lullaby from the Jazz Age.
Otherwise, Boarding House Reach is as heavily influenced by hip-hop as anything else, perhaps nowhere more so than on “Ice Station Zebra.” Between jazzy piano riffs and thumping bass lines, White spits lyrics about rejecting the labels placed on him by folks like … well, me. “Here’s an example,” speak-sings White. “If Joe Blow says, ‘Yo, you paint like Caravaggio,’ you’ll respond, ‘No, that’s an insult, Joe. I live in a vacuum, I ain’t copyin’ no one.’ ”
“Corporation” and “Respect Commander” both center on shape-shifting beats bolstered by sundry percussion and topped with White’s trademark fuzzy guitar riffing. Within White’s back catalog, his band The Dead Weather may well be the closest aesthetic kin to these songs, and they’re the ones that shone brightest at White’s run of surprise Third Man shows last weekend. Drummer Carla Azar’s playing was kinetic, and synthesizer contributions by Neal Evans and Quincy McCrary did much of the melodic heavy lifting. (Though White doesn’t yet have a regular ticketed show on the books for Nashville, the smart money says his fans in Music City will have another chance to catch him with this lineup before the Boarding House Reach album cycle is through.)
Third Man made headlines last week when it laid off seven employees at its Nashville location, with representatives telling reporters the decision was made with difficulty, as a way to “streamline” operations. The label-slash-storefront-slash-venue has grown so steadily over the past decade that it’s likely few folks saw the downsizing coming. But here we are in 2018, when even the boutique label of a rock star — a label that successfully found its footing with an analog-loving fan base and the slogan “Your Turntable’s Not Dead” — is thinking about what the future looks like. If this new record tells us anything, it’s that White is willing to try new things — to risk failure rather than rehashing the old tunes.
White hasn’t released his best batch of songs with Boarding House Reach, but he has done what he set out to do: challenge himself, challenge the listener, and remain relevant.
