Why did this album take you so long?

Jack: Well, it was The Raconteurs! I was on tour with them all year and all around the world. We were breaking in a whole new band, so there was a lot of work to be done. We tried to go everywhere we could. Also we, The White Stripes, toured a lot with “Satan” too. So that’s why. And we used to want to do another album with The White Stripes. Even this album now – we are booked till the end of the year and that’s only Europe and America. We could go for two years, we could go to Japan, Australia, you could go as long as you want but at some point you’ve got to stop and say, time to go back and work on a new record.


Your music has always been related to blues and punk. This album, especially the first song, sounds like late 60s and early 70s heavy metal and psychedelic music – bands like Black Sabbath and their album Paranoid (Iron Man, War Pigs). What inspires you to make music like that, especially as you’re not from that period?

Jack: I don’t know where it comes from. The synthesizer that we use down there is from the 40s, so it predates all that heavy metal by 30 years. Those tones line up more like with Telstar and Joe Meek were using. I don’t think that the vocal phrasing is anything that those metal bands would have ever used. That kind of phrasing is more of the last couple of years. It has been more involved in rock ’n’ roll, not rapping or anything like that, that kind of talk singing. We just all collide, when we’re singing. We don’t sit down and say, we want to write that kind of song.  It just comes out. You kind of let the song do all the work. You sort of just manipulate it and coax it. It happens without you really being in control of it. That’s the thing a lot of journalists don’t really realize about musicians. I think people and also fans think that artists have this decision: Well, should I make a record that is as good as Sergeant Pepper? Oh yeah! Should I sing exactly like Frank Sinatra? If you had that choice, you would obviously do that. You would obviously make a record that is as good as “Revolver”, if it was just maths. But it doesn’t come out that way. You can sit and try to sound like Black Sabbath, but you would probably fail. If a band does do anything that sounds like Black Sabbath, then it probably happened by accident.

You have lots of different styles, like bagpipes and even Celtic sounds on these records. How do you get all of this together? Who played the instruments?

Meg: Yeah, in this case we hired musicians, the bagpipe and the trumpet players. We found them in Nashville. The trumpet player we got to know at a Mexican restaurant. He was playing in a Mariachi band. I’m not sure where the Scottish guy came from?

Jack: He came from this studio. We asked if anyone knew a bagpiper. These country record places know a lot of studio musicians and session guys.

There is this Mexican sounding song “Conquest”. What’s it about?

Jack: This is a Patti Page song. We’ve been wanting to cover it a long time and we’ve never got along to it really. It seemed like the perfect time to do it, because the themes in the song come up a lot in the album, which was debated. We were recording some arrangements. Patti Page in the original has this big orchestral arrangement, like horns and so on. We were like, why don’t we get a Mariachi guy and let him play on this, so it has a Latin feel on it. He came in, a fun guy, he couldn’t speak English. We had an interpreter in the studio. We have never done that before so that was interesting.

I read that you are also a big fan of Bettie Page?

Jack: oh yeah, I am a big Bettie Page fan too, I love that pin-up model. And I love Patti Page, the singer – and Jimmy Page, the guitar player. (laughter)

John Peel once compared the importance of The White Stripes with Jimi Hendrix and the Sex Pistols. Other said you were just very good interpreters. What do you say to this?

Jack: I would say, all we’ve done, in all the different kinds of songs we have done, whatever they are, we really are a blues band when it comes down to it. Jimi Hendrix was the same way, he was playing the blues, whether it was “Purple Haze” or those gigantic explosive songs, they were still blues songs. It’s the same for us.

Your earlier records were more punk-ish and here you use Celtic sounds. Still, it is your heaviest album. How come?

Jack: I guess that song “Prickly Thorn”. is kind of where it came from. We never sit down and never premeditate any of the songs. It only really just happens song by song. I was writing that song on a mandolin. To give an example: I’m writing a song. I picked up a mandolin and started singing a song. My brain does not say: “It can’t be a mandolin song, it’s got to be a guitar.” We don‘t do that. We don’t get in the way of the music. If we did that it would be a shame, then we would have to say: “Oh, we gotta play like people want it from us.” If we thought about it in that way, like Get Behind Me Satan did that, and it had almost no guitar on it … and this album has no piano on it. But there was a piano in the room.

What’s the best thing about being a musician?

Jack: Well, there is a lot of freedom that we’ve had. That’s got to be the number one thing that we’re grateful for, that is how much freedom we’ve been able to have. Since we started the band, it’s been ten years now, and nobody’s really ever told us what to do or what to name a song or what to make a video out of or anything like that or what to have on the cover of the album. We’ve been very lucky and fortunate to always do whatever we wanted to do. I think that’s the epitome of success. Money and fame and all those things don’t really count. But if you are actually doing what you want to do and nobody is telling you to stop, then I think you’re successful.

You are from Detroit originally. Why did you flee your hometown?

Jack: Well, it was just the scene we were involved in. I think it had just kind of run its course. The whole garage rock scene, all the bands we’ve played with and we associated with and socialized with, I think it had all just come to a head and impossible to stay there any longer. It was very unhealthy for us at that point. It’s not a very supportive realm: rock ’n’ roll music, rock ’n’ roll musicians and struggling musicians in the rock world. Everyone’s got an opinion and we broke out of it, took it around the world. So it was hard for someone to say: “Hi, oh we are so happy for you!”, ’cause they aren’t.

You’ve even been in trouble with a music colleague of yours, the singer Jason Strollsteimer of the Von Bondies. What was going on between you and him?

Jack: That’s probably a really good example of that cold kind of attitude coming to a head. I think people are unhappy with their relation to something successful that’s happening. They figure out they are not going to do it. Some people just don’t say anything, some people get bitchy and some people start really terrorizing you. He was really kind of terrorizing me and Meg. It was kind of ridiculous. It got to a point where he really needed to be stopped and he got stopped.

You had to go to an anti-aggression-therapy because of that. What does one have to do there?

Jack: Not really. I think this is just a bullshit word. It’s a popular phrase in America, like someone has “attention deficit disorder”, someone is “lactose intolerant”, someone needs to go to “anger management”. These are all buzzwords that get used. It’s an easy way to label a gigantic section of – whatever.

So where do you live now and what is better about living there?

Meg: I live in LA now. I just needed a change. LA is a city where I feel comfortable. I just tried it out. It’s different in a lot of ways. There is a similarity; it’s a car town. Nobody walks anywhere. It’s a spread out city. And the weather is a lot better!

Jack, you live in Nashville. It’s supposed to be a really conservative city with lots of hill-billies and a lot of guns around?

Jack: I think those hill-billies would have some pretty bad German stereotypes in their head, I’m sure. No, it’s beautiful down south. It’s so comfortable. The number one thing that attracts me to it is, everyone is just so nice and so positive. They’re really kind to one another, they enjoy life in a really, really nice way, in an easygoing way. I think in the real urban cities up north, on the East and West Coast of America, everyone is pushing and pushing, it’s dog eat dog and it’s just a rat race, it’s all these clichés and stuff. But in Nashville it just feels comfortable. It has a down home feel to it down there. The politics and the religion is a whole other level. But you don’t have to be a republican to live down south.

But doesn’t it scare you that your two little kids will grow up with all of that there?

Jack: I don’t know if it’s like that any more. I mean, Nashville is not Georgia or Alabama. Every state has its own feel to it. Nashville is a pretty modern town, very current. It’s actually a very democratic town compared to other towns in the South.

You’ve been on the Simpsons show and you would also like to be on the Sesame Street show. What’s the story behind that?

Jack: Well, it just shows that we really enjoy. The thing is that a lot of Europeans don’t know that in America there are not very many TV shows where bands can perform. Music is very hard to come by in America. There’s a couple of late night TV shows where bands can play. But it’s done in this icky way and it doesn’t really have a good feel to it, it’s not presented. In Europe, especially England, you have such a wide range of places where you can perform and the music is treated with respect. In America something like Sesame Street would be an accomplishment for a band to get on and perform. It’s looking up on music from a totally different perspective, the best perspective, a childish one.

What is the deal with Sesame Street’s monster, Oscar, who collects all kind of things?

Jack: He’s a junk collector. Yeah, we collect a lot of stuff too; we store it on our albums.

Is it true that this will be the last album by The White Stripes for a long time?

Jack: This album? No! I don’t know where that came from. I’ve heard that a lot. It’s our 10^th anniversary this year. This is not true… try to think positive!



This is an unedited interview. If you would like to have an edited version of the text for your publication, or even a story about the White Stripes in German language, please contact:

service@musictalk4u.net



the artist's website:

www.whitestripes.net