Jack White isn’t a fan of confessional songwriting. Speaking to The Guardian, the White Stripes rocker talked about artists who pen songs in the style of Taylor Swift.
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“It’s become very popular in the Taylor Swift way of pop singers writing about all of their publicly aired break-ups,” he said.
That’s a style, White noted, that he doesn’t “find interesting at all.”
“I think it’s a little bit boring for me to write about myself,” he said. “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.”
White added that he has no interest in putting his own “really painful” experiences out into the world.
“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 said.
White noted that, in his own work, he puts “a percentage” of his lived experiences “into what I do.” From there, White said, he morphs “it into somebody else’s character.”
“I can’t really learn about myself until I put it into somebody else’s shoes,” he added.
Jack White Clarifies His Taylor Swift Comments
White’s comments sparked backlash from Swifties online, prompting the singer to post a clarification to his comments.
In a since-deleted Instagram post, White insisted that he “didn’t say that I think Taylor Swift’s music was ‘boring.’”
“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,” he wrote, per per Metro. “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.”
Elsewhere in his Guardian interview, White spoke about his own style of songwriting.
“When I’m writing, I don’t like to get too stream-of-consciousness,” he said. “I want people to have things they can sink their teeth into. So I let it go a little bit and then I reel it in. I’m usually trying to grab hold of a character who’s in some kind of situation and trying to escape from it or solve it.”
As for people who relate to his music, White noted, “It’s an honor that any other human would even spend a couple of seconds paying attention to something I put together.”
Photo by Gregory Shamus/Getty Images
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