The Dead Weather band members Jack Lawrence, left, Alison Mosshart, Dean Fertita, right, and Jack White, bottom, in Toronto on June 13. (Nathan Denette/Canadian Press)The more digital technology makes recordings into "perfect" performances, the more Jack White admires the live, unpolished experience.
The musician behind the bands the White Stripes, the Raconteurs and now the Dead Weather, recorded the album Horehound in a few brief weeks at his Third Man studio in Nashville.
That includes writing several of the songs and jamming with Dean Fertita of Queens of the Stone Age, Alison Mosshart of the Kills and Jack Lawrence of the Raconteurs, all now part of the Dead Weather.
White told CBC's Q cultural affairs show he wanted the impression of a jam session and deliberately left the creak of his own drum stool in the first song.
"It might have done a disservice to the music to perfect it and make it all clean," White said in an interview aired Monday.
"I think people don't really know how records are made anymore … people don't know that drumbeats are put on a grid. They're put to be perfectly in time.... You have to land exactly on this grid, so the intent is perfection," he said.
More soulful version
White said that kind of perfection breeds a cynicism with the experience of music.
"I wouldn't pick that and I don't think if people knew that was happening on the music that they love, that they would pick that over recording it live and having a more soulful version of the whole thing."
White created Third Man Records this year with the hope of recording a more authentic music experience. He's pleased with what they've achieved with Horehound.
"It's so explosive and forceful and dangerous. I don't think other bands sound like that on record," he said.
Mosshart said the group members didn't even know they had an album until the day before they finished recording.
The Dead Weather is now on a North American tour that featured recent stops in Toronto and Ottawa.
White, who's always seeking ways to challenge himself as an artist, has switched back to drums, which he hadn't played in 15 years. The new lineup features Lawrence on bass and Fertita on guitar.
"If a drummer misses something, everybody notices. If a guitar player misses a note, you don't really notice it. I have that challenge," he said, adding that it's also difficult to sing and play drums at the same time.
He recalled his 2007 tour of Canada, which will soon be reprised in the film The White Stripes Under Great White Northern Lights, a documentary by Emmett Malloy that is to open the Toronto International Film Festival.
That tour with ex-wife Meg White was the ultimate in live experiences, he said. White has fond memories of his date in Iqaluit and Whitehorse, cities not often on concert tours.
"In Whitehorse, we were picked up in a '51 Chevy on the tarmac by the mayor of the town," he said.
"To go to Iqaluit was not a good business move — it doesn't even pay for itself — but that show was incredible. Meeting with Inuit elders — these are things that would never have happened if we hadn't gone up there," he said.
"That's so much more important than to play an arena for the fifth time. That's what you do as a musician, to share with people and to go out of your way to go somewhere you haven't been before, physically and mentally. It's also the most incredible luxury that we can do that."
