Jack White responds to coverage of perceived Taylor Swift slight in recent interview

Jack White has responded to recent coverage of a statement he made regarding his songwriting process.

When asked in a recent interview with The Guardian about whether his songwriting process was autobiographical, White responded that “it’s become very popular in the Taylor Swift way of pop singers writing about all of their publicly aired break-ups, which [he doesn’t] find interesting at all.”

“I think it’s a little bit boring for me to write about myself,” he continued. “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.”

Some interpreted this remark as putting down the songwriting of artists like Taylor Swift. In a post (that has since been taken down), White clarified.

“Putting this up for a day and then taking down just to put this to bed:

“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…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.

“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. 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.”

White also suggested that the wide coverage of the imagined slight is an example of the media blowing even the smallest things out of proportion in a constant drive for news stories and content.

“These are the times when I am made less and less interested in doing interviews because in the age of this massive demand for click bait and content, any scrape of anything interesting or off the beaten path that can be turned into drama is swarmed over and spit out as bait, leading me 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’.

“This has always been a problem as it encourages artists to give ‘safe’ answers to any question and stifles artistic vision and image inaction 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.”