Jack White has released two new songs: ‘Hi-De-Ho’ and ‘Queen of the Bees’. ‘Hi-De-Ho’, a collaboration with Q-Tip, is taken from the first of White’s two upcoming albums, Fear of the Dawn, while ‘Queen of the Bees’ will appear on Entering Heaven Alive. Take a listen below.
‘Hi-De-Ho’ samples a song by Cab Calloway. “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,” White told Rolling Stone. “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.” He continued:
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?’”
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. 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 arrives April 8 via Third Man and includes the previously shared singles ‘Taking Me Back’ and ‘Fear of the Dawn’. Entering Heaven Alive, out July 22, features the track ‘Love Is Selfish’.
