Jack White Finds Drumming for the Dead Weather a Difficult Job

Posted on Jul 14th 2009 1:30PM by Dan Reilly
Comments

With the amount of projects he has going, it may seem like everything, at least musically, comes easy to Jack White. In reality, the White Stripes frontman found that his Dead Weather role of handling drum and vocal duties was much more difficult than anticipated. "It's new territory for me," White tells Spinner. "No doubt about that."

Though he's added percussion to White Stripes tracks like 'The Nurse,' White's return to his original instrument started with 'Another Way to Die,' the James Bond theme song he wrote with Alicia Keys. "I haven't really looked into it enough but I didn't really know of anybody producing a record as a drummer," White says. "I thought, 'Maybe that's a way to do it. The first thought in your mind would be to go into an orchestra, the London Symphony and write some gigantic, Bond-esque thing. But it worked well on the production side, so I thought, 'Let's try this again.' Then [The Dead Weather] ended up being a whole album, so it was like 'oh, well, it looks like I'm the drummer of this band.'"

After the band's first gigs in Nashville and New York, White realized just how challenging handling both drums and vocals would be. "Maybe I thought it was going to be easier to 'just' be the drummer," he says. "But the singing is definitely enough to be like, 'No enjoying this either.' It's just a lot of work. I like this. This is whole new area. This is definitely going to affect the way I write songs in a new way."

White's not the only Dead Weather member to enjoy the switch to drums. During the band's live shows, he'll occasionally step out front to handle guitar and vocal duties, leaving bassist "Little" Jack Lawrence to man the a skins. "Now I understand why people want to play drums. All these years I just thought they didn't know what else to do." Lawrence tells Spinner innocently as the rest of the band laughs. "It's just fun to bash on something, because really, that's all you want to do when you're on stage." You can check out White's drumming on 'Horehound,' which is in stores now and catch the band live all summer.