It looks like fans hoping to trace a clear genre outline around Jack White's new Boarding House Reach album may come away bewildered from the purposefully eclectic set — but if the record covers a lot of bases, White says the overall picture is meant to be a "time capsule" of its musical moment.

As White recently told Rolling Stone, he started out the album by making a gamble that even he wasn't sure would succeed, lining up an array of New York-based musicians he'd never worked with just to see what would happen. "I had no idea if we'd be able to communicate musically," he admitted. "It could've been a recipe for disaster. I think it would scare the hell out of most people, so it was very enticing to me."

The combination, however unlikely, immediately started producing "so much amazing music" that White claims it "almost hurt" to boil the raw material down into a cohesive album-length statement. Musing that some of the songs could have been allowed to sprawl out over an entire album side, he added that he wanted the LP to be "relatable" to its audience. "The entire record, to me, is incredibly modern," said White. "I wanted to take punk, hip-hop and rock 'n' roll, and funnel it all into a 2018 time capsule."

As it happens, that time capsule includes a literal artifact from White's past: "Over and Over and Over," a song dating back to his White Stripes days that he'd tried and failed to get right repeatedly over the last decade and change. "I was just gonna hand it off to my grandchildren," he quipped. "It was sort of my white whale. I chased it and chased it, and finally, all of a sudden, it worked."

Boarding House Reach is due out March 23. Listen to "Corporation," the latest pre-release single from the album, right here.

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