Take Me With You When You Go

Album: Blunderbuss (2012)
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Songfacts®:

  • White closes his debut solo album, Blunderbuss, with this multi-tracked, psychedelic hoedown, which finds him singing of a man who, "Can't catch a breath or a break. Like a guy who is strangled or begging for help." The female backing vocals are provided by Ruby Amanfu of "Love Interruption" fame, Laura Matula, who played piano on the former White Stripes frontman's James Bond collaboration with Alicia Keys, "Another Way to Die" and White's former wife, the British model and singer-songwriter Karen Elson.
  • White explained to Mojo why he utilized female backing vocals on many of Blunderbuss' tracks. "Some songs might sound like the male character is upset at some woman, (but) I can't sing from a woman's point of view, so I fall back on the standard blues way of male versus female, or male versus the world. I use that as my door into the song."
  • Speaking with KROQ's Stryker, White explained this song contains the only portion of Blunderbuss that wasn't written at the time of the making of the album. "There was only one thing that had been around for a long time which was the opening piano line to the song 'Take Me With You When You Go,'" he said. "It's a piano thing I've been playing for like ten, twelve years… every time I sit down at the piano I play this thing. I always thought it was some song that I heard somewhere, a big band radio station from the 40s. I hadn't heard it in ten years so I figured maybe it's mine and I finally recorded it."
  • Jack White was always going to make this Blunderbuss' closing track. He told UK newspaper The Sun: "The sequence is my favourite part of making an album. 'Take Me With You When You Go' (with its rocking finale) could only go at the end. There's nowhere else it would fit. It's so funny when songs tell you where they should go."
  • Nashville-based singer-songwriter Brooke Waggoner played electric piano on this track. She told Uncut: "This was always one of my favourite songs to play live; it has one of the most enjoyable piano licks I've ever played. And the vocals that come in around a mark are insane. The ending is epic and a Led Zeppelin for our generation, with Jack's original flavor, of course. In the studio, it kept me on my toes and made me think and feel, which doesn't always happen for me."

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