“I actually thought about adding a bass player to the White Stripes for a long time. At first it didn’t matter to us, because we just assumed that nobody would care about us or the kind of music we were making, so, whatever — we were just going to do what we wanted,” Jack White recalls while sitting in his rehearsal studio in Nashville, Tennessee. “As we got more popular, we started to be tempted to have a bass player, but people were liking what we were doing, so we didn’t want to change the formula and mess it up. Then, after a while, we would get insulted when people would mention it — like, ‘How dare you think we need a bass player or another band member!’” White laughs. As a guitar and drum duo, the White Stripes rose to remarkable fame and success with their garage-rock-meets-blues sound that relied on simple yet infinitely catchy riffs and an unapologetically stripped-down, low-fi sound. For Jack White, being such a high- to mid-frequency-driven songwriter