The rule still held. Two people, the same hard line: guitar, drums, voice, and nothing that needed a third pair of hands. That is the strange thing to keep in mind walking into this record. For all the size of what came off it, the band that made it was still just Jack and Meg White, refusing to add anyone.

Elephant arrived in 2003 and turned out to be the one that broke them wide open, mostly on the strength of a single song that a stadium can sing without being told to. The low end that everyone remembers from it was made without a bass guitar anywhere in the building, which tells you most of what you need to know about how this album was built: out of restrictions, out of a refusal to reach for the easy tool. What sounds enormous here was made by deliberately keeping things small.