See Jack White’s Four-Song Set, Margo Price Duet on ‘Prairie Home Companion’
Saturday night marked Nickel Creek and the Punch Brothers mandolinist Chris Thile‘s first time hosting A Prairie Home Companion since its creator Garrison Keillor handed him the reins of the weekly variety radio show. For Thile’s maiden voyage as full-time host, Jack White visited Lake Wobegon to play a four-song set.
White performed two tracks from his recently released Acoustic Recordings 1998-2016 – the unreleased White Stripes track “City Lights” and an acoustic version of the Raconteurs’ “Carolina Drama,” with Thile sitting in on the latter – as well as a duet of White Stripes’ “I’m Lonely (But I Ain’t That Lonely Yet)” that co-starred White’s Third Man signee Margo Price.
For his final song of the evening, White and his band of stellar musicians –Lillie Mae Rische, Dominic Davis and Fats Kaplin – covered the Tom T. Hall-penned Bobby Bare hit “(Margie’s At) The Lincoln Park Inn.”
“I wanna really blow the doors off on the musical front,” Thile told Rolling Stone earlier this month of his plans for A Prairie Home Companion.
“I want the show to be a home for the breadth of the good music being made in the world. My musical output has been consistently acoustic, but my taste has not. I love everything. As long as it’s good, I’m in. If you’re sitting there going, ‘Well, these particular genres are the only genres I like,’ that’s like saying, ‘I only like books with this particular kind of cover.’ Because that’s all genre is. It’s a discussion of texture. In my mind, there’s this one ‘super genre,’ which is the only genre that matters, and that’s the super genre of good music.”