- Jack White walked back and clarified comments he made about Taylor Swift during an interview with The Guardian.
- The singer/songwriter mentioned Taylor while saying he doesn’t find writing about breakups “interesting at all.”
- In a since deleted statement, he noted “I didn’t say that I think Taylor Swift’s music was ‘boring.’”
Jack White is walking back the comments he made about Taylor Swift’s songwriting. The White Stripes frontman ruffled some Swiftie feathers during a recent interview with The Guardian, when asked if his songs were autobiographical.
“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,” he said. “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. 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.”
He clarified his comments in a since-deleted Instagram Story (via Rolling Stone), writing in part “Putting this up for a day and then taking down to just 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 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 went on to praise Taylor’s “tremendous success” and criticized the “demand for click bait and content” that makes him “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.'”
Jack ended his thoughts with “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.”
Here’s his statement in full:
