Jack White to Bow New Duo

"I don't want it to sound anything like the White Stripes," says Jack White of his newest project, the Raconteurs. "This is a full-on band -- dual songwriters coming together, building off one another, bouncing off each other."

White's writing partner is his longtime friend Brendan Benson, the singer-songwriter whose recent The Alternative to Love was released on V2 Records, the White Stripes' label. The nearly finished album, due early next year, will augment Benson's power-pop pedigree and White's technicolor blues with room-rattling rhythms, courtesy of the Greenhornes' Jack Lawrence and Patrick Keeler, fellow V2 artists who played with White on Loretta Lynn's 2004 album Van Lear Rose.

White and Benson wrote most of the record shoulder to shoulder at Benson's sprawling Victorian home in Detroit. For certain songs, they used a cut-and-paste approach. "We each went into separate rooms," Benson says. "He wrote a section, and I wrote a section. We didn't talk about it, we just did it, and it worked out beautifully."

As for the band's name (French for "skilled teller of anecdotes"), that was all White's doing. "Jack is an endless source of great stuff," says Benson. "He'll spring something on you, and you'll be like, 'How the fuck did you come up with that?'"

CHRISTIAN HOARD AND DAVID FRICKE
(posted Oct. 17, 2005)