It’s different when you’re in a band you can just tell by the laughter that everyone’s in this thing together.” “When you’re doing your solo thing, you’re kind of like the boss, whether you like it or not – as much as you get along and you’re friends with everybody. Holy hell.’ And it also only felt like it had been a month since we last played together I forgot how much the band laughed together. It’s best to go in with baby steps when it’s been a while, and it turns out that it was ‘Wow, that was great. We just got into the studio to record a little bit no pressure, no big plans. “Patrick is the only one that doesn’t live in Nashville, he lives in LA – so when he was in town, we said ‘Hey, why don’t we get together and record that Raconteurs song?’ Brendan had a song called Only Child, and I think those were the first couple we did. “None of us can recall the specifics,” says the chatty, upbeat White. Neither can remember whose idea it was to get The Raconteurs back together after such a long hiatus, but the starting point was arguably Shine the Light on Me, a song left over from White’s eclectic last solo album, 2018’s Boarding House Reach.
Thirteen years since their debut Broken Boy Soldiers, it’s clear from the way White and Benson talk and crack jokes together that they have an easy rapport – the result of longstanding friendships, as well as a musical kinship.Īlongside the band’s other two members, Jack ‘LJ’ Lawrence and Patrick Keeler, they came up together on the Detroit scene of the late 1990s White as a member of The White Stripes, Benson as the solo indie-rocker with a pop sensibility. White admits that his solo career inevitably contributed to Help Us Stranger’s sound, even if it was on a subconscious level Help Us Stranger sees Benson (the underrated tunesmith and creator of outstanding power-pop albums since 1996) and modern blues-rock god White (who has since launched both that aforementioned Third Man label as well as his own solo career since the last Raconteurs album) combine their impressive powers for another album bursting at the seams with melody, vibrant rock riffs and catchy tunes. The pair are at home in Nashville to talk about The Raconteurs’ long-awaited follow-up to 2008’s Consolers of the Lonely. That took up a lot of my time and energy. “The big thing that caused a lot of my time to get swallowed up was Third Man Records, because we built it a year after the Raconteurs’ second album.
“I think we were probably assuming that we were going to come back in a year or two,” says White.
If you ask Jack White and Brendan Benson, that’s pretty much what happened with The Raconteurs. You know how it is: you get together with your musician friends, form a band, make two hit albums, win a Grammy for one of them and then forget all about it for a decade or so.