Each song on Jack White’s first solo album, Blunderbuss, came from a different way of writing than he had ever tried before.
He was writing backwards, he was writing with people in the room, and one time, he had all the session musicians in and they were all waiting for him, and he had absolutely no song at all. He forced himself to write a song in front of them without them knowing it.
Jack tried a lot of ideas like that because he didnt know what he was doing, what it was going to be, until four or five songs in.
The riff for the current single, 16 Saltines, was written while checking a reverb unit to see how long the reverb would last. Jack said, Record this real quick, and well come back to it later, which is the kind of thing that he can only do now that he has his own studio.
Another new thing is that Jack decided that if he woke up in the middle of the night with a melody, he wouldnt let it go, and although recording something at four in the morning was the hardest thing, it resulted in another couple of Blunderbuss tracks.
