White Denim: Swinging Door

Ryan Reed on February 3, 2025
White Denim: Swinging Door

There are many reasons why 12, the latest album from shapeshifting rockers White Denim, could have simply withered away on a hard drive somewhere—lineup turbulence, business-end shake-ups, pandemic instability, shifts in recording methodology, the reality of Austin, Texas born bandleader James Petralli finding a new home and potential career path in Los Angeles. Then again, not even that particular technology was safe. After the universe course-corrected, sending Petralli back to his colorful new material, a faulty drive wiped out progress for numerous tunes.

“It sucked, man,” he admits, through the kind of raw laugh you only earn in hindsight, while walking his 100-pound “monster” of a Bernedoodle around sunny Pasadena, Calif. “I probably had strings for a few, woodwinds for a few, all of my vocals and guitar arrangements for about seven. It was probably at least a month and a half, 40-hour weeks, to get to that point—and my budget was lost for the string players. I got demotivated, like, ‘Maybe I’m not supposed to do this.’”

But that devastation—along with an impressive cast of musicians—eventually relit a fire, helping Petralli reimagine the project in almost every way. And White Denim’s 12th LP, reliably expansive and surprising, even for them, is a testament to creative drive over bad luck, to malleability over uncertainty.

***

The liner notes for 12 are as dense as the end credits for a big-budget film, full of one-off guests—guitarist Eric Krasno, woodwind player Jesse Chandler— shifting engineers, instruments you’ll probably never notice on the first two or three listens (zither, banjo) and drum tracks pieced together from, at times, four different players. It’s a major shift in MO from White Denim’s early days, when Petralli was creating kaleidoscopic garage-rock with bassist Steve Terebecki and drummer Josh Block in the latter’s decades-old Spartan trailer.

That trio developed a “live-on-the-floor” energy during their scrappy, lo-fi days in the late-aughts, but they found a sweet spot by adding guitarist Austin Jenkins and raising their studio ambitions. A pair of back-to back classics, 2011’s D and 2013’s Corsicana Lemonade, drew even more from prog, jazz fusion and Southern rock—an unclassifiable stew solidified by Petralli’s voice, which was always soulful beyond its years.

But in 2015, just when White Denim were entering the realm of indie-rock royalty, Block and Jenkins left the band, initially working with neo-soul artist Leon Bridges, who the latter musician helped discover. The lineup continued to fluctuate around Petralli and Terebecki— an instability that didn’t affect the quality of their work—and 2018’s Performance is their tightest, hookiest album blow for blow, though it was hard not to ponder their long-term future. Which brings us to the pandemic, when a whole lot of things changed.

“We had a studio in Austin—we bought a piece of land together and had a third partner,” Petralli says. “All three members of the original band had kids around the same time, and we all shared aspirations of getting off the road and getting behind the scenes and helping other people’s work and creativity. That was in the mix from the beginning of the band. When everything hit in 2020 and we had just ordered $10,000 worth of T-shirts to sell on our April tour, it was a really bad financial time. We’d built this studio, so we were house-poor and gear poor. It was a panic moment for me for sure.”

His lockdown response was setting a deadline of 30 days to write and record a new album, World as a Waiting Room—an ambitious idea but also one that, in retrospect, might have stretched the band too thin.

“I was really spearheading that [idea]: ‘Music is the way out of this mess, and we have to do it right now,’” says Petralli, noting that he “doesn’t want to speak” for Terebecki. “It was too immediate of a reaction. We didn’t know what was going to happen. Everything was stressful. Everything was shutting down around us, and we had to make this record in 30 days. I think that was just not the right thing for me to put forward, and I put a lot of pressure on the guys in the group in that moment. I think what had been present all along—everyone wanting to slow down and be more involved in their family lives and move into a more steady line of work—was just tipped over by this project and this responsibility we’d created for ourselves.”

Terebecki, he explains, stepped away from the business side in 2020, leaving Petralli to “redefine [his] relationship to the band.” It was a difficult era with a host of challenges, including some strain with a former bandmate that he’d rather not describe in detail. He wound up with a sad realization: “I don’t know if I care that much about this anymore if this is what it’s going to do to my community and my personal life.”

Still, the guitarist continued to write music, uncertain what form it would take. And, later that year, he earned a major mojo boost during a trip to LA, working on the Amazon miniseries Daisy Jones and the Six as a “stunt vocalist” next to producer Blake Mills and engineer Joseph Lorge.

“It felt very fresh, and the roles were super clear,” he says. “It was really solid teamwork, and I knew what the expectation was of me, and I was able to deliver and receive a simple, concrete reward for that—Land a take, get a high-five, take a check at the end of the day. It was like, ‘Ah, man, there are people working at a high level here, and this kind of thing does not exist in Austin.’ My family was here, and we rented a nice house in the valley that has a swimming pool. It was this nice break from the interpersonal struggle that I had in the f irst part of 2020. We put it in the back of our minds—‘maybe that’s an opportunity for us.’ [Then there were] political things and art and music being taken out of schools in Texas. We’re spending the hours from 7:30-9 p.m., until the kids go to sleep, bemoaning the way it feels to live in this state. We said, ‘Let’s just split!’ Both of our kids are creative so we thought, ‘Let’s go somewhere where that’s not an absurd way of life and there are examples of working artists everywhere here.’ So for our kids and for ourselves, the move [to LA in August 2022] represented a path forward that we didn’t see in Texas.”

***

Against the backdrop of that major life shift, new White Denim music—or at least what could fit that mold—started to accumulate. Early on in the pandemic, Petralli had a spree of collaborations: Zoom writing sessions, producing and playing on other people’s albums, gathering demos and pitching them to other artists. “Basically, 99.9% of the time, it was like, ‘Nah, I’ll stick with our idea,’” he says, “so I was banking all these songs that I thought were pretty good. I’d walk the dog and listen to [them] and have these moments of, ‘Maybe I should make another White Denim record.’”

After landing a budget from revered indie-label Bella Union, Petralli started expanding his vision for what 12 could be. He would work in “the old way” of banging out sessions with his regulars (including keyboardist Michael Hunter, drummer Matt Young and guitarist Cat Clemons), but he’d also continue “making connections” with versatile players around LA and elsewhere. Chandler (Midlake, Mercury Rev) became a key contributor, adding flute, clarinet, saxophone and synthesizer. Singers Tameca Jones and Jessie Payo belt all over the old-school soul-funk track “Look Good,” and Chicago indie rock duo Finom (multi-instrumentalists Sima Cunningham and Macie Stewart) add baroque-pop elegance to the sunny “Swinging Door.” Of course, he did have to rise above the hard-drive disaster, but producing an album by Eggy, a “jamband on the rise,” helped him get back into the swing of things.

The end product is admittedly a “hodgepodge” of numerous bands—some in the same place, some sending their parts from various states. The file-swapping production felt natural for Petralli, who grew up idolizing the communal spirit of the Elephant 6 collective. “We had heard—I don’t know if this is accurate—that they would ship TASCAM four-tracks to one another,” he says.

But he knew it might lead to some hesitation from longtime fans. “It was kind of scary in terms of how it might be perceived,” he admits. “A lot of our audience, especially in America, is a jam audience and people that are really into guitar. I had some mild concerns about making something more slick and studio oriented, but this way of working has been at least one step of the process all along.”

In their early days, Petralli says, the band “romanticized” a kind of recklessness. “On the first two records, things are too loud and out of time,” he admits. “They are really chaotic and pure in a way. I always wanted to balance that spirit with the new opportunities we had and to go to nicer [studio] spaces. Creatively [with 12], we just leaned harder into things that have always been part of the deal for us. The main positive thing for me was all the time I got to spend with it by myself. It was really refreshing and helped me figure out what I wanted to say and how I wanted things to come across.”

What solidified 12 as truly White Denim, at least for Petralli, was opening up the songwriting. “Michael wrote songs, and I wrote the lyrics and melodies and produced the track. The same thing for Matt and Cat—I got submissions from these brilliant musicians I get to work with,” he says. “It can’t just be me delivering songs and them playing them. I need people to be invested and care about the outcome of the thing and contribute on that foundational level.”

Also crucial: the presence of Block, who mixed the album and drums on a handful of cuts (including the funky and deliciously cheesy “Second Dimension”) and Terebecki (who plays on both “Swinging Door” and the groovy, flute-filled “Your Future as God”). Petralli says that, even when the bassist isn’t around, he can consult his sensibility—one he’s grown to trust over so many years of working together. A great example came while working on “Econolining,” a euphoric art-pop banger laced with synth, marimba and woodwinds.

“I’m not sure I want to give away who I wrote that for first, but it was more of a pop record,” he says. “It has a kind of a Katy Perry thing to it. I said, ‘How do I make this a little more Joe Jackson?’ [Laughs.] I came up with this musical idea that’s really simple, and the lyrics are really personal— reflective of a lot of the social, legal things I was going through. It was like, ‘When I play this by myself, it sounds like Counting Crows or something’—like ‘90s pop with that chord change. I am a child of that era— that’s the music I grew up listening to. It’s the thing I’ve been trying to push down for my entire professional career as an artist. If Steve was in the room, he would be like, ‘No, dude, this is like Natalie Imbruglia.’ But with Steve in the back of my mind, the positive thing that comes from that kind of editing and collaboration is that I trust him and his taste. I had the time to write these little fugue kind of things with a major scale in between all those parts in the chorus. If I get a really energetic rhythm track and just dazzle it with all these arrangement things, it’s gonna sound more like Joe Jackson than Natalie Imbruglia.”

Sorry, purists: White Denim isn’t the same live-in-the-studio rock band they were back in their wilder younger days. That’s partly due to practical concerns, like the real-life storms they’ve weathered over the past few years. It’s also because they’ve grown as artists.

“We’ve all done a lot of work to make the band a positive part of our lives,” Petralli says, reflecting on the evolution of White Denim. “What ended up happening with me continuing, I think, is a very natural thing that everybody feels OK about,” he says. “We made a lot of mistakes getting there—we’re not the best at setting boundaries and talking about things as they come up. But it’s something we can be proud of together, as we’re raising our own families, that we can still show up for one another—to be better friends and support each other in ways that make more sense for our lives.”