This is why we can’t have nice things.
Jack White posted a statement on Instagram Monday evening after numerous publications took his comments in an interview with The Guardian out of context. When discussing poetry and songwriting, White mentioned fellow musician Taylor Swift‘s style of songwriting, and explored his own approach to storytelling when creating music. Unfortunately, online outlets framed his words as a critique of the Tortured Poets star, especially when it came to headlines that quickly circulated on the internet.
“Putting this up for a day and then taking down to just put this to bed,” wrote White in the since-deleted post. “I didn’t say that I think Taylor Swift’s music was ‘boring’ or whatever click bait the net is trying to scrape together. What I was trying to say in an interview I did about poetry and lyric writing, was that I don’t find it interesting at all for ME to write about MYSELF in my own lyric writing and poetry because I think that it could be repetitive for ME to always write about and It could be uninteresting for people who listen to my music to delve into, and that imaginary characters are more attractive to me as a writer.”
White went on to acknowledge the “tremendous success” of Swift and other songwriters who have their own process, while reiterating that just “because I say I have a way of doing things doesn’t mean that I think that EVERYONE should do it the same way.” He added, “They should do what works for them, And they do, and it is obviously appealing to many people, and I’m glad to hear that.”
When asked by The Guardian in an article published Sunday, if any of any of his songs were entirely autobiographical, White replied, “Not too much. Now it’s become very popular in the Taylor Swift way of pop singers writing about all of their publicly aired break-ups, which I don’t find interesting at all. I think it’s a little bit boring for me to write about myself.”
White further explained, “Even if I’ve had a really interesting day, I feel like I’ve already lived that, I don’t need to go through it every time I sing this song. If it’s something really painful, I’m not going to put this important, painful thing that I went through out there for some idiot on the internet to stomp all over. So I put a percentage of that into what I do and then morph it into somebody else’s character. I can’t really learn about myself until I put it into somebody else’s shoes.”
In his Monday statement, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee said that at times he has been “made less and less interested in doing interviews” amid the “age of this massive demand for click bait and content.” Any “scrape of anything interesting” can be used as drama and “spit out as bait,” he continued, leading White to “not want to answer questions with any sort of romance or passion or reflection as I’m too busy having to worry about accidentally triggering nonsense like this from so called ‘journalists’ and ‘editors.’”
He ended his response to the wave of backlash following his interview by saying, “This has always been a problem as it encourages artists to give ‘safe’ answers to any question and stifles artistic vision and imagination and pushes all of us to not share anything interesting, which was one of the points I made about keeping private things private in that same interview. But yeah, content.”
White recently released Jack White: Collected Lyrics & Selected Writing Volume 1, a collection of lyrics from the artist’s solo recordings including No Name, The Raconteurs, and more, plus selected poems and writings by White, and essays by poet Adrian Matejka.
