Artist of the Year: Jack White

Dear reader, let me dandle you on my knee and tell you about some rock ‘n’ roll folklore—a kind of myth yanked from the doldrums of a two-year absence and dressed up into a 12-inch, white label vinyl pressing, with “NO NAME” written in blue at the top, being slipped into the gift bags of none-the-wiser customers of Third Man Records gift shops in Nashville, Detroit and London. Not even the Third Man employees knew a lick about the LP, their only direction to include it with every sale, free of charge with no questions asked. It didn’t take long for the keen ears to decode the mystery and surmise that it was Jack White’s sixth solo album, and his first release of new material after releasing both Fear of the Dawn and Entering Heaven Alive within six months of each other two years prior. Within days, copies were listed on eBay at $1,000 a pop like it was a copy of Jimi Hendrix and Traffic’s Jams Tape or something. It was guerrilla marketing at its finest, a ripe, high-octane, low-risk middle-finger to the very same press rollouts he spent all of 2022 doing.

Third Man Records is an institution, built from scratch by White, his lifelong friend and promoter Ben Swank and nephew Ben Blackwell in 2009, five years after White trademarked the name and eight years after he registered the label. Nowadays, it houses bands like Snõõper, Hotline TNT, Sheer Mag and Be Your Own Pet—acts that put a clear emphasis on subverting all previous iterations of guitar music through their own incantations of rock ‘n’ roll bloodletting. In White’s words, Third Man is a “beautiful hive of artists coming up with interesting ideas”—a hotbed outlier in the confusing lexicon of music that’s wrestling with the muscle of the world-wide-web’s destructive oppression. “Whenever a good idea comes out, you have to negotiate it through the minefield of how it will be either dismantled or applauded or engaged with, because of the existence of the internet, social media and all that,” he tells me, days before his tour resumes in Oklahoma. “Giving away a free album, we had to spend a lot of time thinking about this and that. ‘What if this happens in the next hour?’ ‘What happens if it gets sold on eBay?’ You have to have a lot of conversations where, pre-internet, an idea like that would have been… We could have probably done it for days, giving away a record, without anybody even noticing. Maybe everybody in Nashville has it, but so what? That’s a cool challenge. It gives us reasons to figure out what means what in pop culture and why it means something.”

Like Third Man, Jack White is an institution, too. He’s a local hero who grew up in a city just a stone’s throw from Lake Erie. When he was still Jack Gillis, he was an altar boy at the Archdiocese of Detroit, learned how to play drums as a first grader, was a fan of classical music until he discovered Led Zeppelin and, as a brace-faced teenager, started listening to Blind Willie McTell and Flat Duo Jets. At one point, White was going to become a priest but chose public school instead, because he wouldn’t have been allowed to bring his amplifier with him to seminary school. At 15, he was an upholstery apprentice under Brian Muldoon, who, after showing White punk rock, started a band with him called the Upholsterers. At 18, Jack met a 19-year-old Meg White at Memphis Smoke, where she worked, and they courted each other to record shops all around southeastern Michigan together. After getting married and taking Meg’s last name, White started Third Man Upholstery with a yellow and black color scheme and a “Your Furniture’s Not Dead” slogan. He was a weird businessman, writing bills in crayon and putting poetry inside the furniture he worked on.

The White Stripes were a damn good band—probably the best of their generation, outshining the, as their fellow Detroiter Lester Bangs would have probably put it, “whiteheap bigdealsowhat” that surrounded them. Their self-titled debut was fine, but the turn of the millennium treated them well. The Meet Me in the Bathroom era of rock music that overcame New York City after 9/11 was but a ghost in the wake of what Jack and Meg White were pulling off in the attic of their Detroit home. Too, the triplicate of De Stijl, White Blood Cells and Elephant arrived and cut through the noise of rock ‘n’ roll’s moronic, insipid cosplay—trust fund kids in leather jackets, a fad the powers that be deemed a “movement” and now every modern-day NYC band featuring a guitar player has to atone for the sins of. Had Jack and Meg not called it quits square in the middle of their prime, we’d probably still be tailing their influence like we do the Strokes. They were a counterculture to Auto-Tune and overproduction, led by Jack’s eye for minimalism, that sparked venerated progeny like Franz Ferdinand, Jay Reatard and Benjamin Booker. The duo took blues archetypes and translated them into White Stripes archetypes, and they even put out one of their best songs, “Icky Thump,” at the dawn of their own career’s death rattle. Few names sewn into the fabric of rock music’s DNA have coded their curtain calls so strongly.

Go to a football game in the United States and you’ll hear “Seven Nation Army” at least once, when a bunch of drunk men in colors of allegiance chant the melody like they’re summoning a beast from the netherworld. A lot of rock legends arrive to us from some foreign place—the Freddie Mercurys, Iggy Pops and Bob Dylans of this lifetime and the last gave music alien makeovers of protest and rebellion, all of which were distant, flamboyant strains of rock ‘n’ roll’s straight-laced, teeny-bopper ancestry. But Jack White fell from the tendrils of Mississippi Delta blues and freak-jazz, vaulting the sounds of Trout Mask Replica and Son House into the 21st century’s musical vocabulary with the same kind of DIY punk edge that oscillated around him in late-‘90s Detroit. I found White’s music when I heard him singing “And when I wake tomorrow, I’ll bet that you and I will walk together again” at the dawn of Napoleon Dynamite. Kids at my school wore “Vote For Pedro” ringer tees; I recited “Hotel Yorba” like it was a sacred hymnal instead.

Boarding House Reach found critical affection in 2018 (and it’s still one of my favorite records of that year), but Fear of the Dawn and Entering Heaven Alive were both largely dismissed four years later. For an artist like Jack White, his fourth and fifth studio albums were good, contrasting challenges for even his longtime fans—eccentric, proggy and zagging, strange experiments that abstracted his typical traditionalism (Fear of the Dawn) and folky, songwriter passages that called to mind the softer White Stripes moments, like “We’re Going to Be Friends” and “White Moon” (Entering Heaven Alive). “Even the Beatles got flack for putting out a double album with The White Album,” White says. “How in the hell can anybody complain about that record? Even if it’s The White Album, that’s a lot of information you’re throwing at people. People can binge-watch Netflix for eight hours at home on a Saturday. They’re not going to go to a movie theater and watch an eight-hour film. Why? What’s the difference? Those are the show-business things that you grapple with and you want to figure out. My way of breaking that up a little bit was to split it into two records.”

Blue New Beginnings

The origins of Fear of the Dawn and Entering Heaven Alive were fascinating—be it a fasting diet that galvanized a whirlwind writing spell in Kalamazoo, or songwriting sessions in Nashville that sprang into two separate records because one tracklist just couldn’t possibly hold all of the sonic juxtapositions properly. But No Name wasn’t made on purpose, or from scratch with a glint of redecoration. White was writing simplified songs, but not “simplified” in the way he and Meg tried to create angular, De Stijl-style musical simplifications of rock ‘n’ roll. White admits to me (and for the first time to anyone) that Fear of the Dawn and Entering Heaven Alive were concept records about the COVID-19 pandemic and lockdown, especially the former. “But I didn’t say that to anybody,” he continues. “I didn’t want to sell it like that to people, but I needed to do that at that time. Obviously millions of other people needed to do that, too. While all the artists were trapped in houses and everybody recorded and wrote the Great American Novel and made the Great American Script and Great American Album while that was happening, and in other countries, too. I felt very good about those records. They fulfilled a spot in my brain. I needed to procure it out of myself; it was bursting to come out.”

White continues, “And all those felt really great at the moment to do but, we’re at a time right now where even making a rock ‘n’ roll record is like making a jazz record. It’s a wonder. ‘Are people down with this or not?’ My teenage children are into a lot of new rock ‘n’ roll and punk music, so it’s alive and well in a lot of places. And a lot of people are putting out [music] on SoundCloud, TikTok, Bandcamp, whatever the hell it is this week, and I’m getting a punk vibe from a lot of this stuff, so that feels really great. Maybe [No Name] is connecting with people because they are kind of raw like that.”

No Name was warm-up music for White’s hands, chord changes he played but felt resistant to record, because the playing sounded so banal. “But I was forcing myself, like ‘No, no, record it. Do it!’” he gestures. When the album came out, it was heralded as a “return to form” by many of White’s previous, Fear of the Dawn-fatigued detractors. “That’s How I’m Feeling,” “Archbishop Harold Holmes” and “Old Scratch Blues” became markings of bombast on-par with anything he’s made in the last 15, 20 years. It’s a record that, in my mind, sounds exactly like what I’d thought White would have made upon the disintegration of the White Stripes 14 years ago. But No Name can’t resurrect the chemistry of White Blood Cells or the oneness of Elephant, nor should it try to. Instead, it’s Jack White trying to get to a simplistic place without repeating himself. “When time goes on, we don’t want to repeat ourselves and we don’t want to rewind the tape,” he says. “We want to move forward as artists. Of course, everybody wants Robert Plant to reform Led Zeppelin with Jimmy Page. He doesn’t want to do that, and good for him. I’m proud of him, that he wants to push forward and go in other directions. Show-biz is a wild minefield for ideas like that. If people like me only for one thing—the Dead Weather, or the Raconteurs, or the White Stripes—they would be as disappointed as somebody who only likes the Velvet Underground going to see Lou Reed in the ‘90s. If you come in with those notions, or if you go see Bob Dylan now and expect him to play his ‘60s hits, you’re going to end up disappointed.”

No Name is, in White’s eyes, a side-effect of him writing, singing and playing from the gut “without thinking about it.” It’s a nuts-and-bolts, riffy drama disguised as some kind of rock revival, and the fun part for White is figuring out whether or not to finish the songs and whether or not “other people are getting something out of it.” “It’s not a selfish act,” he declares. “It’s not like, ‘I’m going to do this for myself, I won’t give a damn what people like.’ I never do that. I always incorporate, for the most part, ‘Does anyone want to share this?’ That’s what we’re doing, we’re going on stage and we’re putting records on shelves to share with other people.”

But White is not allergic to his past. He still plays “Ball and Biscuit,” “Hello Operator,” “Seven Nation Army” and “Fell in Love With a Girl” at his shows. He dusts off Raconteur songs like “Broken Boy Soldier” and “Steady, As She Goes,” or a Dead Weather joint like “I Cut Like a Buffalo,” too. He’s a historian of music—an anthropologist, one may argue. From a preservation perspective, the act of building out a legacy that looks forward without abandoning the fruits of yore is not a challenge or an experiment—it’s a part of the deal, a part of answering to the will of the people who’ve bought stock in your art without sacrificing an inch of it. “It comes out in my mind when we play a song that is something I wrote 20, 25 years ago,” White says. “I’ll say to myself, ‘Why are you doing it, Jack? What’s your point? Is this a nostalgia moment? Are you rewriting the song? Are you interpreting it for how you feel right now? Are you doing anybody any favors? Are you pandering? Do you give a shit about pandering?’ I think that keeps me caring about artistic movements, for the benefit of people trying to share with it—rather than ‘No, I’m doing what I want, I don’t give a damn if you like it or not. Bye!’ I’ve never been that guy.”

“Honest to God,” he continues, “if people just kept saying, ‘You know what, Jack, we like the Raconteurs. Could you just play those songs? Thanks,’ I would probably just do that at some point—because that’s the lot in life, that’d you be lucky to have such a ‘problem.’ There’s guys who are Las Vegas lounge singers. It could be a lot worse! That’s a pretty cool gig.”

Back to Basics

After making Fear of the Dawn and Entering Heaven Alive back-to-back, White did everything—sold-out arena gigs, big-budget music videos, photoshoots, magazine covers. When No Name came unexpectedly and without precurse, White declined to do any press or a big tour. Instead, he ditched the blue hair dye and began playing shows around the United States at venues with caps lower than 1,500 (like Bogart’s in Cincinnati, the Metro in Chicago and the Mohawk in Austin). Playing small rooms keeps the small-time part of White’s stardom alive—tending to the embers of the very same hunger and survival that raged within him when he and Meg first took the stage at the now-demolished Gold Dollar bar in the Cass Corridor of Detroit in 1997. He likens the tour to “if you were a painter and you had an art show at a gallery in New York that is a 2,000-square-foot room that has about 200, 300 people in it—people who are interested in loving art.” “You get to have discussions with them and talk, and you get real feedback and you feel the electricity of that,” he explains. “Imagine doing that in a Walmart-sized box store that’s completely empty and you’re in one corner with your paintings of that gigantic, empty box store. There’s just something about the environment that dictates the vibe of how everybody is interacting and reacting. Even in the small places, the electricity is already 1,000 times better.”

But every time you solve something, a new problem arises. For White, it was walking on stage at certain shows and being met with a vibe of hierarchy within the audiences—of “I got tickets and you didn’t.” And that ego rarely ever translated into ovation. “There’s always a funny thing in show-biz,” he says, “the people in the front rows don’t really make that much noise. They’ve been in line for eight hours, they’re the super fans. They waited for you all day. They were the first to buy tickets, and they’ve been standing there. They don’t really go all crazy. They’re like, ‘You know how much we love, don’t you see what we did?’ That’s good and bad, right? It’s like, ‘Oh, my God, thank you. The dedication to that on their level of the art is outstanding but, at the same time, it’s funny that the people in the back are making more noise and pushing me to go harder.”

Bringing the gang-vocal parables and chugging, skyrocketing six-string massacres of No Name to drop-dead silent arenas didn’t seem all that appealing to a contrarian like White or his management either, nor did the idea of playing the same 20 songs for two months just for a paycheck. Instead, he orchestrated singalongs, on-stage audibles and jam interstices. “There’s a lot of people that go out and do the same show every night,” he continues. “They play the tracks and they don’t give a shit if people clap or don’t. Okay, that’s one way of doing it, and I applaud that, too. To me, I have no idea what we’re going to play tonight. I have no idea what the crowd’s going to be like. I have never played this club, there’s only going to be 300 people there. This is a bad business move and we’re losing money doing it. I love all that. That’s inspiring to me.”

Signified by his inclusion of Zoomer language like “no cap” and “cop to that” on No Name, it’s clear that White is not as resistant to trends as his old-school procedures and old interviews might have once suggested. While it’s not as popular to, as he puts it, have a “Charlie Patton record on your Victrola” as it was when blues music was as vital to some as water, food and air in parts of the world for a minutiae of time, White remains tuned into the interests of everyone around him, whether they are total strangers or artists making a record at Third Man. “You can get in an Uber now and they’re playing electronic music. Say you’re in a car and someone’s driving you from the airport, and they say, ‘Well, what kind of music do you listen to?’ I always say, ‘Whatever you listen to,’” he says. “I want to hear what that person listens to on their way to work. It doesn’t matter if I dislike it or like it or I find it interesting. Sometimes, I’ll even say, ‘So why do you like this music?’ It’s not a judgmental thing, it’s not a snobby thing. I’m very curious and, even if it’s music that I like as well, people always give you a different answer.”

White recalls a time when T Bone Burnett told him that “music started to not be good when record companies started to try making music for people who don’t like music.” It’s a funny thing to say, but it’s not entirely inaccurate. As White frames it, you were an audiophile if you liked jazz in the 1950s, because you could quote it like scripture. “You knew what instrument was making what sound and what musician was playing on what track,” he says. “If you’re a music lover now, you might not even know what the sound is that you like that you’re listening to. What created that sound? Does that matter or not matter? Sometimes, to me, it doesn’t matter. Someone asked Francis Ford Coppola. ‘When you watch movies, do you think about how they’re made?’ He goes, ‘No, I absolutely don’t want to know how they were made. I don’t want to think about it.’ I feel the same. If someone says, ‘Do you like this record or do you not?,’ I’ll say ‘I heard them working. I heard them turn on the compressor. I heard them turn the reverb on.’ That’s a turn-off to me, but it might not be a turn off to other people.”

If you look at the musical zeitgeist of 2024, the pop world couldn’t be further away from blues and garage rock. That’s what the mainstream wants to sell you, at least. It tells you that there’s no money in a low-cap venue tour in a still-recovering, post-COVID American gigging circuit. But Grammy-winning rock bands and revered, million-follower pop stars are booking big venues and not filling seats (some of them are even cancelling shows because of low sales). The music industry is wounded right now, but White’s No Name Tour is a small gesture of faith—an intimate kind of downsizing that leads to audiences being one big body awash with momentum. But everything’s built on top of itself; the threads aren’t as short as cultural memory would have everyone believe. I’m not saying that we’re close to another era where a rock act (of the pop kind or broader) can have six #1 hits in one year like the Beatles did in 1964, but “out of fashion” and “out of style” are two very different concepts. In the hands of Jack White, there’s hope to be felt in the future of rock ‘n’ roll.

When No Name hit DSPs in late July, listeners immediately gravitated to a song like “Archbishop Harold Holmes,” and for good reason—as White delivers a rapping sermon (“You got family troubles, man trouble, woman trouble, no light through the rubble?”) over thundering, shock-rock style clobberings of guitar playing. It’s gratuitous and fucking bastardly in a genius kind of way—like a mad scientist cooking up riffs and Frankensteining them into this authoritative storm of sharp, stabbing blues punk intuition that causes the amp stacks to tumble down like the very Walls of Jericho White is singing about.

On the first leg of his No Name Tour (which will carry over into 2025), he was playing “Archbishop Harold Holmes” mid-set, during the encore and, on some nights, not at all. No setlist was the same, as he and the band (drummer Patrick Keeler, bassist Dominic Davis and keyboardist Bobby Emmett) were working out the new material together in real time. Emmett and Keller had never played with White solo prior to this year. “They would say, ‘Oh, I missed that spot,’ or ‘I apologize for missing a chorus,’ and I’m telling them, from the heart, ‘I don’t care. You are never going to upset me with that, because those are all just opportunities for me,’” White recalls. “If the microphone cuts out, if my guitar cuts out, that doesn’t make me upset or mad. It’s an instant challenge. ‘Oh, cool. Thank you. Now where are we going? What are we going to do now? We gotta figure this out.’ I love that that’s alive and well.”

White confides a fantasy: “It would be nice to go to South America or Malaysia and play a bunch of small clubs with a disguise on and just work these songs up to a different level and then come out and play in America and Europe, so that we just jump to that next level before people even hear it for the first time.” Such a dream comes from a tour he did years ago where he and his backing band had to spend an extra week “memorizing moments, memorizing changes and memorizing to hit this trigger and hit this beat or hit this chord correctly.” “I thought, ‘You know, now that I think about it, this is not really what I wanted it to be like,’” White says. “I found myself in a zone I didn’t really like, which was almost the vibe of what people do when they play along with tracks on tour. I don’t want to be in that spot so much. If I was the person playing to tracks every night and the ‘cue the lasers’ on the chorus, or playing a residency, I think I might fucking just throw up. I can’t imagine being in that kind of banality. I don’t judge people that are in that spot, but I have to figure out ways, all the time, to trick myself into making the music alive.”

Walking It Off

White uses the phrase “music is sacred” a lot. He lives and breathes the vocation of making music. His office is stationed in a record plant in Nashville; he’s surrounded, constantly, by the production of music in every form. And on top of that, he’s a rock and blues preservationist. I mean, he produced a Neil Young record that was completely recorded in a fucking refurbished 1947 Voice-o-Graph recording booth! So what does the man who is always resetting and beginning again with every project get out of making an album like No Name? When art and business quit colliding into each other, what’s left to cherish? “You learn things every time you throw yourself into a room or throw yourself into an environment, about what you like and what you don’t,” he says. “It’s great right now, to play in these small rooms. It’s so electric and energetic. I can’t go into the bar and just talk to people after the show like I did when I was 19. It becomes a session of taking a bunch of selfies. That’s a problem, so you figure out a way around that. I feel bad that not everybody in that town who wants to go share in that can’t get a ticket. That sucks, but what are you going to do? You learn, good and bad, from every moment.”

“You might put out a big ta-da! record and play arenas and sell it out everywhere, and you might walk away saying, ‘Yeah, well, sure, okay,’ but so do a bunch of boy bands who are making entertainment that may just fizzle into the ether,” he continues. “I don’t know. I love pop music, but at this moment in my life right now, I think it’s interesting to say to myself, ‘I’m going to play the first thing that comes out of my hands and my gut.’ Even so many times while recording this record, I was like, ‘Oh, God, that’s so boring. That’s not a challenge to me at all. That’s two chords that I’ve played a million times in my life. It’s not that interesting to me. It’s not triggering me in a certain way.’ But it’s a reverse constriction I’m putting on myself.” White never wanted to be a guitar player. He preferred the drums and piano, but his playing got no response. “But, when I played guitar, everyone was all ears, for some reason,” he admits. “I’m like, ‘Oh, okay, if that’s what you want me to do.’ If I’m a painter and I love painting, but people really love my sculptures and buy my sculptures, I guess I’m going to be a sculptor. I just have to go in the zone where it makes sense and you can stay alive and keep the train running and also be able to do what you need to do to be creative. And these are high-class problems to have.”

I listened to Lazaretto when it came out and it made me deeply sad. I was 16 then, hearing modern rock’s lead architect sing about plague hospitals, cutting out his tongue and the disillusion of safety in the house of a flawed and fabled god. How could anybody make art out of that, out of a suffering so sideways it turns you into the very creature you’re eulogized? Burned in effigy, Lazaretto was—of the self, of humanity, of the temporary ground, if you will. It felt incomprehensible, improbable even, to exist in a world like that one. But then I listened to No Name, and it made me deeply sad, too, as I began hearing the last four years of apathy broadcast in these sludgy, waspish dirges of tough-to-stomach performance. “It’s an assassination of the already dead, #1 with a bullet but the reputation of a rotten apple is too loud to hear now” practically balls itself into a fist of American-made malaise.

And, considering how a line like “the world is worse than when we found it” has already become more vicious and true just a few months after No Name came out, it supports the idea that White’s songwriting has always lingered in the same disgust and destruction that the world’s morality collapses into. He was singing about immigration on “Icky Thump” years before Donald Trump made it part of his 2016 campaign’s bottom line. “Who’s usin’ who? What should we do? Well, you can’t be a pimp and a prostitute, too” might take on a new context 10 years from now. Six years before hospitals became overcrowded and 7 million people died from COVID-19, he sang of being quarantined on the Isle of Man and “lighting fires with the cash of the masses.”

“Things pop in your head and you wonder how much you want to care about them,” White says. “If you’re raised Pentecostal and you abandon it and rebel against it, it doesn’t matter—the rest of your life, those thoughts pop into your head.” His Catholic upbringing corroborates that, and he’s spent most of his adult life reflecting on not just what’s important, but what’s truthful and what life’s end-game should be and where we might be going after that. “Those things are ingrained in your body, so you have to debate them all the time,” he continues. “I’ve gotten really into science my whole adult life and, the more you dig into that, the more and more certain things that are spiritual based start to sound and seem ridiculous. We obviously didn’t come from nothing; even the scientists have to grapple with not knowing everything.”

Rock ‘n’ roll is all about contradictions and imperfections, and White has been able to convey hope and grace in his music without dulling the edges of reality. On No Name, he finds clarity while using imagery of God to make sense of broken institutions and fractured humanity without preaching. It’s a rarely-found line in songwriting, best evoked in “Bless Yourself” when he sings about people needing “God on command, God on demand,” or when he professes that “both Adam and Eve know they’re naked, so we all have something to fear now” on “Archbishop Harold Holmes.” But there is love present too, personified in lines like “Hate is trying to take someone else’s love for yourself, but I’m here to tell you that love is trying to help someone else.” It’s not an “all you need is love” kind of decree, but a pursuit of a fleeting glow in the face of hemorrhaging dystopia.

“I think I saw an interview once with Paul McCartney, where he was saying how happy he is that, at the end of the day, the messages from the Beatles were about love and understanding and peace—that he can sleep well at night knowing that they weren’t putting negativity out in the world,” White says. “And that’s a great thing. They did a great thing for pop culture, society and humanity. How much does it work? It’s a subconscious thing, maybe. On a big level, did everyone end war and give peace a chance? No, that didn’t happen immediately, and it may be a long time before that does happen. But when it finally does happen, those songs will resonate even bigger—to realize that at least we were trying.”

Before the Beatles, no one was saying that the Frank Sinatras and the Benny Goodmans of the world were making music that could, in the right hands at the right time, “save the world.” Music was entertainment then. It was romantic and it certainly wasn’t about changing the world. The idea of a singer-songwriter with a message wasn’t innovative, it was non-existent. It’s that history, slowly burning as it may be, that piques White’s own fascination with storytelling. “That’s something that’s interesting to grapple with in the day and age that I’m working in,” he says. “How uncomfortable I’ve always been in it, no matter where it is, no matter what part of the world it is—the smallest moments where I find comfort are almost shocking to me. And I envy those who ‘have fun’ all day long. But I don’t think I would have chosen that. I wouldn’t have been an insurance salesman, or something, and just be on vacation all the time. I chose to embrace this uncomfortableness and see what I could get out of it, see the fulfillingness in the long game on a daily basis, it’s not as fun but there’s a fulfillment to pushing your brain into places where it doesn’t really belong to see what you’re capable of.”

That mentality lingered in the air in 2020 when White was a last-minute fill-in for Morgan Wallen on Saturday Night Live, after the country performer broke the show’s COVID-19 protocol. “From the moment that Lorne Michaels called on a Wednesday afternoon and asked if I would be okay with coming in, I was so inspired,” White says. “It felt like if someone handed you a guitar and told you to go up and kill some time before Martin Luther King gave his speech, or before they’re about to launch Apollo 11 and they need somebody to introduce the astronauts.” Just after midnight, he took the stage with Daru Jones, Dominic Davis, and his fuzzing blue Fender Telecaster to perform a medley of “Ball and Biscuit,” his Beyoncé collaboration “Don’t Hurt Yourself” and Blind Willie Johnson’s “Jesus is Coming Soon.” It was a mad orchestration; you could feel Jones’s drumming like a migraine in the middle of your brow. And the interpolation of “Jesus is Coming Soon” was an urgent one, as White sang “Great disease was mighty and the people were sick everywhere, it was an epidemic, it floated through the air” while the nationwide death toll climbed into the millions.

Then, he returned 30 minutes later to play the equally labyrinthine, persistent, calamitous crescendo “Lazaretto” with a guitar gifted to him by the then-recently-passed Eddie Van Halen. White re-measured the standard for an SNL performance, done with the same kind of breakneck intensity on No Name he siphoned from the elemental gifts he remains humble about having in the first place. “It felt so important, even though, in a bigger sense, it was just another slot on another late night show in America for a musical group,” he says. “But things were so different at that moment. It felt like it had 10x more importance. I like that, whatever that is in my brain, if I can pull something off. I think there’s a part of me—if there’s any talent in there—that’s in the neighborhood of a clutch hitter in baseball. Kirk Gibson’s not in the Hall of Fame, but we know his home runs. My talent on the guitar, if I have any, is probably in that department.”

Talent is an impulsive marvel on No Name, Jack White’s best Jack White album yet. If we’re ranking the work he’s done since 1999, it’s better than some (but not all) White Stripes LPs, too. It’s definitely stronger than those three Raconteurs albums or those three Dead Weather releases. But that kind of talk is circumstantial and arbitrary. Blunderbuss was good, and “Sixteen Saltines” still thrashes in splendor 12 years later, while Lazaretto positions that ratcheted-up, shocking garage-blues next to Appalachian folk, country squalls, bit-crushed electronica and anachronistic, classical textures that call to mind spaghetti western scores and droning, experimental basement music.

No Name skips past all that, arriving like an heirloom in White’s own sonic lineage—summoning the gassed-up vibrations of no-frills, no-nonsense, rocking-and-rolling bogs that turned the White Stripes into the kind of the band we all loved so deeply that, when Jack and Meg performed “White Moon” together on a backstage piano near the end of Under Great White Northern Lights, we cried with them. So let me quote the late Lester Bangs once more: “Fuck all them old dudes wearing their hip tastes on their sleeves: Get this and play it loud and be the first on your block to become a public nuisance.”

Matt Mitchell is Paste’s music editor, reporting from their home in Northeast Ohio.