Jack White is releasing a book of lyrics via his Third Man imprint, and he’s been talking to the Guardian about songwriting and how he approaches it. The 50-year-old singer-songwriter explained that he rarely writes autobiographical lyrics these days. In fact, he isn’t a fan of the confessional approach at all: “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.” Instead, he said he prefers to channel his inner thoughts and feelings via characters, and used the analogy of his pre-White Stripes profession: “When I learned to reupholster furniture as a teenager, I didn’t learn how to build a chair from scratch; I learned how to take an old beat-up chair and bring it back to life. I’ve realised I’ve been doing that with music, with sculpture, with poetry, with what we do at Third Man.”
