Jack White
Jack White. Guitar god, record store owner, and an overall kind of weird (but amazing) guy. Jack White has given us his art through various projects, from the White Stripes stadium anthems, the Dead Weathers intensity and darkness, to the more melodic indie of the The Raconteurs and finally his own soul baring rawness from his solo project. He has created a diverse catalogue.
But how does it all fit together? With the new Raconteurs album coming out later this month, I think now is a good time to take a look.
Analyzing Music
Below is a summary of the the his albums. We can see projects overlap and span over 18 years. Surprisingly, he has never cursed in that time.
Song Characteristics
Many things are very hard to quantify in music, but Spotify does its best. They provide the additional detail by track including : Danceability, Energy, Liveness, Loudness, Valence, Speechiness, Acousticness, and Tempo. For more information on these metrics please see the Spotify page.
On the below graphs, each point is an album, with the horizontal position reflecting the album release date.
As you can see, he is a little all over the place. This makes sense since its four different bands on the above chart.
We can also put the 8 characteristics of the album on one chart to get a slightly different perspective.
Please note I had to scale all the characteristics to put them on one chart. The lowest score for an album is set to 0 and the highest is 1. Everything else is linearly scaled in between.
But How Does It Fit Together?
Let's imagine a statistic that somehow conveys similarity between two sets of groups. Let's say we take the difference between The White Stripes' and The Dead Weather's danceability score and square it (squaring penalizes bigger differences and keeps signs consistent). Let's do that with all the band combos. Actually, let's do it with all 8 metrics! And then add them together to get one number! And then divide by the largest so that the most different is 1 and 0 is the same... And then put it in a table...
So Jack White is actually the most different from his original band, the White Stripes. Looks like he has changed a bit since him and Meg White split. Chronologically and musically this makes since when you listen to Jack White's growth as an artist.
The Dead Weather is also very different from Jack White's Solo Projects. The Raconteurs are kind of similar to everything. Blending the best parts of all bands or just blending into indie rock is up for you to decide. Surprisingly, The White Stripes, where Jack sings and plays guitar, and The Dead Weather, where he plays drums and is not lead vocals, have a lot in common.
Here is a bit more detail into how the projects differ:
Final Thoughts Jack White
I am a fan of all of Jack White's projects and if he makes a new one, I will listen. Even if its a The Upholsters reunion (who are surprisingly not on Spotify). I never thought of Jack White changing much from the White Stripes, but he has. We all have.