(Credits: Raph Pour-Hashemi)
Thu 21 August 2025 20:34, UK
Every songwriter is going to write about what resonates with them before anyone else. Any audience should be secondary when an artist is looking at what they want to express, but that doesn’t mean people like Jack White don’t have some issues when looking at what they’ve done in the past as well.
Because, really, a lot of what The White Stripes did over the course of their career feels like an evolution chart. The whole point behind the group was to see how much could be done with only guitars and drums, and while Jack and Meg were determined to make as much noise as possible and still be one of the baddest bands in the country, there was also a childlike whimsy to their approach as well.
No, Meg’s drumming was not the most complicated thing in the world, but no one was expecting for her to pull out the Keith Moon drum fills or anything like that. She worked so well because of her ability to serve the song better than anyone else, and a lot of the time her drums act as the perfect ramshackle backdrop to whatever Jack was working on.
I mean, think about the kind of records that Jack was putting out at the time and think of them with any other drummer. Tunes like ‘Icky Thump’ and ‘Hotel Yorba’ are both completely different from each other, but if you were to have put someone like Dave Grohl or even a session drummer like Josh Freese on everything, it would not have had that trashy swagger to it that Meg had when she started demolishing her kit.
But for Jack, some of the hardest pieces of his discography are the moments when he would get too introspective. A lot of the initial appeal of The Stripes was about having fun, but when Jack got sentimental and started to play a bit more acoustic guitar, you were either going to get something cute or a song that would rip the heart out of your chest. And for the frontman, a song like ‘A Boy’s Best Friend Is His Mother’ was that one step that he probably wouldn’t have taken in hindsight.
De Stijl was already a much rawer album than what many rock fans were used to, but Jack figured that the song was too melancholic for what they should have been going for, saying, “Maybe I took it too far with ‘A Boy’s Best Friend Is His Mother’. That one is almost too sad, too quiet, too slow. That was more emotional in ways that I couldn’t really figure out before. With our first album I’d have been too awkward to put in any emotional music but when we were at home recording ourselves I could do it for the first time.”
But that’s half the reason why it works so well. A lot of Jack’s best moments come from when he gets sentimental, and considering the raw production behind everything, this almost deserves a place next to some of the more raw performances that John Lennon started doing around the time that he left The Beatles, albeit this time with a much more intense vocal behind it.
It may have been too much too soon for Jack at the time, but the fact that he was able to bear this part of his soul is why people get choked up watching the band’s last performance on Conan or see him on the verge of tears playing acoustic versions of a song like ‘You’ve Got Her In Your Pocket’. They don’t get any easier to play over time, but that’s why people call it a job half the time.
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