Jack White channels Cab Calloway with Q-Tip on the rocker’s new song “Hi-De-Ho,” the latest single from his new album Fear of the Dawn, out April 8.
White recently spoke to Rolling Stone about the track for our April issue. “I just heard that Cab Calloway song on the radio in the kitchen one day and I thought, ‘I love that song, and it’s just so powerful.’ I said, “You know what would be great? It’d be great to sample that scatting that Cab Calloway does on there and have that scatting go along with a drumbeat,’” White said.
“So I sampled it and then just played a drumbeat that seemed to go along with it and then I grabbed a bass and I wrote a bassline for that drum beat and on and on it went. And then pretty soon I thought, ‘Man, this is so interesting. I wonder if Q-Tip would find something interesting about this?’”
While the partnership might seem unlikely, the White Stripes rocker and A Tribe Called Quest rapper had collaborated before, with Q-Tip joining White onstage to perform Tribe’s “Excursions” at a Madison Square Garden concert in 2015.
“Five minutes later, [Q-Tip] sent me back his own scatting on top of it. I love synthesizing different moments, different areas of music, different time periods,” White continued. “The best part about it all is everybody I played to kept thinking that Cab Calloway was me. And I thought, ‘No, it’s obviously not me. Do I actually sound like that?’ So that was bizarre.”
Fear of the Dawn is the first of two albums that White will release in the coming months; Entering Heaven Alive will arrive two months later on July 22. White will release a Third Man-pressed seven-inch single of “Hi-De-Ho” on April 9 at the second of his sold-out album release shows at Detroit’s Masonic Temple. He’ll then embark on his Supply Chain Issues Tour in support of the LPs.
From Rolling Stone US
