Some lucky furniture owners have found a rare Jack White record sewn into their upholstery. Jack White and Brian Muldoon only released two seven-inches with their band, the Upholsterers, but 100 copies of their second single have long been concealed in unwitting clients’ furnishings.



This week, Third Man Records announced that “two separate individuals” had discovered copies of the Upholsterers’ 2004 single hidden in their furniture. For the first time, the label revealed the artwork on the seven-inch record, which was printed on plastic transparencies. The record itself is made of clear vinyl – an attempt, White claimed, to prevent it from being detected by X-ray.



The Upholsterers album sleeve Photograph: Third Man Records

White and Muldoon formed the Upholsterers after years of working together: White began apprenticing with Muldoon as a teenager, long before forming the White Stripes. They released one single, Apple of My Eye, in 2000; this too is a rare collectible, selling on eBay for hundreds of dollars. The next single would emerge only four years later, in celebration of the 25th anniversary of Muldoon’s Detroit shop, the Muldoon Studio.



“Something hit me as a teenager while I was apprenticing,” White told NPR in 2011. “I said to [Brian] … ‘How come we don’t write notes to each other? Upholsters. We’re the only ones who see the insides of this furniture. We should have so many inside jokes and things we could write.’” Eventually they landed on the idea of stuffing music inside their re-upholstery projects. “We really went to great lengths to make sure possibly no one would ever hear our record!” he joked. “[We] sliced inside the foam and slid in there ... You could only get [it] if you ripped the furniture open.”



At the time of that interview, no one seemed to have found the Upholsterers’ hidden work. “My guess is what’s gonna happen is it’s going to be passed down a generation and some upholster will re-upholster it 40 years from now and pull the record out and throw it away,” White predicted. “That’s probably what’s gonna happen.”



Now that he’s famous, White’s vinyl-oriented eccentricity has found all sorts of other outlets. Third Man Records is notorious for its limited-run releases, and White’s latest solo album, Lazaretto, boasted one of the most decadent vinyl pressings of all time.

