<http://schema.org/articleBody>
"FacebookPinterest\n\nFacebookPinterestFacebookPinterest\n\n Jack White might be the most prolific rock 'n' roll polymath of our time, but he should've been born in another era. Perpetually annoyed (and often disgusted) with the world around him, the former Detroit upholsterer compulsively rebuilds it to match the one in his head. It started with his garage rock duo, the White Stripes, which existed exclusively in a red, white, and black candyland. Now it's continuing in Nashville, where White has turned a giant warehouse in a dead industrial corner into a Factory to rival Warhol's. You could call him a control freak\u2014you wouldn't be the first\u2014but White argues that he's just trying to create a space where he can surrender control and let spontaneity rule. In a crumbling cabin an hour outside of Nashville just weeks before the White Stripes broke up (and just months before a press release announced a \"divorce party\" hosted with supermodel Karen Elson), we talked about attacking the guitar, resisting modern technology, and what he learned from the dead King of Pop, Michael Jackson.\n\nGQ: You've been doing a hell of a lot of producing lately. As a producer, how do you know how hard you can push someone without going too far?\n\n Jack White: Well, to me it would be embarrassing to take the easy way out when you're producing a record or when you're recording something. Some guitar players will go in and they'll record 50 or 70 solos, and they'll tell their engineer, \"Alright, fix it.\" And they'll walk out and go on vacation for a couple weeks, then come back and hope for it to be done, all pieced together. You couldn't do that in my studio if you wanted to, because we don't record on Pro Tools. We record on tape. You couldn't do it if you wanted to. I never wanted to push [someone] until they'd be upset with me, but I do want to push so we can get someplace new. There's no point in just treading water.\n\n\n\nYour browser does not support iframes.\n\n |||\n\nGQ: You have so many projects going on all the time. How have you set yourself up, organizationally, so you can decide what you're going to do when and who you're going to work with?\n\n Jack White: Projects come from all different direction. Some guy wrote me an email this morning saying, \"You've got to check out this band up in the Midwest, blah blah blah.\" It's so nice that someone would even think to... they're not trying to make me happy, they're saying something cool could happen here. And that's the attitude I always have. I want to see, \"Something cool could happen. Because of the place we have, this musician, this horn section might show up, this bass player. Maybe something cool will happen.\" That's all I care about: Building the little dollhouse and then inviting everybody down.\n\nGQ: And you've built that dollhouse with [Nashville record store, recording studio, record label, performance space and general Jack White Factory] Third Man, right?\n\n Jack White: Yeah. It's been a smart move for me in the fulfillment zone of my brain to build that building. I never realized how much I needed that location\u2014the physical location\u2014to really spawn all these different things. It makes all the difference. And we've been up two years\u2014we're on our 75th record right now. That's a lot of music that didn't exist before, and I'm really happy about it.\n\nGQ: When did you start thinking about actually building a catchall space? Was it when you were still living in Detroit? Had you already moved to Nashville?\n\n Jack White: It's strange. I was just looking for a building where I could store all the gear that I had in different storage units. I was just trying to put it all in one place so I could get to it quickly. The idea being that I had built a studio, so now I didn't want this thing were, oh, I have that electric piano and that harpsichord and that sitar on a shelf, so when it happens that, \"Oh, let's put a sitar on this track!\" \"Uh, it's down at the storage unit.\" \"I don't want to have to go get it, let's just use a guitar.\" That's what happens when you put stuff in storage, you don't use it\u2014it's too much trouble. So I wanted to get a building and put it all in there. I found this building, and as I was demolishing the inside I'm like, \"You know what? Wait. This could be something bigger. Maybe we could also do photo shoots here. It'd also be nice if we could do interviews here\u2014we should make a lounge, because we're always looking for a place to do an interview when people come into town. You know what? There's room for offices here. You know what else would be great? I should finally re-release all the White Stripes' 7-inches on vinyl. Are there pressing plants nearby?\" One thing led to another, and then pretty soon we've got a staff of 12 people and it's gangbusters.\n\nFacebookPinterestundefined\n\nGQ: How did you find the people that you hired?\n\n Jack White: Some of them were people that I knew who loved vinyl records and had worked at record labels before. I knew they'd be guys I could work with well\u2014we all came from the same neighborhood, literally, so we knew how to communicate with each other and what we wanted to accomplish. And then it just moves on and on from there. When you put word out that you're looking for someone who's an incredible painter, they just show up, you know?\n\nGQ: One thing I've noticed with you is that you try to take advantage of the fact that logistics naturally create limitations\u2014a box that you have to work in. But what's really different with you is that, if the logistics of a certain project haven't created a small enough box, you find ways to create one yourself.\n\n Jack White: Yeah, it's good to. Yeah.\n\nGQ: Obviously with the White Stripes, the limited color palate is a very obvious in-your-face metaphor for something similar that's going on musically. But what are some less obvious examples of that same impulse in your other projects?\n\n Jack White: When I'm in the Raconteurs, I just do it to myself. Maybe I don't expose the rest of those guys to it. Maybe they don't know what I'm doing. And sometimes you ruin it by talking about it to an engineer or to a band member. You jinx it. You destroy it by saying it out loud. So sometimes you gotta keep those little problems to yourself. I really want that amp knob to be at seven, but I'm keeping it at four and I'm going to try to get it to seven some other way. There's no point in me explaining that to Brendan\u2014I'll just kill it. And it almost looks like you're bragging or something. So it's good to keep this trouble to yourself a lot of the time.\n\nGQ: When I interviewed Wanda Jackson she said that you told her you don't take a guitar solo, you attack a guitar solo.\n\n Jack White: Yeah, you have to. You have to. I don't know how you can do it politely. Even Django Reinhardt didn't do it politely. You have to be so involved, and it has to be a fight, a power struggle. Some kind of confrontation. I think that's what we witness in good stories, in good films, good music\u2014we're witnessing confrontation. Protagonists and antagonists. People fighting about something. That's what stories are. And if you want to tell a story with a guitar, you have to do that. Sometimes you have to be both the protagonist and the antagonist at the same time.\n\nGQ: From the Raconteurs to the Dead Weather to your role as a producer, how are you finding not being the front man?\n\n Jack White: It feels good. When you're in the room writing or recording, nobody talks about that stuff. No one even feels it. But then suddenly when you release it to the world, it's like, \"Oh, that's right. People know me from that band, and they know her from that band,\" or whatever. So you have to realize we can't just do exactly what we want to do\u2014we're still under these preconceived notions from everybody else, so we have to try to use that to our advantage and make it work somehow. You know, to me, in the Dead Weather, when we're all in the room playing, I'm the drummer. I'm just playing the drums and I love it. I'm not thinking, \"I can't wait to tell people I'm the drummer and shock them.\" You know? If you're thinking stuff like that, then you're going down the bad path.\n\nGQ: Is there an itch that exists to be up front, singing, that you have to balance as you're pacing out your projects? I don't mean: Does playing the drums hurt your ego? I mean, is there something that being up front fulfills in you that you sometimes need to get back to?\n\n Jack White: Sometimes you do things\u2014I'll sit at the piano and write songs. I know that it's not my instrument, but I love to play it. And I also know that the crowd doesn't feel that that's my instrument. I put on the guitar, an instrument I don't really care that much about, and the crowd reacts like, \"That's your instrument. That's it. We feel it.\" Literally, at that moment, the music that's coming out is what they want to expose themselves to. So you start going, \"Okay, that's what connects with them, whether I like it or not.\" I'd love to play the drums and be a drummer, I really feel like a drummer in my mind, always have. But it's not what fires them up, you know? So that's the vibe when I go up to the mic and sing: It's that, \"Oh, that's right... they like this.\" [Laughs.]\n\nGQ: So how do you balance giving the people what they want, and doing what feels right to you?\n\n Jack White: It just kind of comes out. In the Dead Weather, when we first started writing songs, I think we wrote eight or nine things, and it's all Alison singing. We had a mic, and I was singing backup, and I ended up singing a verse and writing with her. It just happens, and the good thing is to get out of the way of it. Because when people sit down and say, \"Okay, what are we doing here, guys? What kind of band do we want this to be? Do we want to have two singers? Do we want to have...\"? When you sit and think about it, you kind of blow it. It becomes a press release. It's good to let it happen, if you can. And that happened with the Dead Weather\u2014I ended up singing a couple songs here and there. But Alison loved that, because she could play organ, or guitar, or tambourine, and sing along with me, or whatever. A duet. It was something new.\n\nGQ: How would you distill what you're after when you're producing?\n\n Jack White: I want to blow something up. I want to make something happen that's hard to do. I want to be able to say, \"We didn't spend a million dollars in a studio and 17 months on Pro Tools\u2014we did that with two napkins and a toothpick.\" That's what I'm proud of. The circumstances, the energy that was in the room that got created that wouldn't have been there had you not done such and such a thing. I get off on those ideas. Trying to shake things up and make something happen. It doesn't always work\u2014you can't just fire off a gun and all of a sudden someone's going to record a hit song\u2014but the attempt is worth it. It's the \"taking it easy\" part\u2014when I go and see people in the studios, and I see them taking it easy, it upsets me. It kind of bums me out. I want to take 'em aside and take 'em outside and say, \"What are you doing? I don't understand why you're doing that.\" I think a lot of people are trained to think that when they play in front of X amount of people, I've arrived, I've made it, and now I can rest on my laurels, because I'm The Guy. And that's the biggest mistake.\n\nGQ: I've always felt challenged by your resistance to modern trappings. Has having a family changed your experience around technology and modernity? You've told me in the past that a lot of the stuff that most of us surround ourselves with makes you uncomfortable.\n\n Jack White: I was raised by pretty much senior citizens. My parents were pretty old. We had ten kids. They were into a lot of older things. I remember listening to Nat King Cole, Roger Miller, and Gene Krupa, and I was in a neighborhood where nobody was listening to any of that stuff, and they never would. It was weird to be on my front porch playing guitar, and to have people walk by and making fun of me, throwing rocks and shit. You sort of get this defiance like, Okay, a lot of people aren't into this stuff. But there was always this temptation, like two people on your shoulder, and one of them's saying, \"Jack, just go along and like what they like. You'll have more friends, it'll be an easier time, you'll be happier.\" Then on the other side of me there's that stiff upper lip, like, \"No, I like this, and I'm going to keep liking it. I'm not gonna change just because they want me to.\" That whole battle. And maybe I started that battle in my head. Maybe I imagine that battle in my head. Maybe I create it when it's not there, just so that I know how to work. I don't know.\n\nGQ: Does having a family, where it's not just you in your head anymore, change that?\n\n Jack White: Like, kids, you mean? You know, honest to God, I don't think about 'em when I'm working. There's a time and a place for that. I don't think about my mom when I'm onstage, you know? I just don't really think about my kids when I'm working, and when we press stop and I walk outside, they're the first things I think about. Even when Karen and I worked on a record together, we never thought about that we were husband and wife. We never talked about it, never did anything where I said, \"Uh, I wish we weren't having this conversation right now, because we're supposed to be working on a record...\" We never had that; it was time to work. And we never said it, either, which is a good sign, you know? That means things were happening on their own, naturally, for the right reasons.\n\nGQ: And you're both equally focused.\n\n Jack White: Yeah. That was sort of a test, when I look back on it, for the studio, and for me as a producer, to get through something like that and have it come out the other end and be pure. It's hard to do, man, work with your wife, or work with your husband. And it broke through.\n\nGQ: You cut records so fast, and then there's the inevitable down time before they come out. What's that like given the pace you like to work at?\n\n Jack White: It's a funny thing: It's almost like I'm waiting for the attention span of the Internet age to catch up with the things we're doing at Third Man. Like the singles that we're putting out very quickly. Everybody's always like, \"You need all this content.\" A band used to need six photos. Now we need 300 photos of your band. We have to have Internet clips, YouTube clips, you gotta get all this content, because people go through it all so fast. You'd think that it would equate to [people] putting records out more often. Create music more often, and people will have a desire for it to come faster. But it's almost not the case. It's almost like people are trained to hype. We've trained ourselves to need hype. If we don't see the poster for the new blockbuster movie 500 times, we don't think it's important. And if our friends aren't all buying the record, then maybe I shouldn't buy it, either, because it's weird. I really get that vibe a lot, starting from when the White Stripes finally were selling tons of records. You'd see the things we were asked to do\u2014or the things that were done, you know, promotional things, whatever\u2014and people are that dumb sometimes where if they don't have an ad in the Best Buy circular, they don't buy that record. It's like, Wow, really? I thought that was a long time ago! No, that's today, and it's always gonna be that way. And that's the\u2014I don't mean to call it dumb, but you get a bad taste in your mouth. Like, Wow, I gotta grab you by the arm and drive you to the movie theater and throw you in and lock the door to make you experience it, you know? [Laughs]\n\nGQ: You're the only person I've ever met that works too fast for the Internet. But a lot of what you're always saying and doing is about refusing to float wherever the stream is going.\n\n Jack White: It's easy to do that, really. If you get something cooking, you just stay with it and keep doing it. That's easy. To really let God in the room and let the natural things that happen when people collaborate and work together occur\u2014that's when you're doing your best. You're producing, you're creating. It's because you relinquish control. It's the producers and creative people, the artists, who say, \"Next month I'm making a country record. And then six months from now I'm going to do this....\" When you look at everything like that, it's like you're playing Candy Land. What good is it? I feel comfortable when I know I didn't plan the Dead Weather, Dead Weather just happened. We had a thing and we had to give it a name. It had already happened before we knew it. Same thing happened to Raconteurs. That feels good to me. I know I can't look back and say, \"Yeah, that was kind of put together by the record label... They were pushing us to do that... I didn't really know those guys.\" We don't have those things to look back on and regret.\n\nGQ: What do you mean when you say \"Let God in the room?\"?\n\n Jack White: It's something I always felt, and I saw Michael Jackson say that once. I thought, Wow, I've been saying that to myself for a long time, and I was glad to hear him say that. The ultimate thing to do is to relinquish all control. I think people get in the mindset that when you are the director of the movie, when you're the producer of the album, you're in total control, and you boss everybody around, and you become a control freak and tell people and nitpick and micromanage. That's not what happens. You really just sort of build a room and you just press record, and you just let people do what they do best. Just let it happen. Anybody can go in there and get on an ego trip and bark orders at people and stuff, but it's so stupid. There's no joy in that. There's no beauty in that. Sometimes you get some funny stories out of it, but you're not going to accomplish much.\n\nFacebookPinterestundefined"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.gq.com/story/jack-white-gq-music-issue>