Jack White nabbed stints in eight different bands in his hometown of Detroit before he hit it big with The White Stripes. Then came The Raconteurs and The Dead Weather, all before finally deciding to strike out solo with 2012’s crowd-pleasing Blunderbuss.
Yet, ten years later, White has only now decided to embark upon a full-scale concert tour of Asia, one of the last legs on his ambitious Supply Chain Issues trek. He’s set to make his long-awaited Singapore debut on 14 November at the Capitol Theatre.
White makes no pretense for this apparent oversight, but who can blame him? Despite calling the curtain on his main band in 2011 – with his other musical projects either on hiatus or occasionally active since – he has never been busier.
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This year, he released two albums conceptualized and written over the initial period of the pandemic: Fear of the Dawn, wily and charged with rock eccentricities, and Entering Heaven Alive, which dials back the vintage amps in favour of a gentler, folk-minded approach.
White also continues to run his label Third Man Records, which boasts its own state-of-the-art vinyl record pressing plant – a rarity in a time where such plants face exceeding demand by a growing consumer base.
Back to his tours. Sure, White has mainly kept his tour buses within US borders over the past decade, making the occasional trek across Europe.
With five solo albums on his back, he’s built a solid body of material to rinse through for audiences. There's also the hits by his former main band. And then, songs from his other bands.
On this tour, White has challenged himself and his live band to change up their setlist every night.
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“I imagine that, after a week, I would just be bored of playing the same songs,” White explains over a Zoom call. No doubt, it’s an unforgiving test of stamina and instinct for even the most seasoned musician over a long tour.
It’s just how his attention span works, he reveals. So far, he and his band count up to 120 different songs that they’ve performed on this tour.
All this enthusiasm spells out a tour that’s particularly special for White. It’s not only because he kicked it off by proposing onstage to his long-time girlfriend – he’s also road-testing two full albums, both of which sound worlds apart from the explosive blues-rock that longtime fans expect from him.
“Sometimes, you wait for things to connect with people. Sometimes, you just make a big mistake,” White says, on testing new material with crowds. “That’s okay. I like trying rather than playing it safe. Being in a dangerous spot is a lot more interesting.”
That’s not to say you won’t hear ‘Seven Nation Army’ or ‘Hotel Yorba’ from him. White recognizes the allure of his earlier work, which continues to draw new listeners on streaming, while necessitating fresh new stock at record stores globally.
He remains precious about keeping some of the familiar intact: “For the last few years, I’ve gotten more in tune with the idea that if I’m having a rough night, and things are not working out, I try to ignore it all for the 10-year-old kid in the crowd attending his first concert,” he says. “I tell myself that I can’t let this thing collapse for that kid.”
White adds that while it “sounds maybe a little bit pretentious”, the thought has not left his mind since the start of the tour. It lines up with similar sentiment from other major music acts, most of whom are preparing for their first global tours since the pandemic.
Others, primarily independent acts, have instead faced massive roadblocks trying to get there. Rising costs, diminishing revenue streams, and mental exhaustion – exacerbated by two years of restricted activity – have forced artists to shorten their own overseas treks, or cancel them entirely.
In his current tour, White roped in a large portion of emerging bands – from dream pop trio Men I Trust to West African blues rock band Mdou Moctar – to open various tour stops. It’s another chapter in White’s career-long effort to restore and revitalize parts of an industry that often lacks welfare for its own artists.
Over the years, he’s donated substantial money to preserve the archiving of long-forgotten music. He also boasts a roster of young bands on Third Man Records, which balances an output of new works with reissues of cult classics once long out of print.
This sprawling mission sharpened with greater urgency earlier this year.
In March, White published a rare video message on social media. He addressed the big players of the music industry – all of whom have reportedly kept existing pressing plants busy with new releases as of late. Vinyl has become a huge money maker within the past two years for them, so it’s no surprise they want to keep it going.
While this allowed Adele’s label to distribute more than 500,000 copies of her comeback album 30 on schedule, it pushed back a massive backlog of releases by independent labels and artists by several months – an unprecedented feat since the format’s re-emergence in the early 2010s. This was made worse by logistical factors spurred by COVID and global conflict.
There simply aren’t enough pressing plants around the world. Artists not signed to major labels have grown frustrated and helpless.
In 2017, White sunk his own money into opening Third Man’s own pressing plant in Detroit. In his recent message, he challenged majors to do the same.
“I now ask the major labels… to finally build your own pressing plants again,” he says in the clip. “As the MC5 once said, ‘You’re either part of the problem, or part of the solution.’”
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So, have they responded? “I think they’re not going to do it,” White admitted on the call, sighing. “It’s because they don’t need to.”
He points to Taylor Swift’s latest album Midnights, which sold half a million vinyl copies in its first week in the US alone. “That’s a lot of money,” he noted.
“If they call up [pressing plants] and say, ‘We have a million Taylor Swift records that we need [to be] pressed,’ the plants just have to say, ‘Okay, we’ll do it’,” he suspects. “Who still suffers? The smaller artists.”
“I can’t imagine her record label thinking they’re giving that money to all these other plants when they could [build] their own,” he added, “like they used to back in the day.”
Big labels continue to shuffle their feet on impactful progress. Meanwhile, over the past few years, White has expanded Third Man’s pressing plant operations – with new pressing machines and a bigger team of employees to keep up with orders.
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So far, he’s done all he can. There’s still his own work to attend to. “I really want to record these sets with my band to acetate when we get back home,” he said.
As with label tradition, White aims to capture the energy of his live shows by cutting a live performance directly to vinyl after accomplishing his Asia tour. It requires razor-sharp engineering, little room for mistakes, and delicate equipment that is nowhere near portable.
It’s a practice his label has extended to artists who drop by Third Man’s headquarters in Nashville, Tennessee – Billie Eilish, who cut her own acetate with the label in 2019, thanked White for "inspiring a whole generation of people to do what they want" during her performance.
“It should always be a struggle,” White says of making music deep into his career, “An attempt of getting the crowd and listeners on this adventure with you [towards] a different place.”
JACK WHITE ‘THE SUPPLY CHAIN ISSUES TOUR’ LIVE IN ASIA TOUR DATES
SEOUL - YES24 LIVE HALL - TUESDAY, 8 NOVEMBER
BANGKOK - CENTRAL WORLD LIVE HOUSE - SATURDAY, 12 NOVEMBER
SINGAPORE - CAPITOL THEATRE - MONDAY, 14 NOVEMBER
KUALA LUMPUR - ZEPP KL - WEDNESDAY, 16 NOVEMBER
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