Soaked in sexual tension and wrought with spontaneous bursts of dissonant combustion, The Dead Weather is framed upon a lit-fuse sense of danger and lawlessness that most bands fail at imitating.
Buoyed by mastermind Jack White's rhythmic flurries on the drums and multi-instrumental moonlighting, QOTSA guitarist Dean Fertita and Raconteurs' bass man Jack Lawrence, vocalist Allison Mossheart's stoned, dreamy vocals feign sedated softness one moment, searing flesh the next with a tigress roar and gut-punch bravado. These four sonic superpowers round out The Dead Weather - a high-octane passion collection of well-known influence and inflections that culminate in a mean, desert-buzz bastard blues strut.
On the eve of the release of Dead Weather's bombastic second album Sea of Cowards, we tracked down Alison at a recording studio in Michigan where she's currently holed up with Jamie Hince, her partner in The Kills, for the follow-up to 2008's fantastic Midnight Boom.
CraveOnline: How's the recording process for the Kills album coming so far?
Alison Mosshart: Good, really good. We've been here maybe three days now, but so far it's been great. We've been coming here on and off between Dead Weather tours, so to actually get a whole month of something straight is just great.
CraveOnline: With such a relentless schedule, it has to feel strange to sit still for five minutes. How long have you been working on the Kills record?
Alison Mosshart: Not very long. I think the total studio time we've had with this has been about a month and a half. Just writing, pre-production and stuff, but this is the real deal now - we're recording, so it feels really good.
CraveOnline: What differences are there in the creative process between the two bands?
Alison Mosshart: There's quite a bit of difference.The Dead Weather sort of write songs sitting in a room together, the four of us playing at the same time. Jamming things, someone throws in a little part or something and everyone feeds off of it. And within a couple hours we can have a song with lyrics and everything, finished. I don't know how it happens - it's sort of like magic. (laughs) I don't know. It's far from what I'm used to. Jamie and I, we kinda lock ourselves away and bring songs to each other, then we work on them together. But we each write songs before we come to the table. We write them and give them to each other as gifts.
CraveOnline: What wonderful gifts to give. Now for Sea of Cowards - did anyone approach the second Dead Weather album with any agendas?
Alison Mosshart: No, not really, no. The second record kind of progressed in a good way - we wrote a lot of it on tour, so we were kind of in that live mode. Playing the stuff in front of people, testing out the songs in front of audiences, writing during soundcheck and accidentally coming up with stuff.... it all happened as part of the experience. It's heavier, it's louder and it's more for an audience. It kind of felt like that when we were writing it. We were in tour mode, and it kind of all happened at once, so I think that's the big difference to me between the first and the second one.
The first one, we were sitting in a room playing together, and we kept looking at each other, shocked, like where the fuck is all this music coming from? (laughs) So it was different like that. The first record, we didn't know what the hell was going on. We didn't even know it was going to be a record. We didn't know we were going to be a band until we were going to tour. And then a year later we've done all this stuff and been around the world a few times. So Sea of Cowards is more based on playing live, which is what we've been doing so much.
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CraveOnline: There's a greater sense of darkness and aggression on the album, a more jagged side that seemed to only be really hinted at in the first record. Was that something you consciously wanted people to get out of the experience this time around?
Alison Mosshart: We never really had any conversations about where we want to take the album, how we wanted people to think. I don't know, I think maybe we all just got to know each other better.
CraveOnline: That's clear from your interaction onstage, where in the span of a year the band has become so much tighter and more fluid.
Alison Mosshart: Yeah I think we've had some really beautiful moments throughout the whole thing. Because in the beginning, the shows were so exciting to us - for me, I really didn't know what the hell was going on. I didn't know what we were onstage, and I hadn't played with a full band in ten years. Where to stand? What to do? And looking at all this other gear onstage and all these people, it was all completely mindblowing to me, how to fit into that and what I'm supposed to do. And gradually that kinda... you work those things out, and the shows change and get more interesting.
But you know, if I see footage from those first shows, I can see my brain working, like 'Where am I?' (laughs) I think that's beautiful in itself, too, like the first time you ever play a song, sometimes it's the best because you don't know what you're doing and it's got this energy to it that's nervous and frightened and brave and all these different things. Wandering in the dark.
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CraveOnline: That energy certainly lends itself to a certain sexual tension onstage, particularly you and Jack when you share the mic and so on. How preconceived is that?
Alison Mosshart: No, nothing's preconceived, but for us, we've both spent a long time in a band with one other person of the opposite sex. And I think from years of that, it's a way of performing, and it always does twist things up when you throw a girl into a band. You level the playing field a little bit. Jack talks about that a lot, about how it changes everything in a room when you add a girl. It's like adding some weird chemical to a cup of water. And I think that's why I love playing music with boys, because you get to explore both sides of it. Jack can sing my songs from a woman's perspective, and I can sing his from a man's. You're changing things around, you're tricking yourself all the time as to what you mean by it. It makes it more interesting, and definitely more interesting to perform, because you've got a lot to play with. But none of this stuff is preconceived, I think it just comes from understanding the situation. I definitely don't think about it when I'm up there. These things come naturally at this point.
CraveOnline: How does the power shift work when the guy playing drums steps up to the mic? Does it feel like a bit of a game, to adhere to the new atmosphere shift onstage in the middle of the set?
Alison Mosshart: I think it balances it out. I like it, I like that all those boys can play all those different instruments. It's fascinating to me. They jump all around like it's no big deal, and it's completely impressive to me. It's fun, it's fun to change up what's happening on the stage throughout the show. It breathes new energy into the set every time it happens. A power shift? I dunno, I hope there's all sorts of shifts going on. I hope it's totally fucked up and weird. The energy changes constantly, and that's sort of what keeps pushing it along. It doesn't get stale.
CraveOnline: Care to talk a bit about one or two of your favorite tracks on the album?
Alison Mosshart: I have to think about my favorite ones to play... I've really been liking "Gasoline" off the new one. That's a really hard one to play - it absolutely kills me.
CraveOnline: Kills you how?
Alison Mosshart: It just shreds my voice. Completely shreds me and basically makes me feel like I'm gonna faint. That, and "Hustle and Cuss". I just love it, there's such a groove to that song that's so much fun to play live. I think that's one of my favorite songs. And I also really love when Jack does "Blue Blood Blues" and I get to play keyboards for a minute. I get to dance around and feel like I get to come to the show. That's really nice.
CraveOnline: Other than singing, do you play anything on the album?
Alison Mosshart: Yeah, some shakers and stuff. I don't do any of the keyboards, I think Dean did all of the keys for the stuff that I actually play now, live. Mostly just singing and percussion. I don't think I played guitar on this one. I'm pretty sure. But it all kinda changes lives because Dean doesn't have six arms, and so I kinda have to play some of his parts, which I really love doing.
CraveOnline: How involved are you in the creative process outside of the music? As far as album art, merchandise and so on.
Alison Mosshart: All of us have loads of ideas for stuff like that. Every single image that you see has either been approved by us or suggested by us. Ideas for merch and stuff, we've just been coming up with ideas for things that we'd actually want. And art, Rob Jones has been doing the art but that's a really long process and we're completely involved in that, telling what we want and how we want it to look, and it goes back and forth quite a few times. I mean, Jack and I have sat down and mocked up record sleeves and stuff, and told him this is what we want, and then Rob Jones would make it really, really perfect.
Find out more on Alison at the official Dead Weather website.
