Steady, As She Goes Carolina Drama Salute Your Solution The Raconteurs

Steady, As She Goes Album: Broken Boy Soldiers (2006)
Carolina Drama Album: Consolers Of The Lonely (2008)
Salute Your Solution Album: Consolers of the Lonely (2008)
by Raconteurs

The subject matter of Steady, As She Goes is very rare for a rock song. Frontman Jack White sings about nurturing a stable home life by marrying someone who will support you - it's not something you'll hear Kiss or The Rolling Stones sing about. According to White, it's asking a question many people think about before they tie the knot: Is getting married and settling down the start of a new life, or just giving up?

Jack White first got married in 1996 to Meg White - he took her last name, changing it from Gillis. They formed The White Stripes a year later but their marriage didn't survive the band - they split up in 1999 before releasing their first album and finalized their divorce in 2000. Still, they carried on as a musical duo (a very successful one) and settled in as very good friends.

In 2005, he married Karen Elson and Meg was the "best woman." This song was released a year later, but White says he wrote it about a year before this marriage.

White isn't known for hashing out his personal life in his songs, but he seems to be wondering here if he'll fall into the same pattern in his second marriage:

Well here we go again
You've found yourself a friend that knows you well
But no matter what you do
You'll always feel as though you tripped and fell

White and Elson split up in 2011 and finalized their divorce in 2013. In 2022 he got married again, this time to the musician Olivia Jean.
Note the comma in the title. That changes the meaning to indicate that the guy in the song needs to hold his ground (stay steady) while the girl goes away.

"Steady, As She Goes" is the debut single and most popular song by The Raconteurs, a band Jack White formed with his friend Brendan Benson. The White Stripes were still going strong at the time, but it wasn't unusual for White to have multiple bands going at the same time. The Raconteurs got most of his attention in 2006 and 2008 when they released albums and toured, and in 2007 most of his focus was on The White Stripes, who released their last album, Icky Thump, that year and hit the road to support it. In 2009 he formed yet another band, The Dead Weather, with his Raconteurs bandmate Jack Lawrence and Alison Mosshart of The Kills. The White Stripes shut down in 2009 and The Raconteurs took a long hiatus, returning for their third album, Help Us Stranger, in 2019.

Jack White wrote and produced this song with Brendan Benson. It was the impetus for starting the band. White recalled to Uncut: "Brendan said, 'I've got this song that needs some lyrics.' I took a listen to it and it was the music for 'Steady, As She Goes.' So I wrote the lyrics for it and we recorded it, though it was kind of more reggae-sounding at that point. We really loved it and just kept playing it, so we said, 'Maybe it's time to do this band we keep talking about'. That song really was the trigger."

Two videos were made for Steady, As She Goes. The first was directed by Jim Jarmusch, and shows the band performing in a farmhouse. A few years earlier, Jack and Meg White appeared in Jarmusch's movie Coffee And Cigarettes.

The second video is more conceptual. Directed by The Malloys, it stars Paul Reubens, known for his character Pee-Wee Herman, and finds the band members in different guises competing against each other in a soap box race.

Carolina Drama tells of a kid named Billy, his brother and their mother, who witnesses her loser boyfriend attacking a priest with a hammer. The London Times asked Jack White where this song came from. He replied: "Brendan (Benson) was over at my house a year ago, and we were playing acoustic guitar, and I just said this line: 'This is a story about Billy and his brother and I'm going to tell it again…' That line isn't even in the song any more but that's what generated the whole story. That line gave me the job to do - it told me to get to work. Billy and his brother - what's going on there?"

White was reluctant to name the main character in the song Billy, since that name shows up in so many songs ("Which Way You Goin' Billy?," "Billy Don't Be A Hero"). According to the notes for White's Acoustic Recordings 1998-2016 album, which includes an acoustic mix of this track, Bob Dylan suggested he name the character Eddie, but that's the name of White's brother, so he stuck with Billy.

The working title of Carolina Drama was "Battle of the Bottle."

"Salute Your Solution" is the first single from their second album Consolers of the Lonely. It was released on March 25, 2008 the same day as the album release. Jack White and Brendan Benson share lead vocal duties on the track. The song was featured in commercials for NFL on Fox, the 2009 comedy film Zombieland, the 2012 action film Premium Rush, the 2017 Power Rangers movie, and the launch trailer for Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare. The song was also in the 2023 film The Flash, the documentary Warren Miller's Children of Winter, and is available as downloadable content for music games Guitar Hero World Tour and Rock Band 2.

The single peaked at number four on the Billboard Hot Modern Rock Tracks chart, their second highest-charting single (after 2006's "Steady, As She Goes").