Earlier this week, I had the fortune of checking out an appearance from Jack White in Los Angeles radio station KROQ’s HD Radio Sound Space, an invite-only gig that included both a performance and an interview. For the set, White and his five-piece band ripped through a handful of Boarding House Reach tunes as well as a couple older cuts, including a massive “Steady, As She Goes.” But maybe the most revealing moment of the afternoon came during the interview.
Responding to a question about whether he ever thought The White Stripes would get out of their club phase, White took the question to an unexpected place when describing their success:
“I think it was really Meg. Her appeal and what she brought to the band was this amazing minimalism that broke things down, much like many of the artists in the cubist movement or things like that, the De Stjil movement in the ’20s. What she was bringing to me was reeling me in. I would write a song, she would reel it in, and it would become minimalistic and very much more powerful. It was more powerful than if we had three guitar players in the band, and that’s all due to her and the beauty that she brought to the music.”
The statement follows a recent interview where White took a really different approach to discussing Meg, when he referred to The White Stripes as practically a solo project. Those comments certainly got their share of heat, and might have caused White to reexamine Meg’s place in his own history. Check out the full interview up top, with this section starting around the 9:00 minute mark.
