Jack White has always been a bifurcated kind of guy. That was evident right from the name of his very famous first band: Announcing you’re a stripe may be one strong indicator of a two-tone sensibility.
His yin and yang are there not just in a serious design ethos — which could be red, yellow or blue set against solid black or white, depending on the era — but in his musical extremes, which range from “We’re Going to Be Friends”-style finger-picking and folky gentility to the million-watt rock exorcisms of a “Get Behind Me Satan.” Consider his Michigan and Tennessee hometowns, even, where he maintains twin business bases: He’s still part Detroit punk, part Southern gentleman.
To be sure, White has always favored a myriad of styles. “I love eclectic left turns,” he says, professing that the multifaceted White Album is his favorite Beatles collection. “It was the first album on vinyl I bought as a teenager.
And even in the White Stripes, when there were only two people” in the lineup, “our records would take a left turn into some ragtime ’20s thing and then go back into some heavy blues thing and then come out with this ’70s-punk-sounding vibe the next song.”Still, when he was working toward putting out what was supposed to be a single release in 2022, it was too split-personality even for his variegated tastes. “No matter how much I tried to make a sequence out of the songs, it just seemed like you were taking a Miles Davis record and putting it in the middle of an Iron Maiden record.
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