Song Premiere: Brooke White's Jack and White Duo Covers 'It Must Be Love’
Many American Idol fans remember songstress Brooke White from her inventive Season 7 covers of Pat Benatar and the Police, but a major highlight of her post-Idol career came around 2011-2012, when she formed the duo Jack and White with singer-songwriter Jack Matranga and released three excellent EPs of breezy indie-folk-pop.
Now Jack and White are finally back with a new full album, Lost, out Nov. 13 via Brooke’s June Baby Records – and while eight of its songs are lilting, lovely originals, one of the disc’s standout tracks is another cover bearing Brooke’s distinctive style, premiering today on Yahoo Music’s Reality Rocks: “It Must Be Love,” penned and recorded by Labi Siffre in 1971 and popularized by Madness in 1981.
“We didn’t write this one; it is a cover from the 70s by Labi Siffre – a guy we’d never heard of and a song we’d never heard of,” says Brooke. “We didn’t record it with the intention to put it on the album. We were just looking for cool old songs we could make modern, and found this tune. One listen in and we all loved it, so we decided to give it a whirl in our Tuesday night session. It was a fun one to cut. It’s definitely the happiest, sunniest, poppiest song on the record. We just had to include it. Plus, my dad loves it!”
(photo: Bryan Dale)
Explaining why it took three years for Jack and White to regroup after such a prolific start, Brooke tells Yahoo Music: “I had a baby, and Jack and White hit the back burner. We didn’t know what the future held for the band. I got busy with motherhood and my YouTube channel ’The Girls With Glasses,’ while Jack was working on some of his own musical projects. After a year or so we both started feeling the itch to write again, and just started there with no concrete plans or expectations.
"We thought maybe we could start writing some songs in the park. So we wrote a handful of them over the summer of 2013. We went in the studio with my guitar player, Kevin Haaland, who also is a great producer, and we put down the first couple of tracks. Then the idea was that maybe we could maybe write some tunes for film and TV. Little by little, our new catalog of songs started to grow. We also were set up on a songwriting session with a guy who did a remix of [the 2012 song] ‘Night After Night’” for us, Chris Qualls. Chris had a writing partner, Eric Straube; we all hit it off and started writing songs on Tuesday nights in Echo Park. That’s where we wrote and recorded the other half of the record. Here we are, over three and a half years later since our last release, and we realized that we had nearly a full-length record on our hands that we were ready to put out there into the world. It took a while to get here, but we feel pretty good about it.“
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