Jack White Quotes

I was in a Montessori school. There was a drum circle with all the kids passing around a little bongo drum. I was the last person in the circle, and when it got to me I played ‘Shave and a Haircut, Two Bits’ – in front of all the parents. Blew the crowd away at five years old.

The main things to rebel against – over-production, too much technology, overthinking. It’s a spoiled mentality; everything is too easy. If you want to record a song, you can buy Pro Tools and record four hundred guitar tracks. That leads to overthinking, which kills any spontaneity and the humanity of the performance.

Well, as a songwriter, it’s really dangerous to use the word love in a song. It’s a word that has been used in songs so many millions of times before, and it’s the most popular topic to ever write about.

I consider music to be storytelling, melody and rhythm. A lot of hip-hop has broken music down. There are no instruments and no songwriting. So you’re left with just storytelling and rhythm. And the storytelling can be so braggadocious, you’re just left with rhythm.

Passion is the breath we take, the water we drink to sustain ourselves. Without air and water we perish; without passion an artist will wither and blow away.

Mastery is the rudder, Mystery is the sail and Magic the wind to move you in your chosen direction.

I dabbled in things like Howlin’ Wolf, Cream and Led Zeppelin, but when I heard Son House and Robert Johnson, it blew my mind. It was something I’d been missing my whole life. That music made me discard everything else and just get down to the soul and honesty of the blues.

The fact that we elected Obama was a sign that the black struggle inherent in the blues and so much of the music I have loved can triumph.

I keep guitars that are, you know, the neck’s a little bit bent and it’s a little bit out of tune. I want to work and battle it and conquer it and make it express whatever attitude I have at that moment. I want it to be a struggle.

I won’t let love disrupt, corrupt, or interrupt me.

The way I like to start a new project is to take a cover song and make a stab at it, ideally one that has nothing to do with the people in the room.

There aren’t that many things left that haven’t already been done, especially with music. I’m interested in ideas that can shake us all up.

If you want to put out a million CDs and sell them and get them played on the radio, and even videos, or whatever, if that still exists, that kind of muscle can only come from a label like Columbia.

This generation is so dead. You ask a kid, ‘What are you doing this Saturday?’ and they’ll be playing video games or watching cable, instead of building model cars or airplanes or doing something creative. Kids today never say, ‘Man, I’m really into remote-controlled steamboats.’

When I say nothing, I say everything

It is a myth that art has to be sold. It is not like stocking a grocery store where people fill a pushcart. Art is a product that has no apparent need. The salesperson builds the need in the mind of the buyer.

I certainly wouldn’t want a song that I’d already written to be used on a commercial. That seems strange.

I just think old old movies, they make you concentrate and pay attention so much more. They feel so warm. A lot of modern digital videotape, it’s just too bright. Don’t know why, it’s not warm.

With the White Stripes we were trying to trick people into not realising we were playing the blues. We did not want to come off like white kids trying to play black music from 100 years ago so a great way to distract them was by dressing in red, white and black.

An auctioneer is such a uniquely American thing. I keep thinking in my head, perhaps it’s not as American as I think, but it feels so Southern. It feels so American. Like, hundreds of years of American tradition is involved in it.

I wanted to be able to talk with people who have trade jobs and make records with them. I want to do more records with carpenters, electricians, people who specialize in even more bizarre trades that are off the beaten path.

Many days you will want to give up because of rejections and failures. Passion to be an artist will help you prevail where others fail.

If you don’t have a struggle inside or around you, you have to make one up.

I think it takes a lot of trickery to keep up with the media and its perception of you. I don’t know if I have it in me most of the time to care. The music is made first, and the interviews or photos to keep it alive come later as a necessary evil, I suppose.

Nowadays, everybody assumes, when they wake up in the morning, if they have a question, it will get answered. Because they have the internet. No matter what the question is, someone will answer their question.

I came up from growing up with a lot of Catholic guilt, a lot of punk rock, hipster guilt in the later years where I think people have thrown a lot of things on me. Where I always felt like I’m not supposed to tell the horn section what to play or I don’t want to come off egotistical.

A lot of people in the media, and some everyday people, really aren’t in search of the truth. They’re in search of something worse than that. Money, yeah. I think the media’s the kind of a thing where the truth doesn’t win, because it’s no fun. The truth’s no fun.

I think you can’t really escape any kind of spiritual education as a child, whether it’s New Age or Judaism or Buddhism or whatever it is. You can’t escape it, even if you completely disagree with it, you still have it as a foundation that you base things off of.

We have a secret project at Third Man where we want to have the first vinyl record played in outer space. We want to launch a balloon that carries a vinyl record player.

Well, I sort of don’t trust anybody who doesn’t like Led Zeppelin.

I would never purposely sing a song about someone I love,
I wouldn’t want to embarrass them.
But for someone I don’t like… I would definitely do that.

I won’t join another band again.

I’ve always worked to find really deep meaning of song and also at the same time having it covered in sugar, so it can be taken two or three different ways.

My mother’s the youngest of 10 children too, so we have sort of a special bond in that we know what that feels like. It’s a strange spot to be in.

I trust no one who hasn’t time for music.

I think that sometimes love gets in the way of itself – you know, love interrupts itself. We want things so much that we sabotage them.

If you have twenty guys in the room and you just bring in one girl, you change the entire mood and everyone plays different.

I would never purposely sing a song about someone I love, I wouldn’t want to embarrass them. But for someone I don’t like… I would definitely do that.

People aren’t buying records like they used to, so it’s nice to try to figure out a way to make them do it. I would enjoy the same thing to own an old movie house, to try to trick people to come in – like having 3-D or Smell-o-Vision or Vibra-Vision or something. Mcguffins to get people interested.

I’d make a White Stripes record right now. I’d be in the White Stripes for the rest of my life. That band is the most challenging, important, fulfilling thing ever to happen to me. I wish it was still here. It’s something I really, really miss.

Some people remaster their records six, seven times, remix it three, four times, spend a million hours, then they always go back and hear a demo of it and they’ll say, ‘Aw that sounds so much better than the final mix.’

I didn’t really even think of recording under my own name for a long time. I thought, ‘I’ve got the rest of my life to do that.’

I’m one of those people that you have to keep your eye on or I’ll wander off into the woods and forget to come back.

There’s Catholic guilt about things, then there’s the guilt of being the youngest of 10, so when nice things happen to you, you’re not really allowed to enjoy them.

I know that’s blasphemous when you are from Detroit, but I was never a fan of Motown stuff. I don’t care for the production much.

Vinyl is the real deal. I’ve always felt like, until you buy the vinyl record, you don’t really own the album. And it’s not just me or a little pet thing or some kind of retro romantic thing from the past. It is still alive.

Playing drums feels like coming home for me. Even during the White Stripes I thought: ‘I’ll do this for now, but I’m really a drummer.’ That’s what I’ll put on my passport application.

I want to be part of the resurgence of things that are tangible, beautiful and soulful, rather than just give in to the digital age. But when I talk to people about this they just say, ‘Yeah, I know what you mean,’ and stare at their mobiles.

I really don’t like to take the easy way out, if I can help it, on anything I do, I like to really make it a challenge. I don’t know how to create by taking the easy routes. I’ve tried, you know, I’ve tried to let myself, but I always struggle to compensate.

Life is simple unless we find a way to make it complicated.

That’s what happens nowadays with people working on computers. They can so easily fix things with their mouse and take out all the, ‘Oh, somebody coughed in the background; we need to take that out’ – or somebody hit a bad note. Those are all the best moments.

Telling yourself you have all the time in the world, all the colors in the palette, that just kills creativity.