Even over two decades later, Jack White still can’t believe it actually happened.
Sitting in a bright office back in his hometown of Detroit, White is reflecting on Van Lear Rose, Loretta Lynn‘s award-winning 2004 album that he produced, and that helped bring a whole new generation of fans not just to the queen of Butcher Holler, Kentucky, but to the genre of country music itself.
“I could talk about this record forever and not get bored with it,” White says, getting close to tears numerous times. Today, the brilliant Van Lear Rose gets another life with a newly remastered reissue (alongside an additional track, “Just to Have You Back”) via White’s Third Man Records, also returning to streaming for the first time in seven years. Its impact, though, has never wavered.
When Van Lear Rose was released in 2004, mainstream country music was fresh off a post-9/11 shift: artists like the Chicks and Shania Twain fell off playlists to make way for patriotic-skewed, male-dominated lineups. Though some modern legends, like Johnny Cash, were undergoing a cultural resurgence, the genre was nowhere close to a mainstream embrace. Country may be “cool” now, but two decades ago it was far more often the butt of stereotypes and cheap jokes.
White, however, was a longtime Lynn fan. The White Stripes album White Blood Cells was dedicated to her, and he and bandmate Meg White had routinely covered her song “Rated X” in live shows. Lynn had even invited the duo out to her home in Hurricane Mills, Tennessee, to thank them, cooking homemade chicken and dumplings, and chatting around the kitchen table. It was a transformative experience for them all. “[Lynn] went up to the attic and got Meg a red dress,” White says. “Meg was crying, we couldn’t believe it. It was so kind of her to do that and embrace us. We were nowhere near the neighborhood of someone she should know about and care about.”
As they ate, Lynn casually mentioned that she might want to make another record soon. White remembers throwing his name in the ring.
“I put my hand up like some ridiculous notion while I’m eating chicken, saying, ‘Well, if you ever need a producer for that record, just give me a holler,’” he recalls. “I’m thinking, ‘no fucking way they were going to pick me. Are you kidding me? This is in Nashville.’ And Loretta did, and she trusted me somehow.”
You can hear that trust on Van Lear Rose: Lynn in White, who was comfortable with him bringing along his own very non-session player band that included Patrick Keeler and Jack Lawrence of the Greenhornes (and, eventually, the Raconteurs), and leaning into his own musical signatures. And White, of course, in Lynn, choosing only songs she had written and often letting her voice exist with little instrumental accompaniment, as if he wanted to push the lyrics to the forefront and let everything else take a back seat — but also trusting it could weather a sonic risk or two. They met together on “Portland Oregon,” a masterpiece of a duet that failed to make an impact on country radio, but took home a Grammy award, as did the album. The experience moved White to relocate to Tennessee, where his label and venue, Third Man Records, helped to reshape how the world views Nashville and the music industry itself by prioritizing analog releases, intimate live shows, and boosting artists, like Margo Price, who had been eschewed by Music Row.
Van Lear Rose stands as not just a catalyst for White’s future career, and Lynn’s cultural reappraisal, but a defining personal moment for the 51-year-old rock icon (he was just 28 when the album was recorded, to Lynn’s 71).
“It’s nice when you start realizing you’re part of something that was meant to be,” White says. “You don’t realize it at first, but as you get it halfway through, you’re like, ‘Oh wow, neither of us are in control of this.’ This is just coming out.”
Jack White and Loretta Lynn at the 2005 Grammy Awards.
ROBYN BECK/AFP/Getty Images
Van Lear Rose not only introduced so many people to Lynn and the world of her music, but also to country music, too, and helped change their perceptions, or misperceptions, about the genre. Looking back, talk to me about how you view that impact now.
It was astounding. It was the kind of job to be lucky enough to be given, that it wouldn’t have mattered to me if nobody ever heard it, or I had to pay my own money to come to that job every day. The fact that she was even open to the idea was outstanding and life-affirming. It brought me to tears. That it came out and it resonated with people — and younger people who hadn’t heard of her yet — that was all just icing on this giant cake. Those types of records, where it’s somebody who hasn’t made a record in a long time, or maybe somebody younger is working with them, those happen quite often in Nashville, especially. And a lot of times you don’t even realize that they happened, sadly. So this one was caught in a beautiful storm where she hadn’t recorded an album of original songs in a long time, and I was in the middle of the White Stripes absorption into the mainstream from the garage-rock world. It was perfect timing.
For seven years, this record wasn’t available to stream. Why did it feel like the right time to bring it back?
I don’t even know why it ever left streaming. You’d have to talk to the Loretta Lynn Estate about that [A rep for the family tells Rolling Stone they are “so excited for the release of a project that Loretta loved so much”]. But anytime would’ve been the right time to bring it back because of how beautiful Loretta is. There’s a secondary beauty to the record, too, because it wasn’t done by the Nashville rules of how you should release a record like that, or how you should record or produce a record. All those things were not done according to those modern plans of country music. I remember I was in an airport, and I think it was Jerry Lee Lewis’ guitar player who was sitting next to me waiting for our flight home from the Grammys after Loretta won. And he’s saying it’s pretty hilarious that Loretta got nominated for five country Grammys and not any country music awards that year. It just showed you that it was two different ways of looking at what country music was or could be at the time. Nashville radio wasn’t interested in playing these songs. Meanwhile, in this other world of America, people were embracing it and giving it five-star reviews and just rediscovering Loretta again and loving her for it. So it was pretty wild. And I think that’s always been the interesting part of Nashville, and, in a way, a beautiful part of Nashville, because there’s a business side to things, and there’s a big heart and realistic roots side in the same town, fighting for attention and fighting for territory. It just made it more important and more interesting to other people who would’ve never given Loretta’s music or country music the time of day.
That’s really interesting to think about: the fact that it wasn’t embraced by country radio or institutions almost gave it a little bit of a cosign for people who were leery of what that world maybe meant, and helped them feel welcome.
One day I might write a book about that, the different sides of that interplay with art meeting business, because we have such a cross section of that at Third Man Records, too. Ever since I’ve had my upholstery shop when I was younger, this has always been a part of my territory, to figure out these small little corridors where art meets business, and figuring out how to make that into something beautiful. Loretta used to say, “I have 14 songs banned by country radio!” I always thought that was such a powerful thing to say, and say with pride, you know what I mean? The same thing happened to Johnny Cash, same thing happened to Hank Williams, same thing happened to Elvis Presley. It’s worthy of a book, and I would love to attack that one day and tackle the different angles of that, because it’s so interesting.
I’d love to read that book. You became a fan of Lynn as a teenager, watching Coal Miner’s Daughter, and dedicated White Blood Cells to her. Do you remember what it was that drew you to her music? Was it as a lyricist?
The film and the acting in the film I will give the most credit to, when I was younger. Because we didn’t really have country music around us in Detroit in our neighborhood, or our family. Everybody in the neighborhood listened to hip-hop and rap, and our family listened to rock & roll and blues and some country like Roger Miller and Johnny Cash, but we didn’t have a Loretta Lynn record in the house. So the movie was my first exposure to her, and that just grew and grew. Being with Meg and the White Stripes, you’re exposed to this different level of sexism towards female musicians and artists on stage. I was exposed to it through [Meg], to the point where, finally, when we were doing press for the Van Lear Rose record, I was telling people that my opinion was that Loretta Lynn is the greatest female singer-songwriter of the 20th century. And they’re like, “Well, back that up with evidence!” Even the most feminist folks didn’t have the lyrical content and the song titles that were raising that flag higher than anybody else like she did. She was getting away with murder right in front of everybody’s face: songs about the birth control pill, about “don’t come home a-drinking with loving on your mind.” I mean, that’s hardcore feminism, at the perfect time. Just outstanding.
And since then, you’ve intersected with country and roots music in so many different ways: covering Dolly Parton’s “Jolene,” producing Wanda Jackson, putting out Margo Price’s debut solo record, Midwest Farmer’s Daughter, on Third Man. But it was this experience with Lynn, someone you’d admired for years, that officially brought you move to Nashville for good, right?
It’s wild to think. I mean, on the first White Stripes 7-inch we ever did, the B-side was a Marlene Dietrich song. We came out of the gate making sure people knew that we weren’t just this punk blues thing. We had lots of different things happening. We had covered “Rated X,” and Meg White sang it onstage when we performed it. So we had that kind of history. And then when we dedicated White Blood Cells to Loretta, that was, in the garage-rock world, a strange thing to do. Like, who now? But she meant a lot to us. She was an inspiration to us for years, and especially at that time period for me and Meg. We were listening to her box set on the road in the van. We had the four-CD set. We were just plowing through that on the road driving to Montana and whatnot on tour that year before. And then standing on the Grammy stage with her, who would’ve thought that was going to happen? It was embraced, not in an odd way, to the point where we were asked, “Are you guys going to do another record?” And Loretta goes, “Oh, I’d love to.” And I was reticent and scared. I said, “Man, Loretta, I don’t know how we can. We can’t top this record.” And she goes, “Well, we can’t top it, but we could do something underneath it.”
Amazing. There’s a clip of you both accepting the Grammy Award for Best Country album, and it’s such a funny, beautiful moment where she’s just trying to get you to come to the mic and speak. And you can just see your relationship come through the screen, and the mutual respect.
It was great. I haven’t seen it since then, but man, I remember it being wild how happy she was. And driving to the Grammys in a limo with her, she pulled a pack of Big Red chewing gum out of her brassiere and handed me a piece of it, split a piece with me. It was just a great experience all around.
Let’s talk about the Van Lear Rose recording sessions. You were in East Nashville, over a fairly condensed period of time, with a band you assembled. How did you get the creative process rolling?
Before we started recording, [Lynn] invited me out to her house, and this time it was just me and her, so that was very special. At this time, I haven’t really been around that many famous people like that either, let alone amazing songwriters. This is wild territory for me. She said, “Well, let’s work on something.” She pulled out one of those little cassette decks, and it wasn’t working. She goes, “Jack, maybe can you get this working?” I took a look and opened up the back of the batteries, and it was completely corroded. This was a recorder that had not been used probably since 1977 or something. She just said, “Well, we’ll remember what we’re doing!” She took me to her bedroom, and she had a tanning bed. Oh my God, it looked like a coffin with a sheet over it. And under the tanning bed was hundreds of legal pads of paper full of songs. And we randomly pulled out a few, and the first 10 things we pulled out, that’s the album.
What was the energy like in the studio? Was she immediately open?
We started and I thought, “There’s no way. This sounds too good. There’s no way this is going to make it to a record and get released. There’s no way. Her family’s not going to like it. Loretta’s going to change her mind. Her manager’s going to say this is not working out. The label is going to say this is too strange or country radio won’t play this, whatever. Something’s going to happen where this is not going to come out.” I just had that feeling like, “Let’s just record as many songs as we can before it’s over with.” I had that notion. I was definitely not coming in cocky though, like, “Oh yeah, this is going to be great. This is going to be shooting fish in a barrel.” I was worried. Am I going to be able to bring something to her? Am I going to be able to inspire her, or bring her songs to life the way she would like to hear them? I had no idea what she was hoping to hear. And she taught me a lot about how she had been produced in the past by Owen Bradley and all those folks. To be included in that history was outstanding opportunity… [chokes up]…it was not lost on me.
One of the most powerful things about this record is how neither of you left behind your own distinct style — instead, they come together brilliantly. I’m thinking of a song like “Portland Oregon.” How did she settle in with the band and you?
Somebody was tapping her on the shoulder, man, or there was an inner light inside of Loretta that was embracing what was being laid down. I mean, we did it on eight-track tape, too, so we weren’t overdubbing and multi-tracking things to death or anything like that. This was coming out natural. And “Portland Oregon” is a great example because the whole intro, that was just me trying to riff with the band all on the chord C, the first chord of the song. I didn’t take any writing credit or wanted any. I didn’t want to write with Loretta. I just wanted to bring her stuff to life. In her pantheon of music, that introduction is very strange, and I didn’t know she was going to like that. But she loved it. Why did she? I still don’t know why. I mean, thank God she did. That might be the longest intro she ever had before she uttered a word. So, pretty funny.
It works so well because, when you finally reach her voice, it’s almost like you were rolling out the red carpet. For fans that knew you from the White Stripes and less of Lynn, you’re beckoning them into her world.
Well, I was fighting the whole time to get my name out of this. I didn’t want my photo on the back cover. I didn’t want to be in the video with her. I didn’t want my name in the press. I just wanted this to be a Loretta Lynn album, but everyone kept trying to push that to keep happening. And “Portland Oregon” became, “You guys should do a duet.” I don’t know if this was coming from Loretta or her manager or whatever. I mean, even when I was mixing it, I was mixing my voice down lower because I felt it was disrespectful to be as loud as Loretta in the mix. But what was also beneficial at the time was both Loretta and “Jack White” were getting to be seen in different light, because people in the mainstream only knew this one project of mine, White Stripes. And it was beneficial that this didn’t come out and it’s like, Loretta Lynn singing over White Stripes songs. That would’ve been a big mistake, and a tragedy for us both.
Do you think we’ll see you producing another country album down the line?
I’m not that interested in producing people anymore, because the younger generation doesn’t really need it. I think people come up recording in their bedrooms on their laptops now, so they’re a lot more adept at knowing what compression and reverb and delay is. They know what all these tools are. They’ve come up with it. Where it used to be I could be very helpful to somebody because they’re like, “Hey, I’m just a guitar player. I don’t know what all this studio garble is,” and that you could help them navigate. But it’s rarer now to find somebody who doesn’t know a lot about production from their teenage years on, because of Pro Tools and computers. I don’t really like being part of a project unless I can really bring something to the artist. So, I just have found over the last few years, it’s rarer for me to find a zone there where it makes sense. But if something comes up that feels like I can help, yeah, I’d be open-minded to it.
