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11:25 · 1,894 words of transcript · watch on YouTube
- The structural choice behind the 2022 records: instead of balancing heavy riffs against acoustic songs on one album as he usually does, White split the two moods into two separate releases.
▶ 00:00:21
- White has said that writing a whole record of heavy riffs would numb his brain, and Fear of the Dawn is close to exactly that record.
▶ 00:00:40
- At a tight 40 minutes it reads as the experimental edge of Boarding House Reach welded to the stadium rock of Icky Thump.
▶ 00:01:34
- The case for the title is argued against named alternatives, with Josh Homme ruled out on conduct and Dave Grohl on output since 1999, and The Black Keys on never having matched even The White Stripes.
▶ 00:02:19
- The preservationist credential is literal: White sits on the board of the Library of Congress's National Recording Preservation Foundation.
▶ 00:03:40
- Third Man Records grew into a record shop, recording studios, a distribution centre, a photo studio and a novelties lounge, and Blunderbuss was recorded there.
▶ 00:06:10
- For Blunderbuss he cut each song twice, once with an all-male backing band and once with an all-female one, to hear what changed, and pressed the single Freedom at 21 onto a thousand flexi discs attached to helium balloons.
▶ 00:06:31
- He recorded, pressed and released a live version of Lazaretto in under four hours for the world record, and that album holds the record for the most first-week vinyl sales since 1991.
▶ 00:07:14
- The Lazaretto LP itself is the object lesson: tracks at different speeds, secret grooves under the labels, different renditions depending on where the needle lands, and holograms visible while it spins.
▶ 00:07:52
- Boarding House Reach was written alone in a locked Nashville apartment before isolation was a general condition, with Kanye West, A Tribe Called Quest and Nicki Minaj as the guiding influences on its sound design.
▶ 00:08:33