Something Softer

Jack White's often overlooked acoustic acumen sings (softly) on Entering Heaven Alive

I’ve been thinking about death a lot recently, in some very specific and tangible and not-abstract ways. Sorry readers, I will not be elaborating on that, but, I will use that as an occasion to talk about Jack White’s fifth studio album and second released during the monumental year White had in 2022 with Fear of the Dawn (April), the Supply Chain Issues World Tour (most of 2022 and half of 2023). That album is called Entering Heaven Alive.

For me, and perhaps many Jack White fans, Entering Heaven Alive felt like a minor release. It was, after all, the second of two albums in the year. The narrative around the dual releases was that one album had all the guitar rock and the other was an acoustic balladeer. Released on October 21, 2021, the double-a side single, “Taking Me Back” and “Taking Me Back (Gently)” made explicit the binary between these two albums from the very first moment they were announced.

The fiery bluster of a brand new Jack White ripper made it (at least for me) difficult to get wrapped up in the more gentle b-side.

I remember playing both of these songs nonstop in my office and around University of Detroit Mercy’s campus the day they came out, but as is often the case, I came for the guitars. Quickly, “(Gently)” fell by the wayside.

Then, a very strange thing happened: my son was born and new Jack White music didn’t seem like the most important thing in the world to me.

Ben arrived in early November, the winter holidays came and went, our little family was tucked into our cozy house in Livonia. Obviously, I was excited for what the new year would bring: two! nights at the Masonic Temple to open the world tour, the tour opener coinciding with the release of the first! of two! new Jack White albums! Yippie!

This was a low hum, though, unlike the frenetic 2014 Lazaretto rollout and tour, the double-albums, the singles, they were all wrapped up in the totally life-changing experience of new parenthood, time spent on the job market, thinking about moving states, getting a new dog; there was a lot. Like White himself says, “music is sacred,” but music, we know, isn’t everything.

My CD copy of Fear of the Dawn arrived first and a whole week early. I remember that day well: while Ben and Rachel and Desi napped I popped the CD into my computer and listened to the album, twice (man newborns know how to sleep!), and loved it. I did a live tweet of the first listen which is now lost to history, but, as you can imagine, I greatly enjoyed it. But then Ben woke up and it was on to diapers and bottles and all the mundanity that are the best memories of 2022 but would be a drag for you, dear readers.

Then, in lightening quick succession I got a job in Ohio, Rachel got a job in Ohio, we got a new dog, and we moved to Ohio.

Rachel’s folks were so very kind to open their house to us, and we were big. Desi and Poppy were the first dogs to reside there, Ben was an infant, and I can be a big personality. I want to make it clear: I love Rachel’s mom and dad. Part of how I could reflect this love (to say nothing of being a polite houseguest) was to maybe have a slightly less psychotic response to a new Jack White album, which was set to release about a month and a half into our stay in Plain City.

Thanks to one of Third Man Records’ best innovations since the double-decker record, all of the Supply Chain Issues World Tour shows were being broadcast on Nugs streaming service, so, a few days after each show I would walk the dogs, run errands, prep for the upcoming school year, while listening to the hard rocking White Stripes classics on heavy rotation along with the new Fear of the Dawn tracks. It was great! But this meant there was new Jack White music kind of on a steadily running tap and my cup, so to speak, was running over. An album’s worth of live takes each day in summer 2022 was worth just as much (if not a little more, I dare to say) than one acoustic album.

Quick break! Top ten Jack White slow/acoustic jams, ranked:

1. Alone in My Home¹

2. As Ugly As I Seem

3. Love Interruption

4. If I Die Tomorrow

5. Apple Blossom

6. White Moon

7. We’re Going to Be Friends

8. Humoresque

9. You’ve Got Her in Your Pocket

10. Carolina Drama

I love these songs. I feel like I have to defend that. I’m damning this side of Jack White with faint praise, while I don’t go to him first as the world class lyricist he is² or a slow jammer, his chops are undeniable. Alas the shriek of the guitar calls to me more.

Here’s the lore: during a fruitful creative period during the COVID-19 lockdown months of the pandemic, White found two albums worth of songs. The nice thing about having your own record label and pressing plant is you don’t have to make the tough decisions to kill your darlings, just, how to release them. Massive double-album? No, that might choke the production of other vinyl at Third Man Pressing (a huge, huge issue for indie musicians industry-wide). Okay, let’s just do two separate albums. Fear of the Dawn: that’s the rock and roller. Entering Heaven Alive: acoustic and miscellaneous.

I imagine this was liberating for White, who famously thrives on self-made constraints. All together, 2022 was a maximalist year for White. These albums had a wallet-obliterating number of vinyl variants, the tour production was massive, the dates were sprawling, and, again: two albums. One year.

But with that, the thing I can’t help but keep coming back to is how, as the final piece of the very big puzzle, Entering Heaven Alive feels a little more slight.

That shouldn’t make it any less special, and in a lot of ways Entering Heaven Alive has a more strong emotional pull, at least autobiographically, than Fear of the Dawn. Ben’s first trip to Columbus’s best record store, Spoonful Records, was to attend the listening party for the album. That was rad. There will forever be a picture of my infant and record store guy, thanks Jack White (and also Brett from Spoonful, you the man!).

So, there’s the personal connection. There’s also the simple fact that it is kind of inaccurate to label the record as “the acoustic album.” Revising The White Stripes’ Get Behind Me Satan this year in depth revealed how similar these two albums are. Call them both avant garde, experimental, White doing White Album by The Beatles. Entering Heaven Alive is a kooky little album, let me break it down:

1. “A Tip from You to Me” is not kooky. Bait-and-switch. Like “Blue Orchid” on GMBS, it is a misdirect posing as a thesis-statement. Great piano ballad.

2. “All Along the Way” starts off low and slow, but hits a pretty high crescendo. Not one of my favorite songs. Opens up White’s voice-as-instrument live.

3. “Help Me Along” is a hybrid early 00s chamber pop song and bubblegum pop music from the 50s and 60s. Like if The Raconteurs’ “Yellow Sun” was written and recorded by Ra Ra Riot.

4. “Love is Selfish” is a delightfully quiet little tune. Long-time bassist and longer-time friend to Jack White, Dominic Davis, tweeted that this song had his favorite lyrics White had ever written (“I’ve got a sailboat with her name painted on it / but I don’t know how to sail”). Remember when I said I didn’t go to White as a lyricist? Still stands.

5. “I’ve Got You Surrounded (With My Love)” is maybe the oddest song Jack White’s ever recorded. I don’t know what to say about it: there’s some drunken jazz bar swing, some nasty little keys, some screetchy guitar, everything in the kitchen sink. Fun song. Funky song.

6. “Queen of the Bees” was a pre-album single, the “b-side” to “Hi-De-Ho” a month before Fear of the Dawn is a quizzical entry. Hate to brag, but I was at the live debut of this one (“Love is Selfish,” too) and the dedication to Olivia Jean, White’s long-time girlfriend and short-term wife (he married her on stage during “Hotel Yorba” the previous night) contextualizes this odd duck in a way I can’t really explain but can enjoy.

7. “A Tree on Fire from Within” should go down as an all-time classic. This is, to me, the best lyrical accomplishment on the album, and were it not for White’s noodling on his newfound bass guitar, I’d place this track anywhere on Get Behind Me Satan or even De Stijl.

8. “If I Die Tomorrow” is the rare Jack White slow burner that’s better on record than live. He really drags out the breathiness in each syllable. Great song, especially when the electric part kicks in the final third.

9. “Please God, Don’t Tell Alone” plays like an Icky Thump b-side. Good song. Very theatrical.

10. “A Madman from Manhattan” is another jazzy tune. Not quite sure what to make of this one, though. Sonically more challenging than anything on the supposedly experimental Boarding House Reach, and yet, still fits in the eclectic mess of Entering Heaven Alive.

11. Okay here’s something interesting, a sort of joke I like to think that White is playing on all of us, a subversion of the ‘lesser second album’, Entering Heaven Alive ends with “Taking Me Back (Gently)” which is the ‘oldest’ song on the album, insofar that fans had the most amount of time with the song before the rest of the album’s release. It really leans into the vintage, old-timey, acoustic and analogue instruments and production. It sounds like how Jack White looks in the documentary It Might Get Loud.

    

    And, yet, close listeners will detect in the waning moments of the song, well, wait, isn’t that the hiss and wail of the synthesizer pitching up into Fear of the Dawn’s opening number (also “Taking Me Back”).

I’m unsure what to make of this: it orients Entering Heaven Alive as first, and unless there’s a third option, first is the primary spot. Cynically, White and other luminaries in the Third Man camp were candid about Fear of the Dawn’s superior marketability to wider audiences, so why circle back to this song?

Jack White might just be as into the acoustic guitar as the electric guitar.

During the Supply Chain Issues world tour, White did a few acoustic shows, the best of which was during late September in Santa Fe. Not only does this set showcase White’s deftness as reimagining his biggest and baddest hits as more somber texts, it also contextualizes Entering Heaven Alive in his larger body of work. Every permeation of creative work White has done is concerned with death, and while the live experience sometimes masks this (behind the thunder and lightening of a guitar god bending strings that stir even the deepest corners of hell), the patience required to know White can go off, but doesn’t, elevates the songs.

The Vault release honoring the Supply Chain Issues Tour showcases an entire performance of Entering Heaven Alive intact from inside London’s Union Chapel. The religious undertones become almost impossible to ignore from inside a space like that.

The live renditions of these songs are breathless and elevated in drama and passion, but no better than their studio equivalent recorded on album. This is unusual, I think. Look, I’ll never turn off a Jack White/White Stripes/Raconteurs/Dead Weather song when it comes on, but I always want to see/hear these songs live more³.

This might have nothing to do with these songs and more to do with me as a listener. Perhaps I am aging out of the guitar-solo-godliness and into a balcony seat at a theater typea guy. I’ve recently come into a better appreciation of 2016’s Acoustic Recordings compilation release which, at the time, felt like frustrating filler between Lazaretto and whatever would follow it. I wonder how much of that appreciation is standing on the back of Entering Heaven Alive.

Or, perhaps I can chalk it all up to thunder in the sky.

During the summer of 2022, late July, early August, Ben went through a spell many infants go through of really, terribly, struggling to sleep. These were delirious nights. My poor in-laws, desperate to offer him comfort but let Rachel and I parent on our own, poor Rachel, wanting to be a good houseguest and mother. Poor Ben, those wails as teeth cut gums, as dry coughs wracked his little throat. It breaks my heart, and it broke my heart then.

One night my mother-in-law and I were up with him, this little bread loaf of a boy suffering⁴. Rachel really needed some sleep and Rachel’s mom and I co-conspired on an idea. An old idea. “Put him in the car and go for a drive.”

I packed the little squirm bug into his car seat, latched that into the back of my car, and away we went into the country roads winding through corn fields outside of Plain City. It wasn’t terribly late for me, between 11:00 and midnight, but for the little guy, we were pushing it. Some city lights dotted the rear of the tree line delineating Dublin, Ohio, and the country Dublin would rapidly encroach during our time at my in-law’s house.

If I was going to safely stay awake and pilot Ben around until the soft rumble of the car and the road lulled him to sleep I would need music. Something I loved and could find comfort in, but that wouldn’t disturb his rest. Entering Heaven Alive was in the CD player. I hadn’t connected with it yet. I hit play.

We drove wide circles around Plain City over creeks on old bridges, weaving around railroad tracks and grain silos. Soon, in the rear view mirror I could see the soft rise and fall of Ben’s tiny chest. A gentle snore (his father’s son). Calm washed over his tired face. His beautiful eyelashes caught moon drops in the night sky. I parked in a feed store parking lot and idled. Clouds were rolling in. Did I feel satisfied this worked? Or did I feel helpless, the way I imagine a new parent feels on nights like this one?

White sang, to just me and nobody else in the entire world: “If you help me along, I promise to love you.” Parenting is a game of bargaining: if you just sleep well this one night I’ll do anything for you.

Cracks of heat lightening many miles away paint the sky. I wish Ben was awake for this moment. Against everything in my exhausted body (and his) I wish to share this moment with him, feeling tense between knowing we’ll have so many moments to share and wanting to not miss even one. The clouds. The bolts webbing light across the night sky. It is all too beautiful.

I close my eyes before shifting the car back into drive. The sudden lurch does not wake Ben up. The gentle songs on Entering Heaven Alive transcend their lyrics, their melody. They get us home that night.

As I carry the car seat back into the house moving more softly than any living thing has ever moved, as I take Ben out of the safety straps I am so terribly grateful for, as I lower him into his crib and his continued unblinking rest, I hear echoing in my ears a soft voice telling me what these slow motion gestures have been trying to tell Ben this whole time:

and I’m going to love you

and I’m willing to share

and I’m dying to take you

everywhere.

But for now, sweet boy, rest.

1. current top choice for funeral song, as stated in my last will and testament and known by Rachel.

2. Great example: last month Rachel asked if I’d already pre-ordered Jack White’s upcoming collected lyrics book and, honest to god, I’d forgotten he was putting one out.

3. With one crucial exception: I hate the slowed down version of “Fell In Love With a Girl.”

4. He was not suffering. He sounded like he was suffering. The old heads call this “croupy”