It's all about Jack

Play it: The Greenhornes Sewed Soles

This Queen City, Ohio garage blues band has found themselves playing soldout shows recently thanks to Jack White of the White Stripes asking them to open for them on their recent US tour.

To capitalize on that, V2 records put together this greatest hits album, which culls great garage blues tracks from their three albums, many 7"s, and an EP (Play it: East Grand Blues) from earlier this year (The White Stripes even covered a song off of the EP, "Shelter of Your Arms," as a b-side to their "Denial Twist" single.)

For Sewed Soles, rumpshaking rave-ups like "It's Not Real," "Lies" and "The End of the Night" are complimented nicely by the blue-eyed soul of songs like "Hold Me" and "Stay Away Girl," and all in all the tracks effectively cover the range of their sound. Now normally, bands don't warrant greatest hits compilations until they either breakup or move to another label, but The Greenhornes get the honor because of their unique "on the cusp" circumstances.

The Greenhornes started in '96, around the same time as The White Stripes, and found themselves up in Detroit a lot playing with White's outfit (and also playing with the likes of The Dirt Bombs and The Mooney Suzuki.) Their early British invasion (early Kinks, The Yardbirds) sound was a perfect match and a relationship between the revivalist bands was born. Recently, however, they've found themselves branching out from that sound, with incorporation of 60's Byrds-like harmonies. This is in part due to their new association with another Detroit artist, power-popper Brendan Benson, who produced their recent EP. (Benson, himself, has recently finished a highly anticipated project with Jack White, a band their calling The Raconteurs, which features Greenhorne members Jack Lawrence and Patrick Keeler as the rhythm section.)

The song "There is an End" was recently featured in the recent Jim Jarmusch movie Broken Flowers, and has Holly Golightly as the guest vocalist (Golightly also sang on The White Stripes' track "It's True That We Love One Another" from the 2003 album Elephant.) In addition, the Greenhornes rhythm section also was recently tapped by White to back Loretta Lynn on last year's excellent Van Lear Rose album (Play it), so they've been on quite a roll of late, hence this greatest hits comp to better introduce the world to their greatness.

tags: playlist, music, greenhornes, the white stripes, jack white, detroit, garage rock, brendan benson, loretta lynne