A late White weekend: Addicted to the Mind Shaft

Hello. My name is Tam and I am an addict.  It's been just over eight years since I first wrote about Jack White here in my little corner of the interwebs and he and his music have kind of taken over since then.   I should probably be embarrassed by this, but I'm not.  The high of being a fan-girl is too rewarding, being occasionally mocked for it only makes me laugh that those mocking have no idea what they're missing out on.  

It was eight years and a month and a half ago when I had the epiphany that opened up the rabbit-hole and allowed me to fall in, on a clear blue winter day driving the backroads of West Virginia, listening to the Raconteurs album Broken Boy Soldiers for the first time. And this weekend I had a similar experience-- On Friday, March 23rd, Jack released his third solo album, Boarding House Reach.  On Saturday, I went driving with the album on those same West Virginia roads under the same sort of clear blue winter sky. (Technically this was the first weekend of Spring, but the remnants of last week's snow were still on the ground.) And this album has hit me with the same sort of feeling I had that day eight years ago, that there's something to this music that I need and that I'm not going to get anywhere else. And so I celebrate my addiction.

As for this new record, I'm not one for rating systems so I have no idea how to give it a neat quantification.  It's not a perfect record, but it is an astonishing and, for me, delightful one.  It's also highly perverse, beginning with that strange title--  Boarding House Reach.  When it was first announced, a British friend of mine quickly identified the phrase as an English colloquialism referring to the way guests in boarding houses used to reach across the communal table to make a grab for food if they wanted to get a good meal.  It implies rudeness, but also the way we have to adapt and sometimes be tolerant in our dealings with others, while still making sure our own needs are met.  As the youngest of ten children, this is of course pertinent to understanding Jack's mind-set. As a metaphor, it also implies a broadness of reach, a pulling in and consuming of a variety of comestibles, whether they be food or music.  Again, this sums him up quintessentially.

The album was first introduced with a collection of soundbites in a video called  Servings and Portions, then with a handful of songs released as digital "singles", and then a day of listening parties at selected record stores around the world.  After attending one of those listening parties two weeks before the release date, I found myself juggling a contradictory set of reactions. I was excited and delighted and disappointed and apprehensive all at once. But as a fan of Keats' concept of negative capability, this didn't disturb me.  Rather, it was stimulating and upped my anticipation.  As Jack sings in Everything You've Ever Learned, 'the one who is prepared is never surprised'.  When it comes to him, I am always prepared to BE surprised.  Are you?

As always, this is not a review. I can be as critical as any critic, but I'm just a junkie-fan describing my own experience of the music. Your mileage may and probably will vary. So, on to the songs...

I wrote a few weeks ago about how Connected By Love, the first single and first song on the album, disappointed me. Hearing it in the context of the album hasn’t changed that. In fact, when I heard the full album at the listening party I went to, I was convinced that Jack had for some perverse (that word again) reason chosen to release the weakest songs on the album to preview it, because everything that I had not previously heard was so much more interesting to me than this song. It doesn’t disappoint me because it’s a bad song, though, but rather because it’s an extremely beautiful song that doesn’t live up to its potential. The music is gorgeous and the vocal performance is earnest and moving, but he tripped himself up with the word-play. I completely understand what he was going for, it’s a trick he’s done before—The repeated V sounds of Forever For Her (Is Over For Me) and the “Who is the who?” of Want and Able. But in this song, the repeated –ecteds of connected, rejected, protected, infected, etc, are too unlovely a sound to come across as clever, they instead add a clumsiness to lyrics already verging on corny and diminish the power of the song.

Why Walk a Dog impressed me at the listening party, but that may have been due to its novelty at the time.  Jack’s singing and the music are fantastic, especially that scuzzy guitar solo. But hearing it again left me perplexed—What the hell is it about? Is it the literal condemnation of puppy mills that it sounds like? Or are the dogs the sort of obscure metaphor he’s loved to employ in the past? Maybe it’s the mention of birds, but it reminds me of I Think I Found the Culprit from Lazaretto, they're both perfectly enjoyable songs that would’ve made better b-sides than album tracks.

My immediate impression of Corporation when it was released as a digital single was that it was lyrically lightweight but would be a blast to dance to at shows. When I flew to Nashville for one of the three pre-release shows at Third Man Records last weekend, I found that was absolutely correct. It’s not a head-banging pogoing tune, it’s a hip-swiveler like Trash Tongue Talker from Blunderbuss, and I love it for that reason.



Initial reactions from friends and early reviews pretty much unanimously singled out Abulia and Akrasia as a track to skip over, but I am the anomalous weirdo who will not only not skip over that song, but put it on repeat for multiple listenings in a row. This song reflects Jack’s reputed standing as a Scrabble pro, with its tongue-twisting, twist-of-an-ending exhortation, read by gravelly-voiced Aussie bluesman C.W. Stoneking against a lovely gypsy-flavored tune on violin, piano, horns, and tambourine. Surprisingly, Jack doesn't perform on the song at all, neither vocals nor instrument. It's just his words performed by other musicians and this is one more reason why it makes me smile every single time I hear it.

Hypermisophoniac is another one that both delights and perplexes. Both musically and lyrically, it’s a depiction of the condition of misophonia, intentionally meant to aggravate at the same time that it fascinates.  I really look forward to hearing it live.  But what the hell does robbing a bank have to do with the rest of it?

Ice Station Zebra is, simply put, Jack’s manifesto. Where the White Stripes song Little Room summed up an aspect of his work ethic, this one sums up so many of the beliefs and philosophies he’s expressed in interviews over the years—Choosing the box he puts himself in rather than letting others box him in; being part of the tradition, the family, of songwriters he respects and “letting God in the room” when he writes; his bemusement with people who expect him to remain one thing so that he can live up to their expectations. To take the edge off some of these potentially pedantic statements, he sets his highly clever, rapped lyrics to an almost impossibly catchy, beat-changing break-down that reflects where his head is at musically these days. It’s bound to become a live show staple, and deservedly so. 



Over and Over and Over is the first pre-release song that I saw other people really get excited about. With minor modifications, it could have come from any of Jack’s other bands, but though he tried with all of them, he couldn’t get the riff he’d been carrying in his head since 2005 to cohere until now. It’s a killer of a riff and the spat lyrics are an easy live show chant. But to me, as enjoyable as it is, it’s exactly what he rails against in Ice Station Zebra—A song that lives up to what the majority of fans seem to expect from him. So I like it very much, especially the existential Descartes reference in “I think therefore I die, anxiety and I rollin’ down a mountain”, but it’s not likely to end up on any of my “Top whatever” lists of Jack’s songs. But his pronunciation of “perfidy” to rhyme with belly and Isotta Fraschini makes me giggle every time.

 

When Servings and Portions was posted, I ripped the audio and put it on a cd so that I could put the cd into my alarm clock/cd player and wake up every morning to the purred “Helllooooo” at the beginning. I was eager to hear how that fit into a song and I was not disappointed in any way when I heard it pop up in Everything You’ve Ever Learned. One of my favorites on the album, it’s another philosophical manifesto, one that I can wholeheartedly get behind, with that digitally enhanced purring speech at the beginning that erupts into a propulsive, thrashing, snarling, shrieking thought-provoker. I want to hear it live so, so badly. But I also learned today that I need to be careful of listening to it while driving.

Respect Commander is the other song that disturbed and disappointed me when it was released as the b-side to Connected By Love. It begins compellingly, with more of that hip-swiveling funk, descending into a sultry interlude leading to… lyrics that unfortunately fill my mind with images from the music video for the Warrant song, Cherry Pie. The line "Every time she gets the satisfaction/I want her to control me all night long" just sounds so hair metal.  And again he's piling up the –ecteds. I compared this song to my favorite song by Son House, Pearline, which is the story of a love affair told by guitar with only two sung lines. I will always wish Jack had let the music do the talking in this song and not sung the words he wrote, because the music is fucking fabulous and says all that needs to be said.

Ezmerelda Steals the Show is another that many fans and reviewers are planning to skip over on this album, but it enchants me. Jack’s a whimsical poet, a master of imagery, and lectures with a wink.   This song expresses all of that. I can’t help but wonder if it’s a story he made up to tell his kids.  And I want to scream that final line everywhere I go in public.

Get In the Mind Shaft.  Not only is this my favorite song on this record, it may very well become one of my favorite Jack White songs.  It’s highly unique, and not only because there are multiple versions of it— depending on which album pressing you ended up with, you can hear it begin with one of apparently more than half a dozen different stories that Jack recorded.  They’re all little pieces of #JackWhiteWisdom, ranging from him learning to pick out chords on a piano in an abandoned house, to the sound of frequencies in nature, to the mental battle of baseball pitching, to likening himself to a fisherman selling his catch at a dollar a head.  Regardless of which you hear, the background music of dramatically swelling strings gives weight to the words, making them profound. The story fades into an electronic break-down of synthesizer and digitalized voices singing “It’s strange, let’s try it. Can you hear me now? Am I invisible to you?” The voices are all Jack’s, apparently sung through a vocoder, but the effect makes them sound like alien children, like an eerie memory of how he made Meg White’s voice sound more child-like on St.Andrew/This Battle Is In the Air by speeding up the tape. It brings a touchingly innocent gravity to the second half of the song, turning it into a plea for connection. At the moment when the repeated refrain of “Can it be? Can it be? Can it be? Can it be?” erupts into soaring “Aaaaaaahhh”s, my face splits into an ear-to-ear smile even as a lump forms in my chest and my eyes fill with tears. For me, it’s a powerful song that hits me just as hard as my most favorite of his songs, 300MPH Torrential Outpour Blues. That song struck me immediately as an expression of the sardonic angst I’ve lived with almost every day of my life.  This one reminds me to not let that angst close me off, to always remain open to curiosity, beauty, and wonder, which is one of the most profound rewards of this addiction of mine, one that I’ll carry with me the rest of my life, no matter what kind of music Jack decides to make in the future.

What’s Done Is Done keeps being described as the only country song on the album but, to my ears, the only thing country about it is the twang in Jack’s vocal delivery. The music, on the other hand, is hard to categorize. It’s got the sort of intensely deep kick-drum as in Love Drought from Beyonce’s Lemonade, simple acoustic piano and brush drums, accented with Hammond organ and synth, then ending with a touch of softly strummed acoustic guitar. None of that is overtly country, at least not to me. But it is definitely beautiful. It’s also a fun performance from Jack, with that little whistle/hiccup at the beginning of “what’s”, and Esther Rose’s soft folk-infused voice is a beautiful accompaniment to his. I’ve heard her sing before, back when she performed with Luke Winslow-King, and I didn’t love her voice so much then, but I think I prefer her with Jack over either Ruby Amanfou or Lillie Mae Rische. And that whispered exchange at the end is the niftiest of touches.

Jack has always known how to end an album and Humoresque proves his skill yet again. After the cacophony of the rest of the album, it follows the relative quiet of WDID for the softest and gentlest of send-offs. The only cover song on the album, with lyrics by Howard Johnson (an early 1900s songwriter, not the guy who opened the hotel chain) over a classical interlude by Antonin Dvořák, Jack keeps it simple with an almost heart-breakingly husky vocal over piano and drums. Its reminiscence of early White Stripes covers like Look Me Over Closely and Mr. Cellophane proves that, no matter how far his boarding house reach into different genres and styles, underneath it all, Jack really is that “same boy” we’ve always known.

There’ve been a lot of hyperbolic reviews of this album, both reviling and acclaiming it. I’m not going to define it either way. To me, it’s just a perverse thing of beauty that confirms me more than ever as a fan of this musician who has opened so. Many. Fucking. Doors for me. I’ve climbed inside the mind shaft  and I don’t plan to climb out any time soon. 

Third portion: Corporation, or a White boy goes from blues to funk

The new album, Boarding House Reach, isn't even out yet and Jack White's fans are already dividing into factions over the first three songs. Corporation was released at midnight this past Thursday and by the time I listened to it over breakfast, opinions ranged from loving it, to calling it garbage, to genuine concern over what in the hell direction his music is headed in and has he forsaken everything he used to stand for?  Personally, it's the first of the three songs I can say I almost unequivocally enjoy.  The lyrics are a ways away from profound, but they've definitely got me wondering and that's a good thing. 

As for the music... It's funky fresh and makes me grin from ear to ear.


 
Yeah, it's damned different from anything he's done before.  We're waaaay far from both the Delta and the garage here, folks.  But is it really a surprise?  If you look at his progression over the course of his career and the music and musicians he's talked about over the last five years, this actually starts to feel like a fairly natural direction for him to turn.  His last two albums seemed to reflect his immersion in Nashville, with an abundance of fiddle and pedal steel creating a distinct country flavor.  But he was also playing with a hip-hop drummer (Daru Jones) and a keyboard player who had strong experimental, progressive, and psychedelic leanings (Ikey Owens, may he rest in peace).  The two of them had to have had an influence on him, even if it didn't come out noticeably on Blunderbuss or Lazaretto.  

And then there was Three Dollar Hat on the last Dead Weather album, Dodge and Burn, in 2015.
 

 
In 2016 came Don't Hurt Yourself, on Beyonce's album Lemonade...


   

...and the songs he co-wrote/contributed to on A Tribe Called Quest's final album, We Got It From Here--  Solid Wall of Sound and Ego (neither of which seem to be on YouTube, all I could find was a preview snippet of Ego).   



Not to mention his take on Curtis Mayfield's Pusherman in one of the hidden tracks on Lazaretto--

 

So to hear him go full-on funk in Corporation might be a surprise to many, but it should not be completely unexpected.  That's not to say everyone has to love it, of course.  Though I think I might.  Because it makes me really, really want to hear him cover this now--

   

Play that funky music, White boy. Play that funky music till you die.


 

 

The first serving of Boarding House Reach: Connected By Love, backed with Respect Commander

Disclaimer:  I am not a critic and this is not a review. I am a fan. As such, I can sometimes be critical, but I am not a critic. Because my attachment to the music I love springs from emotional, visceral responses, I don't write "reviews". I can make objective judgements, but for the most part my descriptions of new music are purely an expression of my impressions, feelings, and thoughts. And when it comes to writing about Jack White's solo music, my responses seem to have become more complicated with every album.  Because today Jack released a new song from his upcoming album, Boarding House Reach, and I should be bouncing off the walls, giddy with excitement.  Note the use of the word "should"...

These songs, Connected By Love and its b-side, Respect Commander, are different from pretty much anything Jack's done before. Quite different. In one sense, the difference doesn't bother me, in fact it's terrific, it's what I was hoping for on the new album, a new direction full of surprises. In another sense, the difference is... bothersome. Troubling, even. 



At first listen, Connected By Love seems like the flip-side of the White Stripes song, Apple Blossom.  Instead of putting the woman's problems in a little pile and sorting them out for her, he now wants her to take his and put them on a shelf.  Instead of not wanting to be interrupted and corrupted by love, as in Love Interruption on Blunderbuss, he's now intent on being connected by it.  To express this, his voice is plaintive and passionate and effectively affecting.  

The music is where all the good surprises are.  It's so layered and dynamic and interesting.  Just over half-way through, when you expect Jack to rip into a searing guitar solo, he blows expectation away with a solo on... Hammond organ.  Then comes the guitar, circling and rising to the heavens, and joining with the organ.  Topping it all off are the gospel-style backup vocals provided by one half of the Nashville quartet, the McCrary Sisters. Ever since hearing Ruby Amanfu's rich vocals during the Blunderbuss tour, I've been wanting to hear Jack with multiple similarly rich female voices behind him and the effect is exactly as I imagined it, creating a beautiful compliment to the way his voice has aged and deepened just a bit.  It leaves me completely delighted.

But here's where things get complicated. It was Jack's lyrics that initially grabbed me and pulled me into his music eight or nine years ago, and it's his words that've kept me enthralled from one album to the next, all the way through his catalog. They resonate with me in a way that no other songwriter I've heard has.  His wit, his sense of human nature and the absurd, his subtlety and obscurity, his vocabulary, his amazing ability to draw with words, to vividly describe with the simplest of details all sorts of everyday scenarios and emotions that we've all experienced or can easily imagine.  And yet, lyrically, this song is too simple.  Where is the metaphor that he usually wields with such craft?  After a handful of listens, two words popped into my head that I NEVER thought I would ever use to describe Jack White's song-writing. It pains me to write them now, but I have to be honest-- The lyrics to this song strike me as trite and clichéd.

And yet, how is it possible for him to write something that makes me swoon even as I'm cringing over it?  How can it be that I'm disappointed at the same time that I'm so thrilled?

It makes me think of all the times he's talked in interviews about how "satisfaction is death".  And here he's writing about someone who is satisfied in love, who's had troubles in the past, but who is now content. And his usual sparkling wit and word-play are just not there.  When Jack interviewed BP Fallon for an early Green Series record, Fallon talked about the blues and shared pain. He mentioned how so many fans were upset with Bob Dylan for writing Lay, Lady Lay because "this was a man of contentment, and they preferred him stuck outside of Memphis with the thingie blues again... People actually very often like to have their idols crying".  Maybe that's the case here.  Or maybe it's just not in Jack's makeup to express satisfaction and contentment, at least not without some sort of dark twist to it.

The video for the song, though, is a beautiful expression. The images in it bring the depth that the lyrics lack.  With or without the end-of-the-world moon borrowed from the film Melancholia hanging over it all, the vignettes of a young woman nursing her grandmother, a mother and her twin sons, and a young man turning to his abuelita when his friends lead him astray convey some of the multitudes of ways that we can be, should be, connected to each other by love.  

Showing the statue of Mary as Jack sings the opening "Woman..." takes it to an even higher level, hinting at possibly more spiritual connections that are nowhere to be found in Jack's words. A preview of the video intro voice-overs and the image of the single sleeve, with Jack's hand breaking through the tiles of a wall, which were teased the day before the single release, had me wondering if this song would have a socio-political theme, a timely "love trumps hate", anti-Trump sort of message that would follow in the footsteps of Icky Thump. Something that would inspire listeners to connect with love on a large scale.  But no, it turned out to be a surprisingly pedestrian love song set to inspired and dramatic music.




The b-side, Respect Commander, succeeds and suffers in the exact same respects as Connected By Love. The music is fantastic, starting out with that crunchy guitar Jack's so well known for and that his fans love so much, before a re-start that switches to a faster, funkier sound accompanied by synth that's unexpected and totally exciting.  After two minutes of sonic chills and left turns, though, he begins singing and again... the words are total rock'n'roll, good lovin' cliché.  The saving grace of this song, despite the sultry urgency of Jack's voice, is that the verse is short and that he then lets loose on the guitar for a stuttering, heart-tripping solo that runs all the way to the end.  In a way, this one reminds me of Pearline, my favorite song by Son House, in which House sings only two lines, "Pearline, what's the matter with you?" and then later, "I love you, Pearline". His guitar tells all the rest of the story of their relationship.  I can't help but wish Jack had kept his words as succinct in Respect Commander.  

But again, disappointment in the lyrics is mixed with thrilled excitement over the music and vocal delivery.  I have no idea what to expect for the rest of Boarding House Reach and at this point I think it would be best to not even contemplate.  

Way to shake things up, Jack.

Confessions of a Jack White junkie, volume 2: A taste of servings and portions

It's hard, it's soft, it's crunchy, it's smooth, it's stuttering, it's melodic.  He raps, he croons, he shouts, he squeals. It's got new words (abulia, akrasia, abjurement... Jack must've been doing some casual reading through the A section of the dictionary when writing this one), and some familiar themes (weight of the world on his shoulder, suffering for/because of women, starting fires).  There's a new cast of characters among both musicians and  instruments.  In just four minutes, he's given us a lot to digest and a lot to think about. 

And the fan-girl/addict has eagerly taken her place in the front car of the roller-coaster, waiting for things to get rolling.