Their collaboration on this 22^nd of Bond movies will mark the first time the cinematic franchise uses multiple artists for its theme song. And if the seemingly random team lacks in chemistry, the title of its brainchild – “Another Way to Die” – gives promise that it won’t lack in morbidity. Mr. White, half of the celebrated alt-rock band The White Stripes, provided lyrics, production, and drumming to the song. Soulful piano player and crooner Ms. Keys, creator of songs such as “Rock wit U”, “Butterflyz”, and “My Boo”,provided the beautiful voice.

Jack White trained with famed bullfighter Dennis Borba for the video, according to the White Stripes site. Scenes were shot over two days in Artesia, Calif. and with a "visual urgency that brings the song's Spanish themes, frantic horns, and compulsive pounding rhythm to life." Ole!

Jack White, 27, resembled a punk Lord Byron: ghostly pallor, consumptive eyes, black newsboy cap pulled down over inky locks. Mute, chain-smoking Meg White, 28, looked like an Edward Gorey character with porcelain skin and raven hair. Both wore skin-tight red pants.

Mr. White was explaining why he had dedicated the Stripes' much anticipated fourth album, Elephant , "to the death of the sweetheart," as he put it.

"It seemed to keep coming up lyrically when I was writing the songs for this record. They revolve around this sweetheart or gentleman notion. I was coming to terms with a lot of it being very uncool nowadays, or very dead."

As Ms. White stared silently at her partner, Mr. White complained about 14-year-old girls who are tattooed and pierced, who look like "sailors" and talk the "ghetto" jive of hip hop. "People in other countries make fun of America for that Jerry Springer kind of attitude," he said. He recalled, with similar indignation, a reality TV show he saw on ABC recently- Are You Hot .

"People come on stage to be judged for 10 seconds and get off-'Yeah, I give your face a nine, I give your body a six. Goodbye,'" Mr. White said, a look of disbelief flashing across his pale face. "This whole judgment thing is coming down heavy," he said. There was a little Elvis cornpone creeping into his voice. "I mean, people are really into sitting in their living rooms and just saying, 'Oh, she's terrible, she shouldn't go out with that guy.' It's really getting pathetic. Where is that heading?"

It might seem odd for a band that's been credited with saving rock 'n' roll to be obsessing about the end of courtship in America, but it's not really. For all of their modernity, the White Stripes have always been a little bit old-fashioned, both with their art and their hype. Their music is an utterly convincing aw-shucks-look-what-we-just made-up-style rock, blues and folk that can clang with punk bravado or resonate like a gospel field recording.

Meanwhile, they have maintained an air of mystery and coquettishness that's part Victorian, part Warholian. The media is still not sure whether they're brother and sister, as they claim, or ex-husband and wife, as Time magazine reported as early as June 2001. When The Observer asked the duo if they are related, they both laughed knowingly and said in unison: "Of course!"

It's a pretty smart tack to take when you're dealing with a puritanical media that will judge you a nine one day, a three the next-spin 'em like a pinwheel.

Who's Dave Eggers?

Clearly, Mr. White has a Dave Eggers flair for grass-roots integrity and P.T. Barnum showmanship. The whole concept of a brother and sister who make classic rock with only guitar and drums and who wear only red-and-white uniforms might have seemed hokey, but instead they appear to have split the rock 'n' roll atom: their breakout album, 2001's White Blood Cells , sold 600,000 copies-not too shabby for a former furniture upholsterer and his "sister" from hard-scrabble Detroit.

His latest down-home concept was to release 500 advanced copies of Elephant -which will be officially released on April 15- to critics on vinyl only. "Any journalist who didn't own a record player, we didn't want them writing about us," he said. "The first time you listen to it, you couldn't just walk around and do laundry or whatever. Every few minutes you had to flip the side.

"It became an event ," Mr. White said.

At one point, the album was selling on eBay for $399, which generated stories in publications that might not have paid a lot of attention to the White Stripes.

Even Mr. Eggers is interested. Mr. White was also scheduled to be interviewed by the McSweeney's founder for a magazine that Mr. Eggers is launching called The Balloonist -a sort of younger, hipper Harper 's for the winsome set.

Mr. White, however, didn't seem to know who Mr. Eggers was.

"Dave Eggers … ?"

"The guy who wrote A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius ," his publicist told him.

"Oh, O.K.," he said. He still didn't know.

There are some who might say that Mr. White shares something with Mr. Eggers: The desire to be an antidote to the big, greedy, sin-filled world-Jack White is pure of heart! "Storytelling-wise, it's just getting honest about things," he said. "Maybe a lot of artists or writers or poets or whatever, maybe they find humor in the relaxation of rules and ethics. They find some humor in it. I just don't think it's funny. I don't think it's cool to not have morals. I don't think it's cool to just forget everything."

When Mr. White spoke about old-fashioned stuff like morals, he seemed to be going into character, as if he were a preacher or an old blues man-or "Jack White," the self-styled persona he adopts in blues numbers. "People think of how a family was in the 1940's," he said at one point during the interview. "'Oh, it was terrible because of religion and there was an ogre for a father yelling at everybody' or whatever. They're picking out all the bad qualities and saying, 'We've improved, we've advanced.' But perhaps those ways were closer to natural instincts about what it means to be male, what it means to be female, what it means to be a father or a mother.

"When these natural instincts start to get denied too much," he said, "you start saying, 'That's not truth any more. It's just not honest.' What are those things? What is male? What is female? What is natural? Those kind of questions are important."

Blood of the Lamb

On the upcoming record, Mr. White is full of this kind of fire-and-brimstone. The 14 songs on Elephant dig deeper into the epic language of the crossroads-old-school blood-of-the-lamb stuff-to cast out devils, curse enemies, defy gossips and cope with love and women. "It's quite possible that I'm your third man, girl," Mr. White sings on the track "Ball and Biscuit," "but it's a fact that I'm the seventh son."

This might seem like some bad white-boy aping if Mr. White didn't win you over by immediately dropping the heaviest fuzz-rock riff this side of Hendrix while yelling, "Now, lookout!"

The songs on Elephant -recorded in April of 2002 in London, held until now because White Blood Cells was still burning off the shelves-are more sophisticated than Mr. White's past efforts. There are more chords, more guitar solos, more notes , and the results are not as obviously radio-friendly as, say, " Fell in Love with a Girl," the group's punk-pop hit of 2001.

With fewer straight-ahead hooks, Mr. White takes bigger risks with the simple combo. "There's No Home for You Here," the third song, has a multitracked chorus right out of a Queen song, and "I Want to Be with the Boy … " is a white-soul piano ballad that sounds like Small Faces –era Rod Stewart. There's a Johnny-and-June-type song with British folk-popster Holly Golightly and Ms. White that play up the brother/sister/ex-wife conundrum. "Well it's true that we love one another," the Whites sing in unison, to an acoustic guitar and tambourine. Then Ms. Golightly chimes in: "I love Jack White like a little brother."

Ms. White even sings a song, a winsome flower of a song called "In the Cold, Cold Night."

The band's last album adhered to a kind of self-imposed Sharia Law of rock: no bass guitar, no guitar solos, no cover songs. The result was rock 'n' roll with a kind of righteous purity, one in which Mr. White sang of the "Holy Ghost," of wanting to get married "in a big Cathedral by a priest." (Before that, their second album was called De Stijl , after the Dutch art movement that adhered to principles of simplicity.)

On Elephant, however, the first thing you hear on the record is the thudding of a bass guitar and a drum beating out a sort of dance rhythm. What gives? Mr. White said the self-imposed rules came and went from album to album-he's not married to them. "I finally relaxed those rules," he said. "I don't know why."

But with Mr. White, nothing is as it appears. The bass note heard on the song-"Seven Nation Army," the first single-is actually something called an octave guitar, a plain old six-string with a bass string on it. It eventually unfolds into a heavy slide blues-rock thing, in which Mr. White promises to ditch the scene for "Wichita, far from this opera forever more."

K-Rock Culture

Mr. White said the band's recent fame has brought him in closer contact with the detested Are You Hot minions than he'd ever expected. He said it took some time, for example, to navigate the MTV and K-Rock culture, what with glossy hucksters clawing for a piece of him. "It was a lot of learning," said Mr. White. "It was us jumping into a world that, No. 1, we never thought we'd be in, and No. 2, never wanted to be in, really. So it was a point where we were forced to like, 'O.K., here's all this opportunity and chance and money right here for you, do you want it?'"

As it happens, the answer was yes. White Blood Cells broke first in the U.K., where the music press makes an incredible din. "After our initial anger for having all this press attention in England that we thought was going to destroy us, we said to ourselves, 'Well, we have to embrace it and make it work for us, and manipulate it to our advantage to make it work, because if not it's just going to just ruin the band and we're going to break up in two months.'"

That meant resisting a lot of temptation-including a reported $1 million offer from the Gap to shill blue jeans. "There's been tons of things: beer commercials, video-game scores and movie soundtracks-it just never stopped," Mr. White said. "It starts to get really weird when these money amounts, they start adding up in your brain, you're like, 'This is disgusting.' I mean, I can't believe these corporations are like, 'O.K., what's the hip new band? Yeah, White Stripes, let's get them on the commercial. Give 'em a million dollars.'"

But Mr. White said that he didn't exactly enjoy playing integrity cop either. "I started to feel like a real jerk about it," he said, "because I start thinking, 'Who do you think you are to turn down that kind of money?' or, 'Who do you think you are that you're better than that or you're too good to do this?'"

Ms. White, who'd sat silently smoking-and coughing-for most of the interview, suddenly spoke up. "It just takes constant vigilance to know what you should do and what you shouldn't," she said. "Some things are really obvious. It takes a lot of thought to decide what you should do and what you shouldn't do and still maintain some kind of respect for yourself."

'Garage Rock' Jeans

One thing Mr. White did seem to enjoy about his newfound fame was the power to manipulate the media-or at least watch his influence grow with simple gestures. He recalled seeing some "garage-rock-cut jeans" at a local mall that he said were directly inspired by an interview he gave in England. "That's why it's on there right now," he said. "We were laughing but we also thought it was pathetic. But what are you going to do? Andy Warhol would have thought that was funny."

Mr. White also claimed to have christened the new "garage rock" revival. He said he dubbed it so in an interview in London in the fall of 2001. "All of a sudden, after I said that, everybody was 'garage rock'-the Vines, the Strokes-that was all 'garage rock.' When we came home, us and our friends were laughing because we always thought of garage rock as the Sonics and the Gories. Now it's this global term for anything that's happening in rock 'n' roll now."

If there's one thing that might preserve the White Stripes when the garage-rock revival goes the way of bubble-gum pop-and really, can it be long now?-it's their distinction as genuinely great practitioners of a broader sort of Americana-Mr. White's blues and country and folk and punk and rock are all meshed together by his cheap, fuzzed-out guitar. It's in their simple guitar-drum setup that they keep finding the common DNA that connects styles and sets them into a sort of monochromatic stone. It also helps that Mr. White has a soulful yelp and can tear up on the guitar.

On Elephant, Mr. White said he'd been digging deeper into the same few influences he's always looked to, from early blues to Cole Porter, plumbing them for their traditional "notions." "I always feel like I don't know enough about the songs from the 20's," he said. "I don't know enough about Cole Porter, I don't know enough about Irving Berlin. I always feel that way. Or how much I love Johnny Cash and someone brings up some song that I don't know and I feel like, 'Why don't I know everything by Johnny Cash by heart?'

"But that's good, it keeps me alive," Mr. White said as Ms. White sucked on her umpteenth Camel. "A lot of musicians would just ignore that fact and not care about the past or the tradition they're joining. I like joining this tradition and I like paying my respects and my dues to the people who did it better and not pretend that we exist in a vacuum or that we're completely original-I think it's ignorant."

Then he added: "It's like not thanking God for things that happen."

In his prime, the Pakistani qawwali singer was one of the most passionate and imaginative vocalists of his time, and that night in October 1992 at the Sanders Theatre in Cambridge, Mass., he sang his Sufi devotional music with full-throated abandon. Qawwali 's purpose is to bring people closer to God, and hearing Mr. Khan belt out wildly careening lines with you've-got-to-be-kidding-me rhythmic flair, it was clear that some sort of transcendence was taking place. Some folks got so excited they set off the fire alarm, and the building had to be evacuated. Close to an hour passed before we were allowed back inside, but nobody went home in the interim.

I saw Mr. Khan in concert twice more, at Town Hall in 1995–where I sat next to the rabid fan Jeff Buckley–and at Radio City in 1996. At that later show, it was clear that something was wrong. Mr. Khan was now so heavy that he needed to be helped onstage. His performance, though peppered with genius, was comparatively subdued. Within a year, his kidneys had succumbed to long-standing diabetes. He was 49 years old.

Shortly before his death, Mr. Khan entered the studio with producer Rick Rubin to record eight tracks that have just been released as a double-disc set, The Final Studio Recordings (American/Legacy). Mr. Rubin may seem an odd choice for a qawwali album, but his recent work with Johnny Cash shows that he refrains from diluting traditional music. The sound here is crisp, and the tabla and harmonium–the only instruments besides voice–are pumped high in the mix, all the better to hear how they delicately shadow every inflection of the singer's improvisational flights.

With a few sublime exceptions, Mr. Khan lays back for most of the first disc, leaving the greater share of the vocal fireworks to his younger brother, Farroukh Fateh Ali Khan, and his nephew, Rahat Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. (In accordance with family tradition, Mr. Khan had already named Rahat as his successor. He has just released an excellent album of his own, also on American and produced by Mr. Rubin; he will perform at the Bowery Ballroom June 13.) On the second disc, Mr. Khan seems to warm to his task, firing off rounds of daredevil scat singing as the chorus grows more fervent behind him. It's marvelous stuff, but it takes a while to get to it.

Mr. Khan was at his best when pushing his raspy, soulful voice to the breaking point and beyond, but by the time he recorded these tracks, he was too ill to do that consistently. Newcomers to this remarkable man's work should first find Shahen-Shah , his 1989 debut on Real World, or any of the five En Concert à Paris discs on Ocora. Unlike the merely very good Final Studio Recordings , those albums contain the kind of music that sets off fire alarms.

–Mac Randall

The White Stripes: Great White Mopes

There must be something in the Schlitz. The Midwest has been pumping out cars and grain and hazardous chemicals and crop after crop of pasty-faced hayseeds since the 50's. It's also the swath of the country that has clung the hardest to a brash, gritty form of white rock–no matter that most of the acts were English. By the early 1970's, they'd all settled in for a prolonged gasfest that has yet to peter out. The MC5. The Stooges. Neil Young. Black Sabbath. The list goes on, and most of the walking dead are still on the road.

So it's about time we had a fresh reincarnation to stoke the hearts and minds of our culturally starved youth. For all the Velveeta the Midwest has produced, it sometimes comes up with a fine Limburger–raw, pungent, kinda sloppy. That's the White Stripes.

Ever since their buzz-friendly showcase at the South by Southwest Music Festival in Austin in March, this brother-sister duo from Detroit has been pushed to the forefront of a "new" garage-rock trend. "Will garage rock be music's next big thing?" the wags at Entertainment Weekly recently wondered. Oh, come on. Everybody's heard about the bird. The most significant thing you can say about garage rock is that there's never been anything new about it; it's always reveled in a tinny, stripped-down, blues-based skronk. Singer Jack White, who plays guitar and piano while his big sister Meg pounds the drums like a Sasquatch, seems to know this in his bones.

Aside from their modish predilection for dressing only in white or red and invoking the hallowed names of Blind Willie McTell and Loretta Lynn, the White Stripes come across refreshingly uncooked on their third album, White Blood Cells (Sympathy for the Record Industry), with a whiff of the Buzzcocks here ("Fell in Love With a Girl"), a vintage Iggy Stooge bleat there ("Expecting") and some of the best crunge riffs since Jimmy Page was still in control of his bowels. And they do this without projecting any of that tired scuzz-rock 'tude emanating from Mr. Blues Punk His'sef, Jon Spencer.

"Well I'm sorry / But I'm not interested in gold mines, oil wells, shipping or real estate," Jack White proclaims (albeit via lyrics lifted from Citizen Kane ) during an interlude in "The Union Forever." "What would I liked to have been? / Everything you hate." The White Stripes sound as if they've yet to have their dreams crushed, and that's a great way to go through life.

–Jay Stowe

The White Stripes will play the Bowery Ballroom on June 16-17, and the Mercury Lounge on June 18.

Ron Sexsmith: Little Boy, Blue?

It happens all the time in movies: The gentle-hearted poet falls in with the dark-souled rebel, and before you can say "Sal Mineo," the little lamb is staggering around his hometown in a leather jacket, stinking up the place with bourbon breath and dime-store nihilism. Before you've finished your popcorn, he's dead–a symbol of innocence lost, or some crap like that.

This scenario crossed my mind when I saw that the dark prince of Nashville, Steve Earle, had produced baby-faced bard of Ontario Ron Sexsmith's new album, Blue Boy (Spinart). Actually, my first reaction was: intriguing combination. As singer-songwriters go, Mr. Earle and Mr. Sexsmith are some of the best we've got, guys who consistently create four-minute worlds that seem as emotionally vivid as the one going on outside our apartment doors.

Then I remembered that these men have significantly different worldviews. Mr. Earle is a pragmatist–his last album featured a lovely song called "I Don't Wanna Lose You Yet"–while Mr. Sexsmith remains an optimist, even when he's foundering in the shadows. "As far as I can tell / The dark as well / Wears a thinly veiled disguise," he sang on his excellent second album, Other Songs.

The good news is that Mr. Sexsmith does not pull a Mineo on Blue Boy . Mr. Earle drags in his love of layered Beatles psychedelia, reggae and snare drums and gives Mr. Sexsmith a musical kick in the pants. Though the album has its sinister moments (listen to "Parable," in which the "poor loser" wonders: "What if that bad winner / Were to have a little accident?"), Mr. Sexsmith's plain-spoken romanticism wins out.

That struggle between dark and light can be found on the very first track, "This Song." In a voice that sounds like a smooth hybrid of Van Morrison and Chet Baker, Mr. Sexsmith sings of bringing a fragile song "into this world," asking repeatedly, "How can this song survive?" But he also declares: "I'll never leave this song alone / I'm gonna keep it / Safe and warm / For hate is strong / And darkness thrives."

Not every song on Blue Boy is a gem. The mournful organ and guitar line of "Cheap Hotel" sound great, but the lyrics, about a woman fleeing her abusive husband, feel wan. But there are no real clunkers. Mr. Sexsmith continues to pack his beautifully simple lyrics with little surprises. On "Fallen," for example, he uses the image of autumn leaves to symbolize not the predictable specter of death, but an intense love: "And the leaves have lost hold / Of the branches as always / Which leaves us with gold / And wine-colored pathways / In the same way, I've fallen for you."

There are moments–such as on "Don't Ask Why" and "Just My Heart Talkin'"–when the music sounds so much like Mr. Earle's that you half-expect to hear his world-weary voice over the jangly guitars. Then Mr. Sexsmith shows up and makes you believe that optimists can operate in a dangerous world.

– Frank DiGiacomo