4 Outstanding Solo Songs by Jack White

On July 19, Jack White’s surprise new album, No Name, dropped into the shopping bags of unsuspecting Third Man Records customers. The unmarked white vinyl version is out now by traditional methods.

No Name sounds like White has found himself, after years of experimental tinkering in his studio. One of his superpowers is using limitations to his advantage. Others hide behind the production, but White thrives in the open spaces. The space gives him room to step on one of his bespoke, gloriously strange guitar pedals and do what he does best—melt faces.

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With his attention back to the garage blues that made him famous, here’s a look at four outstanding songs from White’s previous solo albums.

“Love Is Blindness” from Blunderbuss (2012)

White’s U2 cover of “Love Is Blindness” is the B-side to “Sixteen Saltines.” It also appears on the soundtrack to The Great Gatsby. Bono wanted to give the song to Nina Simone but the band kept it for the closing track on Achtung Baby. On White’s version, he sounds like he’s channeling the ghost of Simone. It may be the finest vocal performance he’s ever committed to tape. Lately, dense layers of overdubs and “more is more” have defined White’s post-White Stripes work. However, his early solo recordings still utilized space as a powerful tool. The goth organ turns Bono’s broken love song into a funeral dirge.

“Love Interruption” from Blunderbuss (2012)

The first single from White’s debut solo album, “Love Interruption” speaks to the bitterness of love—the good, the bad, the vicious. White expresses the stasis of heartbreak with gory allusions to his mother being murdered and slamming one’s fingers in a doorway. The blues ballad features Ruby Amanfu, a member of White’s all-female band The Peacocks. On the Blunderbuss Tour, White alternated between female and male backing bands. The sparse track also features Brooke Waggoner playing the Wurlitzer electric piano, and clarinetist Emily Bowland.

“Sixteen Saltines” from Blunderbuss (2012)

The title comes from White’s daughter who asked her father for a snack of 16 saltine crackers. The track follows a failed relationship in a girl-done-me-wrong rock song that threads a mixture of The White Stripes and The Raconteurs. The bad romance tale uses a boat metaphor but help isn’t coming. The ill-fitted couple is stranded in a sea of sadness while White chokes on a lifesaver—perhaps both the candy and the raft. White told NME he imagined a character “eating cracker rations on a lifeboat.”

“Lazaretto” from Lazaretto (2014)

“Lazaretto” is Jack White’s best riff this side of “Blue Orchid.” White told NPR the song is “a rhyme about the braggadocio of some hip-hop lyrics.” But his character, instead, brags about the things he’s done. “Not the imaginary [thing] or things he would like to do,” White added. Lazaretto is a hospital for patients with contagious diseases. Also, White constructed the London location of Third Man Records on the former site of a lazaretto, fitting neatly into his attention to detail. If you find yourself confronted by aliens and they only allow you to play one Jack White song, this is the one you want. Born rottin’, bored rotten.

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