“You need to know why you’re doing it” was the insight Jack White offered in a recent interview with KCRW when asked about his philosophy and attitude toward recording. After hearing his third solo album, Boarding House Reach, listeners may take his advice and ask White “Why did you do it? Why did you bring in jazz, funk, rock, blues, spoken word, hip hop, and country on the same album? Oh, and classical, I almost forgot classical.”
On first listen, Boarding House Reach may seem like a disaster of incongruity, an unsightly container bulging with passionate but undisciplined experimentation.
Then again, in 2014, a funky, half-rapped-over track called “Lazaretto,” with stops, starts, retro guitar riffs, a slamming fiddle solo, and lyrics about a maritime quarantine station, may have sounded like a recipe for a creative dead end before the aforementioned song—the title track from White’s sophomore solo release—won a Grammy for best rock performance.
Many of White’s fans had been wondering if he would finally circle back to his garage-y, blues-rock White Stripes roots on his third solo album to save rock and roll, a genre increasingly marginalized in this era of dance-pop and electronic alt-everything. Instead, when creating Boarding House Reach, White, a multi-instrumentalist, producer, label founder, vinyl pressing studio owner, and history nerd, felt no need to reenter the safe womb of rock and decided to ramp up the cross-pollination of genres. He especially tapped electronic and hip hop-influenced elements to take his art to a new place. Perhaps in twenty years, it will be apparent that such a bold, borderline insane act will have in fact helped to save rock and roll.
But for now, we can only observe how a juicy funk beat, part acoustic and part electronic, drives a stoner jam in “Corporation” that supports White’s rap-preaching, in which he threatens to “Buy up all the empty lots / And make one giant farm / Who’s with me?” And how the groaning video game sound effects surfing atop classic rock guitar and jazz piano in “Hypermisophoniac,” White’s reflection on people afflicted with extreme sound sensitivity evokes a curious mental image of all the gadgets in White’s house that have been eavesdropping on him, including the kids’ toys, getting together and demanding to co-write a song with him (and White obliging, of course).
The electronic treatments shape the face of every track. But even in their most prominent and ominous manifestations they end up partnered with and tempered by human elements. The yin of the alien overlord synthesizers in the opening track, “Connected by Love,” finds itself balanced by the yang of the McCrary Sisters’ soulful backing vocals and White’s own powerful crooning, infused with a beckoning urgency that could wake the dead to full attention. White’s love of vintage electronic equipment seems to have led him to borrowing Hal 9000’s dimmer, more poorly circuited cousin to narrate the creeped-out introduction of “Everything You’ve Ever Learned,” the album’s most bizarre offering, which transmogrifies into a conga-fueled psychedelic groove.
White’s approach in the studio also contributed to the album’s warmth and organic depth despite the layers of electronics. White began with live musicians, such as drummer Louis Cato (Beyonce, John Legend, and Q-Tip) and keyboardists DJ Harrison and Neal Evans, whose living, breathing recordings White shaped to simulate samples, instead of the other way around.
As hip hop and electronic music are having their moments, White has taken the approach David Bowie had taken many times: inhaling the breezes of now-ness and exhaling his own fresh, unpredictable response to it. Shot through the prism of White’s blues-rock melodies and tube amp gear, Boarding House Reach still sounds like a Jack White album. And there are carry-overs that reveal continuity. In addition to new blood referred to him by Q-Tip, he worked with several of the musicians from his previous two solo albums, including drummer Carla Azar and fiddle player Fats Kaplin. The album’s deliciously fuzzy rocker “Over and Over and Over” recalls the energy of the White Stripes because he wrote it when the duo was still together, but the song was never used until now.
The breadth of styles covered in the album’s thirteen tracks, however, will most likely lead to frequent brow furrowing, as when his Daft Punk-ish “Get in the Mindshaft,” a song about the creative process, is directly followed by a drown-in-your-sorrows country waltz.
Such transitions seem to be the intent. Just as the cover art depicts an androgynous face that dispenses with gender categories, White’s jumble of styles dispenses with genre categories, creating a bustling, intermingling, and often confounding microcosm of American music. And that may be the answer to the question of why.
White also refuses to allow himself to be pinned down to other societal categories. While White, in his lyrics, describes a dreamer as “Sisyphean” and one of his characters compares paintings to that of Caravaggio—not household knowledge unless you’re a liberal arts major—his entwining of so many musical tastes may especially irk the economic class-conscious “I like everything except rap and country” crowd. Both mentioned genres, for too long associated with the poor and uneducated, coexist on Boarding House Reach, offering a refreshing disdain for class and race divisions. Even listeners ignoring class issues will find it difficult to deny White’s talent in choosing words such as Sisyphean and Caravaggio that possess natural rhythms ideal for rapping, on par with the word “motherfucker.”
With the many starts, stops, and change-ups that trigger momentary losses of momentum, albeit the effect lessening over multiple listens, Boarding House Reach is Jack White’s most challenging record to date. During the writing, planning, and recording processes, White had pushed himself into what he referred to in a Rolling Stone interview as “uncomfortable situations” in order to score the rewards of encountering new musical territory, and he dares the listener to do the same.