TORONTO -- Industry types and music journos can go back and forth on how to fix the ailing music business, but White Stripes guitarist Jack White knows exactly where he doesn’t want his tunes heard.
"Right now, all bands are being told young kids are exposed to music through Guitar Hero," he said briskly in a midday interview recently. "So now we have to put our songs on a video game? That's how we reach kids? This is an era that needs help."
So White, in Toronto last month to promote his third band, the Dead Weather, said he's putting his money where his mouth is.
"I'm going to make records and I'm going to put them out there so you can watch them spin and you can smell them and hold them," the newly-minted drummer said, touting his label Third Man Records.
Headquartered in his adopted hometown of Nashville, Third Man houses a record store, a photo studio, a darkroom and a performance stage. White had a say in the building's entire design.
"We let technology get in the way of us falling in love with [music] and being romantic about it," the 34-year-old said, flanked by his new bandmates -- the Kills' Alison Mosshart, who fronts the new group, bassist Jack Lawrence, who plays with White in the Raconteurs and guitarist Dean Fertita of Queens of the Stone Age.
"We think the newest toy makes it better, but it doesn't make it better. It can oftentimes destroy the experience completely. But I would never choose to have someone listen to my records through ear buds, just like a [film] director would never wish that people see their film on an iPod."
He continued: "I want to put tangible objects out there in the world. Anything that's mechanical and moving immediately becomes romantic. If it's pausable, fast-forwardable, it's not reverential at all."
Consequently, the gimmicky studio enhancements some of White's contemporaries use are absent from the Dead Weather's brooding debut album, "Horehound," due in stores on July 14.
The album’s 11 tracks – 10 originals and a cover of Bob Dylan’s "New Pony" – were recorded over three weeks earlier this year ["It's not our tribute to 'St. Anger,'" White joked, referring to Metallica's long-in-the-works eighth record] after incessant jam sessions on the Raconteurs tour, for which Mosshart's Kills opened, and an impromptu visit by Fertita during a Nashville gig, ballooned into something more.
"Everything from Pentagram and Bob Dylan to Gary Numan," said Lawrence, characterizing the late-night sessions.
"If the songs didn't emerge," White said, noting how several tracks came together in the band's first 12 hours together, "I think we would have moved on to something else. But we all didn't realize just how much we wanted to do something new."
"Plus it was nice to be in Nashville; a town that's very supportive of art and music," the London-based Mosshart added. "For me, it was brilliant driving fast cars and shooting guns and doing all these things I don't get to do at home."
Another attraction, White conceded, was getting a chance to return to the instrument of his youth.
"Playing the drums on the record came from the James Bond song I did with Alicia Keys ['Another Way to Die']," he replied when asked about the switch. "After that, I wanted to try it out."
Before the band took to the stage at the Horseshoe Tavern to treat fans to a 65-minute fuzzed-out sample of the "menacing," bluesy garage rock that courses through the upcoming album, White admitted that the challenges of starting something new invigorates him.
"[Lawrence] and I have gone through this with the Raconteurs, so we’ve been down this road," White said. "It's a tough task to try and keep people interested in a song they've never heard before in a style they haven’t heard from us.
"So," he paused, eyeing his pomegranate martini, "it's going to take a second."
"But we're doing OK," added Mosshart, an omnipresent Marlboro dangling from her fingers. "We took on a huge challenge," taking the stage right after the Red Wings were ousted in the Stanley Cup finals by the Pittsburgh Penguins, she exhaled.
"[The crowd] snapped out of it pretty quick," Fertita smiled.
And that kind of nightly uphill scramble is just the way White likes it.
"People need to respect music and not say, 'Well, it's MTV's fault; it's Steve Jobs's fault.' If we don’t get together and respect music for the art form that it is, everybody loses."
