From the ACL Taping Program on September 17, 2006:
When four friends get together to make music, you expect the fun to show through. But when those friends are Jack White of The White Stripes, respected singer/songwriter Brendan Benson, and Jack Lawrence and Patrick Keeler of The Greenhornes you also expect something musically innovative. And with their debut release, Broken Boy Soldiers, The Raconteurs deliver rock that “sounds like they had as much fun making it as you're going to have listening to it” (E Online).The Raconteurs started when Detroit natives White and Benson got together and wrote “Steady, As She Goes.” This soon-to-be rock classic inspired the duo to put together a full band and record an entire album. They asked Lawrence and Keeler, who had worked with White and Loretta Lynn on her 2004 release, to provide bass and drums respectively in this rock ‘n’ roll supergroup.
All the members of this new band collaborated in the studio to create the 10 songs on Broken Boy Soldiers. “You’ve got to let the music dictate where you go,” said White in a Los Angeles Times interview. “When this band started, we never sat down and said, ‘This is what we want to do.’ The music could have gone any way. ... I love leaping into the unknown.”
Broken Boy Soldiers turned out to be a very successful leap, with critics praising the release as inventive, elegant and raucous. Spin wrote the CD is “the cool sound of hot days, fragrant smoke, and FM radio at ear-splitting volume” and Filter said “the music rattles your brain like no other and gets better with age.”
