Raconteurs recording second album in Nashville

By Brian Garrity

NEW YORK (Billboard) - The Raconteurs, the side project of White Stripes frontman Jack White, are in a Nashville studio working on the follow-up to their 2006 debut "Broken Boy Soldiers," and hope to have a new album out next year.

The group, which also features Brendan Benson, along with Jack Lawrence and Patrick Keeler of The Greenhornes, has been recording at Blackbird Studio for a week-and-a-half and currently has 12 songs written, White said.

The group is attempting to get as much of the as-yet-untitled album done before the White Stripes start touring to coincide with the June 19 release of their next album, "Icky Thump."

"We don't know if were going to finish but we wanted to get everything down before we got busy," White told Billboard.com. "We have a lot bigger ideas about certain things, so we will see how far we get."

White said the sound was "very different" from the first album. "It's coming out great, man," he added.

The band is signed to White's Third Man Records but remains in need of a marketing and distribution partner in the United States in the wake of the shuttering of V2 Records in January. Third Man has a deal with Warner Bros., but only for the White Stripes, sources said.

Reuters/Billboard