Lazaretto
Jack White found the material in boxes in his attic. Short stories, poems, and plays he had written at age 19, forgotten for years. Some of it, he said, was garbage. He laughed while reading it, thought about throwing most of it away, then started hearing ways to push the worst of it toward something new. Those teenage writings became the backbone of Lazaretto, his second solo album, recorded at Third Man Studios in Nashville, Tennessee, and released on June 10, 2014. Today is the 12th anniversary.
The title track was released as a single on April 19, 2014, Record Store Day, pressed and sold the same day it was recorded at Third Man. White explained the song's concept to NPR. The character singing is not trading in the standard braggadocio of hip-hop, not claiming things he wishes were true. He is bragging about real accomplishments, real actions, things he has actually done. A lazaretto was a quarantine station, the kind of place a person with a contagious disease was once sent and held against their will. White took an obsolete word from the vocabulary of exile and made it feel like it had always belonged in rock and roll.
"The character who's singing this song is bragging about himself, but he's actually bragging about real things he's actually accomplished and real things that he actually does, not imaginary things or things he would like to do."
The album debuted at number one on the Billboard 200, selling 138,000 copies in its first week. The vinyl pressing alone moved 40,000 copies, setting the record for highest single-week vinyl sales since SoundScan began tracking in 1991. That record stood for seven years before Taylor Swift's Evermore broke it in 2021. The Ultra LP version is its own achievement, a three-speed record with hidden tracks pressed beneath the inner labels, a hand-etched angel hologram in the dead wax, and a side that plays from inside out. At the 57th Grammy Awards, the title track won Best Rock Performance.