Jack White

Although "White went on to say that "It's depressing to have a label come and tell you that [Guitar Hero] is how kids are learning about music and experiencing music." While he added that he doesn't try to limit "which format people should get their music in…if you have to be in a video game to get in front of them, that's a little sad," White Stripes' songs still appear on Guitar Hero 5 and are featured as a download on Rock Band. (Via Kotaku.)

When asked in a recent interview by British music publication NME what three things every new musician needs, the frontman replied, "They need to quit playing video games, throw away their Auto-Tune program and cut three strings off their guitar." (Via Kotaku.)

Dead Weather

& Slash:

“We’ll probably be having a new album by that time [March], if we’re lucky. We have a lot of songs cooking right now, we’ve been playing a few of them live and I’m sure by March the entire 20 or 25 songs will be onstage by then,” Jack White told Rolling Stone. “We can’t tell you that much about it except that it’s gonna be really expansive, and I use that word loosely in a scientific sense, meaning that I’m just using it to distract you.”
[...]
White "served as producer during a recent recording session with Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee and the Queen of Rockabilly, Wanda Jackson. “It was just supposed to be a seven-inch [single], but we did a lot more songs, so maybe it will be something bigger,” White told MTV News before last night’s MTV-U Woodie Awards. “There was a lot of good stuff. It’s a wild record.” "
[...]
As for not RSVPing to Slash’s invitation to appear on the Velvet Revolver guitarist’s upcoming all-star album, White told MTV, “I don’t even remember that request, but I love Slash. Appetite for Destruction is one of the best rock albums of the past 20-30 years. … I don’t really like those albums where every song is a different person — that Santana thing, that’s not interesting to me.”
(Via Rolling Stone.)


The trailer for the new Dead Weather single "Die By The Drop" off of the sophomore Sea of Cowards album due out May 11th.

The evolution of Monsieur J. White in pictures here.

Martin Scorsese directed The Rolling Stones' documentary "Shine A Light," which features Jack White.
Jack, how did you and Mick choose "Loving Cup" as your duet?
White: Mick called me. I offered up six or seven songs, which were all shot down [laughs]. "Factory Girl" [on Beggars Banquet] was talked about. Another one was "Shake Your Hips" [the Slim Harpo cover on Exile on Main Street]. Then he said "Loving Cup." That was great — for years at White Stripes shows, we played "Loving Cup" [over the PA] as the crowd was leaving. I just wanted to harmonize with Mick. I didn't necessarily want my own verse. But he said, "Take one."
[...]
Do you feel cheated, Jack, that you won't meet and play with your favorite bluesmen because so many are gone?
White: The problem now is if you want to work with somebody — if that somebody is still alive — you do it on one of those compilations or tribute records. Last year I got asked, "Do you want to play with Jerry Lee Lewis?" It was for one of those records. Yeah, I do want to play with Jerry Lee Lewis. But I don't want to do it like that. I want it to be where we can both get something out of it.
[...]
Jack, do you feel you were born too late — that you missed out on a time when joining a rock band was like running away to the circus?
White: I didn't have those kinds of rock-star dreams. I wanted to play in smaller clubs, even when we could fill bigger ones, because I knew it would be better there. I was always aiming low. That's the problem. To get mood and vibe, you have to aim low. The Stones have been playing a lot of club shows in the last few years. I'm sure the vibe is better.
Richards: When you get into this, you want to communicate. You just have to figure out how. My lot, it's a caravan. That's why I enjoyed working with the X-Pensive Winos [in the Eighties]. I could take it down a notch. We called it EMG: Everything Must Go. We traveled on a bus. I hadn't done that for a long time.
White: I saw the Winos when I was a teenager. I worked at the Fox Theater in Detroit. I had an hour break and got to watch the show.
Richards: It was as free as what Jack does with the Stripes now. How did we open the show? We'd sit down in front of the drum kit and smoke a joint. All the audience could see was this light passed around. You felt the mood of the audience, and you could feel when it was the right time — "OK, let's break" — and you could open with a different song every night. It was far more interesting than fireworks going off.
Jack, is there a Stones song that you particularly like — one that's not a greatest hit?
White: I don't know why we didn't do it, but in the Stripes, we were going to cover "Undercover of the Night." I love the guitar riff. I wanted to break the song down to just the riff and that shaky-maracas beat. But we worked on it for a second and got distracted, I guess.
Richards: You wouldn't have loved the song so much if you'd had to do the goddamned video for it.
Via Rolling Stone.



On the possibility of Jack White producing a new Rolling Stones album:
Richards told Rolling Stone, "I enjoy working with Jack... We've done a couple of tracks." When asked whether or not White would be tapped to produce the next Stones record, Richards that he "couldn't fuel that rumor any more than to say Jack and [him] are in touch.

Via Rolling Stone.

In 2005, you broke out with the Raconteurs and ever since it feels like your path has changed and expanded. How much of that was planned?
I have to say that, honest to God, it was 100 percent spontaneous. Neither of those bands [the Raconteurs and the Dead Weather] were planned and both of them came at times when they were completely in the way of other things I was doing. So it was antithetical to what I was already trying to accomplish to stop the train and start a whole new project and get involved with it. But I can't do that. I feel like I have no right to tell what's being created to halt.
There was a time this past decade when the idea of "garage rock" included bands that sounded nothing like the White Stripes. Do you feel like you have peers out there now that aren't necessarily doing the same kind of music, but work on the same level?
It's difficult to say. I feel like I'm a lot more to do with Jay-Z than I do with the Black Keys. And I don't know what that is, it's just a feeling. Like for example, when all the garage rock bands blew up at the beginning of the decade, the Hives and the Strokes... we visually had a lot in common with the Hives and the same sort of sense of humor, I thought. But for some reason, we did shows with the Strokes, and in a lot of ways we had absolutely nothing in common with them. We got along like gangbusters with the Strokes, though.
Do you like Jay-Z? People may think you don't like hip-hop.
I love hip-hop if it's done with a sense of the blues, even if the person who is creating it isn't thinking that at all. I think Jay-Z is just incredible. The Black Album is one of the best albums of the decade.
When you say you're working on the same world or the same level as Jay-Z, what does that mean exactly?
I think that what he's saying in his lyrics is honest. His ideas about metaphor are really reflective about what struggle is. He has a lot more room to work than I do. He can get away with a lot more than I can. And I'm envious of that because he can stretch into metaphors that I would love to do. You can get away with a lot of interesting stuff in hip-hop and he's really good at it.
(Via Rolling Stone.)

Jack White