Jack White

Rock’s shrewdest renaissance man honed his chops humbly: playing open mics in Detroit’s late-’90s underground scene. By day, Jack White (born in 1975) was reviving old furniture as Third Man Upholstery. By night, he and his then-wife, Meg, were channeling vintage punk, rock, and blues into visceral analog recordings. While The White Stripes undoubtedly changed the face of rock in the 21st century, White continues to transform it. The singer/axeman has lent grit and swagger to The Raconteurs and The Dead Weather, but his vision as a solo artist is most expansive. White is as much an excavator of old sounds as he is an insatiable experimenter. “Every time I go in, I’m trying to do something I haven’t done before,” he tells Apple Music. That ambition resonates through the high-voltage attacks of his 2012 debut, Blunderbuss, and into the roiling brew of rock, blues, country, gospel, electronic, hip-hop—even some digital wizardry—that the Third Man Records impresario continues to concoct. Still, the primitive power of his earliest material remains wholly unchanged.