When Jack White was a kid, he misheard "Salvation Army" as "Seven Nation Army," which is how he got the title for this song. White will often take a distinctive phrase he finds interesting and use it as a song title. "
Rag And Bone" is another good example.
This song deals with The White Stripes' rising popularity and the negatives that came with it. After White came up with the riff, he devised a storyline in which a protagonist comes into town and all his friends are gossiping about him. "He feels so bad he has to leave town, but you get so lonely you come back," said White. "The song's about gossip. It's about me, Meg and the people we're dating."
"Seven Nation Army" has one of the most famous basslines in music, but it wasn't created with a bass. The White Stripes didn't have a bass player, so Jack White played the riff using a guitar with an octave effect to sound like a bass.
The music video was directed by the team of Alex Courtes and Martin Fougerol, who went on to make U2's "
Vertigo." It uses lots of clever compositing, with each shot emerging from the background framed by a triangle in constant forward progression. It picked up the MTV Video Music Award for Best Editing but also gained a reputation as one of the most effective motion-sickness-inducing devices since the invention of spinning carnival rides.
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Jack White devised the riff at a soundcheck before a show at the Corner Hotel in Melbourne, Australia, on January 29, 2002. Jack White recalled to Rolling Stone: "There's an employee here at Third Man named Ben Swank, and he was with us on tour in Australia when I wrote that song at soundcheck. I was playing it for Meg and he was walking by and I said, 'Swank, check this riff out.' And he said, 'It's OK.' [Laughs] He added: "I didn't have lyrics for it until later on and I was just calling it 'Seven Nation Army' - that's what I called the Salvation Army when I was a kid. So that was just a way for me to remember which one I was talking about, but it took on a new meaning with the lyrics."
The White Stripes were the duo of Jack and Meg White, who formed the band in 1997 a year after they got married. By 1998, Jack had two other bands that were getting more attention in the Detroit area (The Go and Two Star Tabernacle) but he fell out with both groups and set his focus on The White Stripes.
By the time they released their debut album in 1999, Jack and Meg were separated. When they released their second album in 2000, their divorce was finalized. None of this hurt their musical chemistry. Meg was happy to let Jack set the musical direction - he did the songwriting and played most of the instruments while Meg held down the drums (he started out as a drummer and taught Meg how to play). Her unrefined drumming style became a hallmark of their sound and complemented Jack's unruly guitar and vocals very well.
Unlike most musical couples who have gone through a breakup (we're talking about you, Fleetwood Mac!), there's no trace of their relationship tribulations in their songs. In fact, they claimed to be brother and sister until an enterprising reporter found their marriage certificate in 2001.
The group released their sixth and final album, Icky Thump, in 2007 and played their last concert that year. By the time they announced their breakup in 2011, Jack had two other bands going: the Raconteurs and The Dead Weather. Meg retreated from the public eye.
In keeping with the seven (7) figure that is a distinctive, distinguishing and essential characteristic of this track, the riff consists of seven notes that are repeated in the same order throughout the song.
With this song, The White Stripes rose from the underground to become a band your mom might have heard of. Their first three albums were released on a Detroit-based indie label, but that third one,
White Blood Cells (2001), got them on MTV with a clever Lego video for "
Fell in Love With A Girl," and word started getting out. The major label V2 signed the band and re-released the album, giving them big-time promotion and distribution for the first time. "Seven Nation Army" was the first single from their next album,
Elephant. It didn't set the world on fire when it was released, peaking at just #76 in the US, but it showed serious staying power and became an iconic track thanks to its uses in sporting events.
In the video when Jack White points to his hand as he begins the third verse, he's showing you where he is from. The state of Michigan is shaped like a mitten and people in the state often point to a spot on their hand when asked where they are from.
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Italian soccer fans latched onto this song as their national team played to victory in the 2006 World Cup. Fans would often chant the guitar riff at games and victory celebrations, and the song re-entered the Italian charts as a result, hitting #3. To win the World Cup, Italy had to defeat seven different nations.
Jack White was delighted. "Nothing is more beautiful in music than when people embrace a melody and allow it to enter the pantheon of folk music," he said.
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This song, along with the rest of the Elephant album, was recorded on analog equipment over 50 years old at Toe Rag Studios, which were set up in Hackney, east London in 1991 as a strictly analog (or as they write, analogue) enterprise using only pre-1960 studio equipment. On the album, it states: "No computers were used during the writing, recording, mixing or mastering of this record."
The success of Elephant established Toe Rag as a trendy antidote to digital music-making.
The song was big in the summer of 2003. For the next year, The White Stripes were pretty much the epitome of cool. They were brimming with indie cred at a time when that was still a big deal - not only did they pay their dues, they turned down endorsements. It also helped that they had a striking, unified visual look constrained to the colors white, red and black. And it wasn't every day you saw a two-piece rock band with a female drummer.
They earned mentions in the movies School Of Rock and Freaky Friday; they became favorites on irreverent late night talk shows, especially Conan O'Brien's; Jack showed up in the movie Cold Mountain and dated Renee Zellweger, who starred in the film; he and Meg got their own segment in the movie Coffee And Cigarettes, which also features cool cats like Tom Waits, Iggy Pop, RZA and GZA from Wu-Tang Clan, and Bill Murray. Couples dressed up as them for Halloween.
All the while, they stayed grounded and aloof, standing out from the fame-hungry pop stars of the era. As celebrities got more accessible and music more computerized, The White Stripes bucked the trends, which fans found quite refreshing.
According to Jack White, neither the labels in America or in the UK wanted to put this song out as the first single. They eventually relented and it became the White Stripes' first Hot 100 hit in the US and Top 10 entry in Britain. In an interview with XFM, White said: "I can think back to when Elephant came out. I wanted to put 'Seven Nation Army' out as a single. The label in England and the label in America both didn't want to. They wanted to put 'There's No Home For You Here' [out], can you imagine not putting 'Seven Nation Army' out as a single?"
The White Stripes had to cancel a bunch of shows in the summer of 2003 when Jack White needed surgery to repair a finger he damaged in a car accident. White was worried that fans would think he was just begging off the shows, so he posted a video to the band's official site showing the actual procedure in vivid detail. As the surgical team do their work, "Seven Nation Army" plays in the background.
The soul-pop singer Marcus Collins released a cover of "Seven Nation Army" as his debut single on March 4, 2012. Collins first entered the music business when he replaced Anthony Hannah in the boyband Eton Road, following their exit from the third series of The X Factor. Collins remained with the five-piece for 10 months, initially to pursue a solo career, before moving back to his hometown of Liverpool, where he got a job as a hairdresser. In 2011, Collins auditioned as a solo artist for the eighth series of The X Factor, eventually finishing as runner-up to girlband Little Mix. After the final he signed a record deal with RCA Records, and released this song. Collins' self-titled debut album was executive produced by Gary Barlow, who was the singer's mentor on X Factor.
Collins' more soulful arrangement is based on the version recorded by French singer-songwriter Ben l'Oncle Soul in 2010.
The cover debuted at #9 on the UK singles chart. It was not the first White Stripes track to be covered as a pop-soul offering and made into a UK hit. Their 2002 single "Fell in Love With A Girl" was reworked by Joss Stone as "Fell In Love With A Boy" for her debut single, which peaked at #18 in 2004.
In addition to Marcus Collins, artists to cover this song include The Flaming Lips, Virginia Belles, and The Oak Ridge Boys.
Jack White told
The Independent that the main riff was the riff he planned to use if he ever got asked to write the theme to the next James Bond film. He decided that wasn't likely to happen, so he went ahead and used it in "Seven Nation Army." Five years later, he was asked to write
the theme song for the Bond film
Quantum of Solace.
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The song is very popular at sporting events around the world, but particularly in European football stadia. Around the UK, fans sing different words to the riff. In Falkirk it's "We're the navy blue army," while in Oldham they chant the less imaginative "We're following Oldham." Meanwhile in Germany, every time Bayern Munich score up to about 2019, a remixed version of the song played.
"Seven Nation Army" earned the Grammy Award for Best Rock Song, and Elephant won for Best Alternative Music Album. These were the first of four awards the group won in total; Jack White won more with various other projects.
The website
Consequence of Sound named this as their top rock track of the noughties. Their explanation: "Remains as vibrant and as popular today as it did in 2003, resonating on a daily basis from record players and football stadiums alike. And like any rock'n'roll anthem, White's should continue to be equally vibrant and as popular for an eternity to come."
The Salvation Army has featured in a number of songs, the best known being The Beatles'
Strawberry Fields Forever, which is about a Salvation Army home in Liverpool where John Lennon used to go. Two UK hit singles from the 1970s,
Long Live Love by Olivia Newton-John, and Banner Man by Blue Mink featured the church organization as a central theme. Among the songs The Salvation Army has cropped up in as an incidental motif are
Life In a Northern Town by The Dream Academy and Leonard Cohen's
Suzanne.
Following a speech by Jeremy Corbyn at the UK's Wirral Live music festival on May 20, 2017, supporters in the audience began to recite the Labour leader's name to the tune of the song's riff. This was repeated on several occasions in the run-up to the British 2017 general election 2017, and continued to be a popular chant for a number of months afterwards.
"I've heard about it but I don't know anything about Jeremy Corbyn," White told Q Magazine apologetically. "I don't really know who he is. I've been depressed about politics since Trump came on the scene so I kind of lost interest in the world."
Jack White often closes his solo sets with this song. "It feels kind of like you just have to play it at the end of the show," he told
Rolling Stone in 2018. "I've done it all over the set, and it just has that sort of closing thing to it, especially when there's an outdoor, festival vibe."
The final challenge on Season 31 of the reality competition series The Amazing Race had contestants assemble a drum kit at Hart Plaza in Detroit while about 100 musicians played "Seven Nation Army" over and over again at high volume.
Initial plans were to stage the event at Belle Isle Park in Detroit, but the permit was denied. Earlier in the episode, contestants had to press records at Jack White's Third Man Records plant.
