Jack White has said that the idea of writing songs about public breakups “in the Taylor Swift way” is not “interesting at all” to him.
The White Stripes frontman, 50, was asked about the use of autobiographical details in his own songwriting when he made reference to Swift, whose high-profile romantic relationships have inspired a raft of songs throughout her career.
Swift is widely believed to have written songs about her relationships with exes – including musicians Joe Jonas and Matty Healy, and actor Joe Alwyn. More recently, her songwriting has been informed by her ongoing relationship with her fiancé, NFL player Travis Kelce.
“Are any of your songs entirely autobiographical?” White was asked, in a new interview with The Guardian.
“Not too much,” the “Seven Nation Army” musician replied. “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. 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,” he continued. “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.”
White explained that he puts “a percentage” of his personal experience into his own songwriting, so he can 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 added.
In the past, Swift, 36, has earned critical acclaim and an ardent fanbase thanks to her confessional songwriting.
The 2012 track “All Too Well”, for instance, was widely speculated to be written about her one-time boyfriend, Brokeback Mountain actor Jake Gyllenhaal – a theory that was all but confirmed when Swift added additional lyrics for the extended 2021 re-release.
Gyllenhaal and Swift dated for roughly three months from October to December 2010.
However, Swift’s approach to songwriting has not been without its critics. Writing in The Independent earlier this year, Alim Kheraj argued: “Swift’s inability to look beyond herself is affecting the music, too. One of the biggest roadblocks of 2024's The Tortured Poets Department was how reliant it was on the lore of its own creator, while last year's The Life of a Showgirl is her most solipsistic record yet.
“The problem is not that Swift draws on her own life to create her art. The issue is that she now appears unable to see that life in the context of anything other than herself.”
