The Dead Weather's Polymorphism

With members from some of rock music’s hottest bands (The White Stripes, The Kills, Queens of The Stone Age and The Raconteurs), The Dead Weather can lay claim to having almost unparalleled credentials within the current music scene. Formed in early 2009, the super-group released their sophomore effort Sea of Cowards this month—the title a reference to the anonymity of the Internet. Produced in Jack White’s Third Man studios in Nashville using his customary bare bones approach to recording, the band revisits the bluesy garage sound they debuted on Horehound. The first single from the album, Die By The Drop, is accompanied by a video from master of surreal spots, Flora Sigismondi. Here, some unusual facts about the talented quartet.

• The seed for The Dead Weather was planted when The Kill’s Alison Mosshart stepped in during her band and the Raconteur’s joint tour in 2008—she performed the lead vocals on Steady As She Goes live in Memphis after White lost his voice.

• White met his now wife Karen Elson on the set of his first collaboration with Sigismondi—the video for Blue Orchid. The couple married soon after in a shamanic ceremony at the convergence of three rivers in Brazil, with his first wife and band mate Meg White as maid of honor.

• Dean Fertita of Queens of the Stone Age has literary chops: his previous band’s name, The Waxwings, came from the first line of a poem in Nabokov's novel Pale Fire.

• Aside from having a busy schedule with The Raconteurs and The Greenhornes, Jack Lawrence also moonlights as a member of Karen O's back-up band, Karen O and the Kids, contributing to the soundtrack of Where the Wild Things Are.

•White showed his humorous side playing Elvis Presley in Judd Apatow’s 2007 music spoof, Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story.

• Their close knit circle of friends came together in May 2009 when Lawrence married photographer Jo McCaughey at Jack White's house in Nashville in a double ceremony with Meg White and her husband, Jackson Smith (son of Patti Smith and Fred “Sonic” Smith).