Jack White will be bringing the blues (or curing them, perhaps) during a performance at Andrew J Brady Music Center on April 13.
Jack White is one of the most curious cultural figures of the last 20 years, a vampiric Blues-man savant with old-fashioned notions about music and modes of living. The Detroit native has also been one of the busiest — initially with The White Stripes, the duo he created with former wife/drummer Meg White, and the last decade-plus with a variety of music-related projects both in the spotlight and out.
White’s fourth solo album, Fear of the Dawn, is set for an April 8 release on his own Third Man Records. A second album of new material, Entering Heaven Alive, hits in July. In a January 2022 interview with Los Angeles radio station ALT 98.7, White said the former record features “hard hitting” Rock & Roll, while the latter is “very mellow — almost sort of like a Sunday morning album to me.”
The sonic dichotomy wasn’t necessarily intentional.
“I usually just write and record, and then eventually it starts to tell me what it is,” he said. “I usually don’t say, ‘This is the kind of record I’m going to make.’ I didn’t in this case either. I just kept writing and recording as it was happening, with no real urgency to it, because of the lockdown. I was like, ‘Well, who knows if we’re going to be playing shows or when a good time for another record to come out would be anyway?’”
Three of Fear of the Dawn’s 12 songs have dropped thus far, the most intriguing of which is “Hi-De-Ho.” It opens with White’s trademark guitar run through some sort of distortion/reverb pedal, which yields a ghostly, dirge-like feel that wouldn’t be out of place as the score to an Italian horror movie. A voice that might or might not be White’s then enters singing operatically in a foreign language before Q-Tip — yes, of Hip Hop masters A Tribe Called Quest — enters, his rapid-fire delivery waxing poetic about Cab Calloway, the iconic Jazz man who is the originator of the “hi-de-ho” phrase in his 1931 song “Minnie the Moocher.” The jagged, high-stepping tune concludes with an unexpectedly tone-altering keyboard outro, yet another eccentric turn in White’s evolving musical journey.
Doors open at 6:30 p.m. Tickets start at $85. More info: bradymusiccenter.com.
Listen to "Hi-De-Ho" below:
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