Jack White Interview: Part Two
Monday June 25, 2007 @ 05:00 PM
By: ChartAttack.com Staff

The White Stripes

The White Stripes' Jack White talked about the band's extensive Canadian tour in part one of an interview with Noah Love. Below he deals with The Raconteurs, his new hometown, his new label and other topics:

ChartAttack: How soon after The Raconteurs finished touring did you start The White Stripes again?
Jack White: Well, I called Meg [White] while I was doing that tour and said, "Why don't we get together," and maybe she'd just move out to Nashville for a couple months so we could write and rehearse and record, and she said OK. So she came out in December and we started rehearsing and writing, but then we got sidetracked. There was other things we had to do and we got pulled away from it. So there was two or three weeks in there that got taken away from us. So we started to push a lot harder because of it. We just made it more of a challenge to get through what we were trying to get through — all of these half-written, quarter-written songs. So a lot of them ended up being written in the studio. This was the longest we've ever spent in the studio.

Did you write any of the songs for the Stripes record while you were out with The Raconteurs?
"You Don't Know What Love Is" was, but I very rarely write on tour. I wrote a lot of Raconteurs stuff with The Raconteurs while we were on tour. Those guys are always playing guitar backstage and on the bus. We're always playing guitar together and songs start coming out. There's no other guitar players in The White Stripes, so that doesn't really happen.

How does Meg feel about The Raconteurs?
She's a big fan. She's come to every show she could so far, so she likes it.

You're based in Nashville now. What do you like about the city?

It must be nice that everybody you want to record with likes it there, too.
All the Raconteurs moved here. I guess it feels right at the moment.

Tell me about the concept for the song "I'm Turning Into You."
That was from a video treatment idea that Michel Gondry had. He was telling me and Meg, "This is a video I have to do with The White Stripes." He went on saying he wanted to hire 100 actors that looked less and less like me and more and more like Meg, and morph one into the next. I thought, "That sounds pretty interesting." So I went home and a couple days later I wrote that song based on that. Or started writing it, I should say, because we were working on that song when we did Get Behind Me Satan, but we didn't get to it. We had too many songs floating around.

Have you shot the video?
I don't think Michel's heard the song yet. I hope it gets shot. You're in a tough position with that, writing a song based on a video treatment. That's probably never been done before. But doing that, you kind of think, "Well, that means we have to make this good enough that it can be a single so that we can make a video for it," which is not an easy position to be in. You can't really do that. So you just hope for the best. Whether it's a single or not, we'll probably make the video.

How did you settle on Warner as a label?
Well, we looked at 'em all. We've always been uncomfortable — same way we recorded this album in a modern studio for the first time, we were scared to do that, we were scared to be on a major label. But I think as time goes on, the indie labels have shown us their worst side, their worst colours — all the indie labels we've been a part of. Except for V2 and XL, they were great. But all the smaller ones always gave us a bad taste in our mouth, the very underground ones. So we knew from that experience we didn't hate major labels. Every one of our favourite bands ever, even going back to Robert Johnson, was on a major label and all that kind of stuff. We always wondered, "What will they do?" It's about time.

What's up with The Raconteurs?
We're doing our second album right now. We're in the second last day of recording. We've been here about two or three weeks and we're just trying to get as much on tape as we can before I hit the road. We were originally going to try to do five weeks in the studio, and it's just not enough time. There's so much going on with this White Stripes album, we just couldn't give out that much time for it. So we're gonna come back for it later in the year. But we've got a lot of stuff down and there's a lot of ideas happening.

So the album should be out next year?
We had grand, grand notions a few months ago about releasing it in October or something, but I don't know. I've only got two hands. We'll get it out as soon as we can, I guess.

What's the material sounding like?
It's very different, very large. I don't know, a lot more grandiose. That's all I can say right now.

Could you ever see yourself doing a tour where you do double duty, Stripes and Raconteurs together?
If it was as easy as just walking on stage and playing with one band and playing and then walking on stage with the other band, I'd do it. But the problem is all the stuff behind the scenes that you have to monitor and all the people who work for you and all the stuff like that. That's what gets in the way. It's the production of it. So that's what kind of keeps it from happening. But also, once you're in one path, it's kind of hard to jump out of it and jump into a whole other situation, you know, clear your head of the other situation. Because they're so different, the bands are so different.

—Noah Love