Over the last few months, the sludgy magic made by the White Stripes--frontman Jack White and his ex-wife, drummer Meg White--has spread the Detroit duo across the glossy pages of magazines nationwide.

With the recent release of their third album, "White Blood Cells," the two have justified the hype, blending a love of blues, Broadway and brevity. The 16-song CD, which was recorded in Memphis, comes after they paid their dues on the road and at home, opening for such indie-rock darlings Pavement and Sleater-Kinney, and gaining a solid following on the Detroit club circuit.

LiveDaily correspondent Colin Devenish caught up with Jack White to talk about musical theater, big business and the pros and cons of buzz band status.

LiveDaily: What was it like recording in Memphis?

Jack White: Memphis is kind of a natural place to go, because the south is so similar to Detroit--I think that we found out when we got there how much it was like Detroit. Just the feel of it. People down there call Detroit a Southern city. And we went to New Orleans not too long after [Memphis]. It’s a straight line down--Detroit, Memphis and New Orleans are all the same city. The way the roads look, the way the buildings look, the mood and the vibe of the city.

How do you feel your songwriting has developed over the years? Are there songs on this record that you couldn’t have written on earlier records?

That’s a good question. I don’t know, because three songs on the record--"Dead Leaves in the Dirty Ground," "This Protector" and "I Can Learn,"--were all written before we did our first album. And even our first album, "Sugar Never Tasted So Good," I wrote that when I was 19. Sometimes there’s songs that get put aside until it feels right to do them. The only thing that’s consistent is that we don’t want every song to sound the same, we never want each album to sound exactly like the last one. A lot of people say that, but it’s just important to us. Not to be a two-chord garage rock band forever.

I think "I Smell a Rat" has a real dramatic feel to it. It sounds like something out of a musical, like "Oliver Twist" or something.

I love that song. We wrote that the day before we left for Memphis. The phrase "I think I smell a rat"--there was one day when I was home by myself and I played one chord on the piano, and I just kept saying that over and over, "I think I smell a rat." And I could never think of anything else to go with it. I loved it because I had this whole thing imagined--that it would go into this swinging finger-snapping thing after that--but I never finished writing it.

We had this [other] song called "That’s Where It’s At" that we didn’t put on the first album. [The lyric] was, "All you people know/Just where it’s at now/walking down the street with a baseball bat now." It’s about the kids in the neighborhood. We weren’t going to use that song anymore, and I played that chord, and "I smell a rat" popped out again. Meg played it with me and I started singing the lyrics from that other song about the kids in the neighborhood again, and we said, "This is perfect."

Me and Meg really like that Broadway punk. I like musicals a lot. Our parents played "Sound of Music" and "Music Man" and things like that [when we were growing up]. I think the most appealing part of [musicals is that] when songwriters back then were writing songs for a musical, they had a job to do. They had to have something catchy, because it had to be the selling point of the musical or the play. People would say, "Listen to those songs, you have to go see this new play, the songs are great." People aren’t saying, "You’ve got to see this new play or new musical, the story’s great." It’s the music. In order to get paid, they had to get these melodies across. That’s hilarious. I like that because it forces someone into a box where they have to relate to fellow man. And it’s very hard to sit down and say, "I’m going to write a catchy song."

I think the catchiest things of the stuff we’ve written, like "You’re Pretty Good Looking" on our second album ... is just the most natural thing. I didn’t sit down and figure it all out. I don’t think it can be faked. Same thing with "I Think I Smell a Rat." I just hit a chord, and that was the first thing out of my mouth.

"The Union Forever" [from "White Blood Cells] uses lyrics taken from the film "Citizen Kane." What gave you that idea?

There’s a song in the movie, called "It Can’t Be Love, Because There Is No True Love," that plays at this party they have in the Everglades during the film. I could never find what this song was about, if it was a ‘40s song, some jazz standard--I could never find it. I was trying to play it on guitar, and I said a line from the movie while I was playing the chords. And it was like, "I wonder if I can rhyme that with something else from the movie?" I had a lot of the lines memorized already, and then I went through the film and started writing down things that might rhyme together, that might make sense together. "

The song "The Union Forever" has a real political bent. How important is that kind of thing to you?

Most of the time I don’t care at all about it. I never voted for president because I don’t care for it. "The Big 3 Killed My Baby" [a song from an earlier album] hits home because of where we’re from and how much I think the big three [auto companies] rip off everyone. It seems really funny to me that nobody cares. The car has been ruining my life at all times.

That’s the kind of thing I care about, like "Hello Operator" from our second album--that’s a phone company finger-pointing song. I hate the rip-off company. I know everyone has to have a job, everyone has to work and get a paycheck to keep everything going, but it’s pathetic that the better mouse trap doesn’t win out.

Meg said she heard one dentist invented a coating to put on teeth so you’d never get cavities ever again, but the government won’t let them produce it because it would put all dentists out of business. That’s nice to know.

You've become something of a buzz band lately. What do you make of all the attention? Do you feel like people like you for the right reasons?

It's a confusing thing. I don’t know. I know a lot of these writers and everyone have jobs to do. Maybe some people say it’s the band they’ve been waiting for a while to write about; maybe some people are just doing their job because they were told to write about us. How can you tell? Reading one article to the next, you can’t really tell what the scope of it is. I get the feeling a lot of people have a job to do, and they have to write about something, and this is what people are talking about. So there’s things like that.

But we were in Mojo, and we were really proud of that, because we really love that magazine. It meant a lot to us to be included with so many other great people there, even if it’s just a mention. That made us kind of proud, because that’s not bulls---, there’s actually something backing it up."