FEATURE:
Revisiting…
The Raconteurs – Help Us Stranger
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ALTHOUGH they are a popular band…
PHOTO CREDIT: David James Swanson
and can be considered a supergroup – consisting of Jack White (vocals, guitar), Brendan Benson (vocals, guitar), Jack Lawrence (bass guitar), and Patrick Keeler (drums) -, their third studio album, Help Us Stranger, does not get as much play and attention as their previous two. Released on 21st June, 2019, I wanted to spend time with it. I wonder whether the band will release a fourth studio album. Jack White put out two albums this year, so you have to think he has been too busy to think of working with The Raconteurs. I hope they do have more work in them. Help Us Stranger is a fantastic album that went to number one ion the U.S. and scored positive reviews across the board. It may be their best-received and successful album to date. With Brendan Benson and Jack White proving what an incredible songwriting partnership they are, Help Us Stranger is a triumphant album. Few expected The Raconteurs to put out a third album. their first studio album in eleven years since Consolers of the Lonely (2008), Help Us Stranger was recorded at Third Man Studio in Nashville, Tennessee. I am going to come to a couple (of the many) positive reviews for a tremendous album. Prior to that, Entertainment Weekly featured an interview with Jack White and Brendan Benson in promotion of Help Us Stranger:
“There have been numerous (in)famous pairings throughout music history: Mick and Keith. Sonny and Cher. Metallica and Lou Reed. So how to characterize Jack White and Brendan Benson, of rock quartet the Raconteurs? Well, according to White, they might just be the oddest of the bunch.
“We both really inspire each other, but we both think each other is the strangest person,” says White. “Brendan’ll say to me, ‘You are just the weirdest guy I know.’ It’s so funny, every time he says that, I wanna say it back to him, but I don’t wanna argue with him! Most of the people I’ve loved and admired — mentors I’ve had — are people I’ve found to be odd. Not at first glance, but maybe as time goes on. I find an appeal to their eccentricities.”
Their collaboration proved wondrous rather than strange on Help Us Stranger, the new, long-time-coming Raconteurs record. The band’s 2005 debut, Broken Boy Soldiers – along with lead single, “Steady As She Goes” — were nominated for Grammys. And in the 11 years since their second album, Consolers of the Lonely, fans and critics alike have been eager for more of the lineup’s driving, precise, and clever melodies.
“It was just timing, we never broke up or anything,” explains Benson of the group’s decade-long absence. “There wasn’t some epiphany. I was busy producing and writing, Jack was busy with his solo career, and Patrick [Keeler, drummer] moved to Los Angeles. So when Patrick came to visit Nashville recently we got together and jammed; it was really fun and I think we actually recorded some stuff.” (Bassist Jack Lawrence, who also plays in the Dead Weather with White, is the fourth full-time member.)
The first song the group tracked was a cover that appears on the album, a lesser-known Donovan song called ‘Hey Gyp (Dig the Slowness).” “Right from the get-go it was like, ‘Press record, let’s go, we’re doing this.’ Not much discussion, not much planning — as is often the case with the Raconteurs,” says Benson, laughing.
However, there was a method to their madness. “The morning we recorded [“Hey Gyp”] I heard [the Donovan original] on the radio in my car,” says White. “It was this trick I’ve used over the years, which is to record someone else’s song — any song will do — just to get our brains working on the first day back in the studio. Then we’ll move on to our own stuff. It’s an icebreaker; like if you’re at a party, and you just bring up the weather.” The only issue? “This trick usually backfires, and we end up falling in love with the song and having to put it on the record. I did that on [Little Willie John’s] ‘I’m Shakin’ on my solo record and with Bob Dylan’s ‘New Pony’ on the Dead Weather’s first album.”
That spiritual intuition comes through in the dozen tracks off Help Us Stranger. Like the previous two Raconteurs releases, the album title is the plural version of a song on the record (“Help Me, Stranger”). “It’s one of those things that the band thinks is funnier than it actually is in real life,” says White, laughing.
Given White’s fame, he admits he’s a stranger to very few, though anonymity is one of his fondest wishes: “My favorite thing is to be at the airport and not be recognized and be able to just talk to people. That’s a blessing. Once they recognize me, the conversation’s over, basically. It’s a shame, because they’re coming with preconceptions, so it’s kind of ruined.”
With the exception of “Hey Gyp,” White and Benson wrote all of Help Us Stranger. Though the duo generally work separately on the lyrics, Benson explains, “we might help each other out on a few words now and then; if somebody gets stuck on something, it’s always great to have another brain.” White, an encyclopedic musical obsessive, adds, “It’s nice to have that much songwriting history that has come before you, because it gives you a lot of places to say, ‘Oh well, that’s been done,’ or ‘Don’t go there; someone’s tried that, and it didn’t work.’ It gives you places to aim for and places to stay away from, to be knowledgeable of that history.” White even harkens back to the Bard for inspiration. “William Shakespeare, whether it’s a comedy or his love sonnets — I think those are, of course, the most incredible work. It’s almost like written by God herself.”
The release of Help Us Stranger also finds the duo dissecting their music and process in the press, which wasn’t done with their last release. Consolers of the Lonely dropped almost as a surprise in 2008. (Per White, “Years later, you saw Beyoncé doing it, and everyone was flipping out. ‘Oh, it’s amazing! The record just came out of nowhere.’ We were like, ‘Wait a minute, we did that like eight years ago,’ which clearly wasn’t the right time to try it.”)
“I think all artists would probably rather create and not talk about it, in a perfect world. It would be as hard for a painter to describe a painting,” adds White. “But at the same time, you’re putting it on a record store shelf, you’re going onstage, you’re trying to share it with people. You’re trying to see if there’s anybody out there who can dig it, and if they do, you keep going with it. That could be a hundred people. You never know what’s gonna happen. You’ve just gotta go with your gut”.
Before I wrap things up, I want to source some reviews. There is so much to enjoy when it comes to Help Us Stranger. Even if you do not know about the band, you will be instantly interested and won over by their chemistry and amazing songwriting. This is what AllMusic wrote about their 2019 album:
“Reconvening after a decade's absence, the Raconteurs resemble nothing less than a guild of craftsman united by taste and work ethic on their third album, Help Us Stranger. Ever since their debut, the quartet displayed a shared love for the rock and pop made before the advent of MTV, and while they've never abandoned an aesthetic steeped in FM radio, they've gotten livelier with each passing LP. Which isn't to say Help Us Stranger is a slack, loose affair. One of its considerable pleasures is how Brendan Benson encourages Jack White to stick to a strict outline and color within the lines, trends the latter largely abandoned on his willfully obtuse 2018 album Boarding House Reach. There are jokes and asides peppered throughout Help Us Stranger -- the best of these is an intentional skip at the start of the title track, the kind of thing that will drive vinyl freaks batty upon the initial listen -- but the album is distinguished by its velocity, a momentum delivered as much through writing as it is through performance. Whether they're stitching together individual ideas or writing in tandem, Benson and White are full collaborators, honing their hooks and melodies so they're gleamingly lean, then they dress up these handsome bones with squalls of guitar, vintage synths, campfire acoustics, ghostly piano, gypsy violin, and thundering rhythms. On the surface, the sound may seem as retro as the record's tight 42-minute running time, but that's where the Raconteurs' dedication to craft comes into play. The group intentionally works with old tools so they can fit within an album-rock tradition, yet they have little interest in re-creating the past. Apart from a hypercharged cover of Donovan's "Hey Gyp (Dig the Slowness)," none of the songs bear hallmarks of another time; the tunes teem with modern-day ennui, right down to White's gripes about cell phones. Despite this contemporary flair, what keeps Help Us Stranger lively is how the Raconteurs blend and mix barbed pop and blues skronk so their classicism seems fresh, not stale”.
I shall leave things with an excellent and glowing review from DIY. They had some very kind words to say about one of the very best albums from 2019. Help Us Stranger proved that the band lost none of their excellence and stride eleven years after their second studio album:
“11 years since the release of second LP ‘Consolers of the Lonely’, it seemed unlikely that we’d ever be staring down the barrel of a new Raconteurs record. Having quietly gone on hiatus at the turn of the decade, co-frontman Brendan Benson then declared a few years later that the hiatus was actually more of a split, and talk of the supergroup that he, Jack White, Jack Lawrence and Patrick Keeler had first unleashed back in 2005 soon dwindled away. In the interim, Brendan released a couple more solo records, and Jack L and Patrick continued playing in various projects – most notably those connected to Big Jacky W, who… well, safe to say the prolific star hasn’t exactly been lazy since.
First teasing their return last year, the advent of a new album proper should yield the obvious question that’s floored so many bands attempting a second spin of the wheel: coming back to a musical landscape that’s changed immeasurably in the interim, where do they fit in 2019? And yet, now as ever, The Raconteurs don’t really fit anywhere. Theirs is a union as progressive as a tin can on a piece of string, as zeitgeist-chasing as an old man playing shuffleboard; the beauty of The Raconteurs is in the timeless joy of hearing two world-class songwriters, cut from two very different sides of a similar cloth, come together to make something if not greater, then at least as good as the sum of their considerable parts. And in that sense, ‘Help Us Stranger’ succeeds, and then some.
If Jack White has always been the bigger star pull in this operation, then on the band’s third, the two frontmen stand perhaps on more equal footing. Of course, it’s the White Stripes legend who underpins the likes of ‘Live A Lie’ and ‘Only Child’ with fizzing fretwork and strange piano inserts, but it’s Brendan whose more major-key driven, simple melodies bring something fresh to the table. The sassy kiss-off of the Jack-led ‘What’s Yours Is Mine’ or the histrionic, wild-eyed fire of ‘Don’t Bother Me’ are classic White and make for easy highlights, but they’re also more familiar; having released solidly for years, we know what Jack can do. But it’s when the pair truly come together, on the stadium stomp of opener ‘Bored and Razed’ or the lighters-aloft ‘Now That You’re Gone’ that The Raconteurs remind exactly why there’s a place that still remains for them as a unit. Whether they continue ablaze or leave it another 10 years, it’s a place always worth returning to”.
I will round up soon. If you have not heard Help Us Stranger, then go and listen to it now. I am surprised that songs from it are not really played on the radio. With no filler or any weaknesses, this is a work that needs to be picked back up and shared. Take some time with Help Us Stranger and…
LISTEN to it now.