Jack White clarifies: “Never said Taylor Swift is boring”

In recent days the “Guardian” published a long interview with Jack White in which, among other things, the musician spoke about his way of writing songs and reflected on how his writing deviates from today’s trend of many pop artists to draw inspiration from their private life. The co-founder of the White Stripes then underlined how his way of making music stay away from autobiographical writing. Subsequently, White’s statement was misinterpreted and reported, prompting the musician to clarify his position.

“Nowadays it has become very common, in a Taylor Swift way, for pop singers to write about all their romantic breakups made public. This is something I don’t find interesting at all: as far as I’m concerned, writing about myself would be a bit boring“, said Jack White in the interview with the “Guardian”, adding “If it’s something really painful, I won’t make public that important and painful experience I had, so as not to feed it to some idiot on the internet”. He continued: “What I do is take a part of it and insert it into what I write, then transform it into someone else’s character. I can’t really understand anything about myself until I put it in someone else’s shoes.”

Since his words were misunderstoodWhite then shared a long post on social media yesterday, March 9, to clarify his position and close the matter: “I’ll post this for a few hours and then delete it, just to close the matter“, wrote the musician at the beginning of his message – published on social media and then deleted as promised. He then declared:

“I didn’t say I think Taylor Swift’s music is ‘boring’ or whatever other clickbait thing the internet tries to throw together.

What I was trying to say in an interview I did about poetry and lyric writing is that, as far as I’m concerned, I don’t find it interesting to write about MYSELF in my lyrics or my poems at all. I think that for ME it could become repetitive to always write about me, and that for those who listen to my music it could be uninteresting to continually delve into this. As an author I find fictional characters more fascinating.

Taylor and other singers have enormous success writing in their own style, and I’m very happy for them that they managed to engage so many music fans in their own way.

Just because I say I have my own way of doing things doesn’t mean I think EVERYONE should do them the same way. Everyone should do what works for them. And in fact they do it, and it is evidently something that many people like, and this pleases me.

It’s moments like these that make me want to give interviews less and less, because in the age of this enormous demand for clickbait and content, any snippet of something interesting or out of the box that could be turned into a controversy is attacked and spat out as bait, leading me to no longer want to answer questions with any sense of romance, passion or reflection, as I’m too busy worrying about accidentally triggering nonsense like this from so-called ‘journalists’.

This has always been a problem, because it encourages artists to give ‘safe’ answers to every question, stifles artistic vision and imagination, and pushes all of us to share nothing interesting. Which was precisely one of the points I made in that same interview, when I talked about the importance of keeping private things private.”