Jack White is clearing up recent comments he made about songwriting after some people thought he was criticizing Taylor Swift.
In a Sunday, March 8, interview with The Guardian, White, 50, opened up about his approach to songwriting, explaining that he prefers not getting too autobiographical with his lyrics, especially when it comes to breakups.
White said, “Now it’s become very popular in the Taylor Swift way of pop singers writing about all of their publicly aired breakups, which I don’t find interesting at all,” adding, “I think it’s a little bit boring for me to write about myself. 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,” he continued. “So I put a percentage of that into what I do and then morph it into somebody else’s character.”
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On Monday, March 9, White took to Instagram to expand on his thoughts after his quotes were misconstrued as a slight against Swift, 36.
“Putting this up for a day and then taking down to just put this to bed,” White shared in a since-deleted post, per Rolling Stone and NME. “I didn’t say that I think Taylor Swift’s music was ‘boring’ or whatever clickbait 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.”
He added, “Taylor and other singers have tremendous success writing in their own styles and I’m very happy for them that they’ve succeeded in engaging with so many music lovers in their own way.”
“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,” White explained. “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.”
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White lamented that his comments were taken out of context and said that “these are the times when I am made less and less interested in doing interviews,” citing how “any scrape of anything interesting or off the beaten path that can be turned into drama is swarmed over and spit out as bait.” As a result, the musician doesn’t “want to answer questions with any sort of romance or passion or reflection” for risk of being misconstrued.
“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,” he wrote.
