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At 16, there were two moments in the film It Might Get Loud that I believed captured everything important about playing guitar, about rock and roll, about all music maybe. If interviews and his own testimony are to be believed, he’s constantly working and playing. I think Jack probably sees writing and performing as a religious enterprise. He was going to go into the seminary and become a priest, but decided on public school instead when he figured they wouldn’t allow a guitar amplifier in a seminary. There’s this great clip of him and Stephen Colbert trying to out-Catholic each other. Faith, if not religion, gets reframed for you when your life falls apart, which mine has done a handful of times. In high school I was an indignant atheist, my first few years of college a sort of humanist/nihilist. I joke often that if you’re raised Catholic it never really leaves you. It’s too late to try to go to church, but the idea crossed my mind. Jack White and Stephen Colbert face off Sunday, 10:15 am Right now “Little Bird” is playing, and I couldn’t be happier. I’ve spent the rest of the morning listening to what I’ve started calling The Little Suite, even keeping the party going in the shower by turning the speaker volume way up and putting my phone in the sink. But there it was, still piping into my ears! I was tickled.
![the white stripes the white stripes](https://www.lifeboxset.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/the-white-stripes.jpg)
Before I’d always run out of batteries or pulled out the earbuds in my sleep. I must not have turned off the repeat button from yesterday morning when I had my music on shuffle at work! I sat straight upright - it’s a small discovery, but I’ve always wondered if I could use the repeat function to listen to something through an entire night. What happened? Where am I? Who’s that singing? I woke up this morning sweaty and fearful, experiencing the kind of stress that, for me, always follows a night’s rest unpreceded by any bedtime routine. I don’t know what time it was when I woke up from my nap, but I distinctly remember thinking “fuck this song” (referring to “Little People”), giving up on the day, taking my meds, and going to bed fully clothed, boots and all. I don’t know that I’ve ever taken a nap that didn’t annoyingly get cut short, make me fitfully angry, or feel like a thousand-year cryosleep. Instead, I turned on and turned up a White Stripes playlist experiment I’d put together about a month ago.
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#The white stripes torrent#
I’d already listened to two new albums on the bus to and from work, and I would have liked to listen to more, but I’m for some reason incapable of seeing new music as a positive force that adds to my life instead I think of it in terms of an endless torrent that I can’t possibly weather, a to-do list that I’ll never catch up with. I wanted to do some reading or maybe play my recently reclaimed trumpet, but had the energy to do neither. Last night I came home from work thoroughly exhausted. What I’m saying is that after 40-some hours of listening, I have no answers. They don’t have much in common besides some of them taking a deconstructed approach to the band’s sound.
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Until a couple of days ago.Įvery White Stripes album has a song whose title is some variation of “Little _.” Like the band itself, the Little songs are remarkably variable. I haven’t listened to the Stripes in any appreciable volume for a long time. Sometimes I worry that I may have ruined them the way I ruined Aerosmith for myself. When I was in high school I could listen to album after album of the White Stripes on repeat. You stop defending your choice and you just say it. Like when you say a word repeatedly until it sounds like gibberish. If you say something is your favorite enough times over enough years you start to forget what that means. There are six songs and the whole thing runs about sixteen minutes. I’ve been listening to the same playlist for two days straight.