Everything We Know About Jack White’s Boarding House Reach

By Monique Melendez

Jack White’s third studio album Boarding House Reach comes out March 23, and the singer-songwriter has promised a far-reaching, diverse album for his first LP in nearly four years. Here’s what we know so far about the album.

White has been working on Boarding since last summer.

White hinted at beginning the recording process in a May 2017 New Yorker piece. “I’m going to try to write songs where I can’t be heard by the next-door neighbor,” White said. “And I want to write like Michael Jackson would write — instead of writing parts on the instruments or humming melodies, you think of them. To do everything in my head and to do it in silence and use only one room.”

Third Man Records posted photos of White recording his album in New York City two months later.

According to White, the album works as well for simple chores as it does for violent crime.

In a back-and-forth conversation with actor Gary Oldman for Interview magazine, White described his new work as “good gardening music or roofing music or, you know, back-alley stabbing music.” Silly Jack.

White went back to the basics for the record.

According to a press release, White chose to go with the only equipment available to him when he was a 15-year-old aspiring musician: “a quarter-inch four-track tape recorder, a simple mixer, and the most basic of instrumentation.”

The album goes beyond the boundaries of rock.

In a Rolling Stone feature, White revealed he booked a room in New York City and worked with musicians he had never played with before. In a concerted effort to expand his repertoire, White reached out to musicians who have worked with Jay-Z, Kanye, Kendrick, and other hip hop artists.

Though there aren’t any features explicitly listed on the tracklisting, the album makes the most of White’s work with other musicians, with featured vocals from singer-songwriter Esther Rose, Beverly Ann and Regina McCrary of Nashville gospel quartet the McCrary Sisters, and a spoken-word bit by Australian blues musician C.W. Stoneking.

White thinks Boarding is “incredibly modern.”

We’ve already heard four full tracks from the album, plus a medley of snippets: “Connected By Love,” “Respect Commander,” White’s dream-Jay-Z-collaboration-turned-solo-track “Over and Over and Over,” and “Corporation,” plus the “Servings and Portions From My Boarding House Reach” medley.

“The entire record, to me, is incredibly modern,” White told Rolling Stone. “I wanted to take punk, hip-hop and rock & roll, and funnel it all into a 2018 time capsule.”

You’ll have to put your phones down to experience Boarding live.

White will celebrate the release with a trio of intimate, presumably phone-free gigs, then tour the U.S. behind the album. Why the insistence on phone-free gigs? For a “100% human experience,” White says.

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