Jack White – I'm the proudest I've been in my life of my guitar playing

As two new solo albums illustrate the breadth of his art, Jack White believes that he's reaching a new peak as a guitarist. "There are places I've never gone before," he says, "and techniques I thought I wasn't capable of doing...”

- By Joe Bosso. Portraits by Eleanor Jane

It is a big statement that Jack White is making this year - with the release of not one I but two new solo albums. And yet, as the man himself says, this is not the result of some intensely calculated master plan. In fact, he had no plan at all...

I know people won't believe me when I say this, but I don't really ever have a plan to make an album once I get involved in it, he explains. I always sort of start falling into it and find myself in the middle of it, and then I say, 'Oh, wow. I guess I should start maybe thinking about this, how it's going to relate to things I've done in the past, or what I want to do next live on stage.' But just as quickly, you can find yourself in a bunch of traps because you start overthinking the public version of what you're doing, and that's not a good place to create, really.

Jack is speaking from his home in Nashville, where these new albums were written and then recorded at his Third Man Studios. He has made a couple of public appearances over the past few years, performing on Saturday Night Live in 2020, and playing two concerts in London last year to mark the opening of a new Third Man Records Store in the city's Soho district. But for the most part he has been laying low in Nashville as a result of the pandemic. And while he admits that the period of forced isolation affected him deeply, it was also a key factor in the sheer volume of new songs he wrote.

Once he had recorded all this material, Jack briefly considered packaging everything on one grand double-album set - an idea he quickly rejected. Instead, he divided the material into two thematic albums. With his previous solo record, 2018's Boarding House Reach, he struck a balance between blitzing riff monsters and mellower songs that blended rustic country, folk and blues, but with the new albums he draws distinct lines of demarcation.