Jack White: I’m not going to put a painful thing out there

On the jacket of Jack White: Collected Lyrics & Selected Writing Volume 1, Hanif Abdurraqib notes a need to think of White as a writer of lyrics. Edited by Ben Blackwell and following 2023’s The White Stripes Complete Lyrics 1997-2007, the new collection gathers every song White has written outside that band alongside poems, Instagram ruminations and scans from his notebooks.

White, 50, talks from Third Man’s Nashville headquarters, a label, studio, pressing plant and publishing house where he curates what he values in American vernacular culture. He describes himself as drawn to the relationship between pop and the avant garde, and his work shows that defiant eccentricity can sit beside stadium shows and Bond themes without diminishing his mystique.

He treats lyrics as poetry, tracing his writing back to teenage coffee-house nights in Hamtramck and influences ranging from Charley Patton, Son House and Howlin’ Wolf to William Blake and Shakespeare’s sonnets.

United States, Nashville

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