"Entering Heaven Alive": Jack White's second release in 2022

In April of this year, Jack White took a plunge in Detroit’s massive Masonic Temple, not far from his childhood home. After inviting his longtime girlfriend Olivia Jean Markel on-stage to play The White Stripes’ Hotel Yorba, he proposed. Moments later, they were married in front of the crowd, a sequence so surprising and swift it even caught their officiant, Third Man co-owner Ben Swank, offguard. 

Still, it is now difficult to hear Entering Heaven Alive — White’s second album of 2022, the plainspoken rootsy counterpart to Fear Of The Dawn, released the day he exchanged vows — without thinking of a lover sorting out the terms and conditions of the budding romance he wants and even needs to last. These 11 songs map the mind of someone who has enjoyed success and its finer trappings, from money and power to a little family of his own, but is still searching for more: lasting love, shared happiness, a deeper contentment with life itself. If the delightfully madcap Fear Of The Dawn suggested a sonic berserker lighting to be free, Entering Heaven Alive is a plea to be bound to someone who mostly wants the same.

White, of course, never fancies this will be easy, given both his troubled past and busy present. During Love Is Selfish, he turns the inherited wisdom of Bible verse hokum on its head, admitting that his love isn’t necessarily patient or kind, that it does seek its own advantage. “I’ve been trying over the years to try and overcome these fears,” he sings, voice pitched slightly over an acoustic guitar that wants to frolic but instead sounds forever frustrated. “But nothing I come up with proves I can/And I work real hard to make you understand.” Failure isn’t just an option, then, it’s the expectation.

He gets flirty and lascivious during the ragtime update Queen Of The Bees, asking to hold hands in public and butter his paramour’s literal and metaphorical bread. “Oh lord, let them see,” he begs. But self-doubt plagues even this peppy confession, as he worries that he’s wasting her time or doomed to repeat past wrongs. 

Such fears wrap around the warm acoustic strums and ascendant keys of Please God, Don't Tell Anyone like barbed wire, spiking the blues-rock shuffle with White’s warnings about just how bad he has sometimes been. He’s stolen and cheated and sinned in uncountable ways, even though he believes it’s mostly been in service of someone else — a crying daughter, a screaming son, a dejected lover. “Have I proven myself to no one?” White wonders, just before his voice begins to break.

There is, of course, more to this burgeoning love than tortured self-flagellation. The dim lick of All Along The Way may sound swiped from some dark Delta dungeon, but White actually lifts from Hansel And Gretel and, uh, antiquated Florida agricultural practices to pledge his support and partnership. (Olivia Jean aptly plays bass and guitar here.) 

Its Wurlitzer-led chaser, Help Me Along, is a guileless and winning devotional that smartly acknowledges there’s work to be done, its rush of sweetness aside. “I'll keep nothing else from you”, he sings near the start, hinting at a prior fault. These five minutes feel like a march straight out of couple's therapy and to the altar — or, in the case of White and Olivia Jean, onto the stage.

The love story is only one of two primary threads here. This is, after all, perhaps the most mellow and settled LP of White’s career, its largely acoustic canter taking it from New Orleans back to Nashville, from occasional jaunts to the Brill Building to frequent hack porch jams. Recorded almost entirely at White’s home studio, with a small cast of veteran collaborators and pals, these 11 songs are built for theatres, not arenas, a rare retreat given White's public bravado. His guitar heroics, so riveting during Fear Of The Dawn, are almost entirely absent here. Aside from the sleek jazz winks and brief lysergic roar of I've Got You Surrounded (With My Love), a cosmic excursion that suggests Steely Dan taking Tom Waits for a test-drive, White sits back and picks, too contemplative now for paroxysms.

These slow burns seem good for White, who passed 45 around the time he was writing them. “Ask yourself if you are happy and then you cease to be,” he sings at the album’s start, paraphrasing the autobiography of political philosopher John Stuart Mill. Piano and drums suddenly lash against him, like a stentorian schoolteacher reminding him not to repeat the mistakes of his youth. Shut up, and just be.

White has lived his public life often seeking out some bleeding edge of rock music, sometimes stumbling badly. Even the seemingly primitive blues of The White Stripes were an exercise in ecstatic minimalism, in pushing a set of elemental binaries, like red versus white or guitar versus drums, to extremes. Fear Of The Dawn, then, showed White still had the itch to see how much he could twist rock's weird branches. But what is more basic and barer than falling in love and trying to figure out how not to fuck it up? That is the language of Entering Heaven Alive, or of walking into paradise with your dignity intact before it’s already too late.