As Jack White gears up to release his new album Boarding House Reach on March 23, he sat down today for an interview on the KROQ program “The Kevin & Bean Show.” At one point, he was asked why there aren’t as many rock bands on this year’s music festival lineups. “Rock’n’roll needs an injection of some new young blood to really just knock everybody dead right now,” he said. After noting that he thinks a new wave of exciting rock music is “brewing” and “about to happen,” he discussed the genre’s historical peaks and valleys.

Since rock and roll’s inception, every 10, 12 years, there’s a breath of fresh air and a new injection of some sort of what you could I guess call punk attitude or something like that. A wildness. Things get crazy and then they get crazy for a couple years, and then they kind of get subtle, and then you’ve gotta wait for the next wave to come through and get people really excited and screaming about it again. We see it at Third Man all the time, a lot of young rock’n’roll acts, and I can tell in the last couple years it’s definitely different than it was five years ago. So I think it’s about to explode again.

Elsewhere in the interview, he revealed that Q-Tip recommended his current drummer Louis Cato. Jack White is among the credited musicians on A Tribe Called Quest’s final album We got it from Here... Thank You 4 Your service.

Thus far, White has released three new songs from Boarding House Reach: “Connected By Love,” “Respect Commander,” and “Corporation.” Read “Inside Jack White’s New Third Man Pressing Plant.”