If somebody says to me
"What do you do?"
That's a hard question to answer
You mean when you go through the little passport thing
you don't just put
Exactly.
'F*cking rockstar.'
I put musician, but I don't know what that means.
I don't know if that's really what I do.
Yeah, no it is.
Would I put that on my tombstone? I don't know.
Mate, you've had two number one albums.
You can definitely put musician there, it's fine.
We are here in Nashville Tennessee
to visit the one, the only
Jack White.
Okay.
Jack, it is lovely to meet you.
Nice to meet you.
Thank you for inviting us into your home.
I assume you live here as well, I don't know.
I do sleep here sometimes.
Really?
That's what the couch is for, it all makes sense now.
So look, famously you're a big fan of creating invisible rules for yourself.
You said that you refuse to ever learn...
you refuse to ever play harmonica?
Is that true?
That's true yeah.
So even though you want to play harmonica
Dying to.
You've prevented yourself from playing harmonica.
Yes.
Why?
I think there's a thing
you see these Persian rugs.
There's a certain style of leaving a stitch wrong.
A bad stitch in each one.
So that none of them can ever become perfect.
So that's when it's perfect.
Is when it has disorder in one part of it.
And that's a very beautiful thing.
When you think about creativity in those...
those terms.
Perfection sometimes in certain areas of art can be a detriment.
And the mistakes to me that we make on stage
That I'm pretty sure a lot of times
80, 90 percent of the audience doesn't even notice
But sometimes we would walk off stage like
"Oh I blew it"
"I played the wrong chord in that section."
To me that does not matter.
They're all opportunities to me
Those are beautiful opportunities.
Where as, for a set you're doing by the book
where you have the lasers and the pyro all happens right at the chorus
to make the mistake would be deadly.
But what we're doing and playing live, I think those are beautiful things.
And they could change the whole way that we swerve into a song.
And now everyone in the room's in a whole new thing we never knew was going to happen ten seconds ago.
When you play live do you still play without a set list?
Correct, yeah.
I think it should be a dangerous thing, a live show.
I think it should be sort of unpredictable.
For the people on stage and for the people watching.
It's strange, I find it as I'm walking to the stage that
you sort of get a vibe, a frequency from the crowd.
Yeah, this feels like this crowd is in the key of A you know?
Is it literally the key of A?
I have no idea.
I should take a meter with me maybe.
So that's what I'm trying to take to the stage
And say, okay lets start this song in A and see if that works.
What I want to know is how you manage to communicate that to the rest of the band.
Do you just look at them, and they know what that nod means
Nobody knows what we're going to do next.
Cause I don't know what we're going to do next.
And the hardest part is doing the quick change
to hurry up and figure out what the next thing is, without too much dead air.
How important is it for you to be able to see the faces of the people that you're playing to?
Is there something that you get back from that?
Cause, you do live performances in here.
You were saying earlier, you pack about 300 people in there.
And it strikes me that, the value of that is
You can see people's faces.
That's the best.
You can really breathe the same air, and really feel it.
The festivals where they're like 100 feet away
and there's all that security
it's very hard to connect.
I don't really know what's going on out there.
You never find the key.
Yeah, not really.
So I'm doing more guess work as to
Well, I guess this should be the next song
I don't know.
You go in these waves of going
"Now I've built it up to this."
"Now time to break it down to an acoustic quiet thing."
There's a nice thing to be able to play with the idea of exhausting an audience.
Exhaust the hell out of them and ourselves.
And then take a deep breathe and play something soft.
And like, let everyone re-group.
And then hit 'em again.
How do you feel the exhaustion?
Can you get that vibe off them?
A comparison is use a lot is like
If you played a common room at a senior citizen's home.
If I was to sit in there
Which I assume you do all the time.
Often.
And I, maybe you play some songs from the 40s or something.
And then, you can see them getting interested, smiles on their faces, singing along.
And then you playing something a little bit different and they're like...
You know, it's like
little children and senior citizens don't lie.
They tell you exactly how they feel.
And it's written on their face.
This kid does not like these carrots.
And this lady does not like my version of 'You belong to me.'
And that is it.
So you feel that and you think
"Ok, now it's to go into something more..."
Jack White does the strangest focus testing of anybody is the music business
is what I just learnt there.
The comment cards are what really hurt my feelings.
I guess the very famous story is
'Seven Nation Army' is the song you tried to write without a chorus.
Correct, yeah.
That one worked out.
But so, do your rules change over time?
Always, they change for every scenario that I'm in.
But the rules aren't applied to what type of music I'm going to work on.
I never say I'm going to write a country album
Or a soul album, or a hip hop album.
I say this is the scenario we're working in.
We're going to work in this room for three days.
And here's the people that are going to be there.
Let's see what happens.
That's what I like to do.
I mean, most methodology out there is
'Let's go to the most expensive studio, record it on pro-tools and
get as many writers and producers involved that are amazing at this.
And let's hurry up and try to make some hits.
That's usually the methodology of most mainstream music nowadays.
So I'm always excited to hear about anybody
who's using some kind of methodology to get them into an uncomfortable position.
So that they do something totally different.
And what will actually take me to a place where I would never be before.
Something very uncomfortable.
That's interesting to me.
"I also believe personally that you let the music tell you what to do.
You don't tell the music what to do.
It's not an ego trip.
You're not in control.
You sit there and you set up the scenario
and the music tells you what your action should be.
To me it's like these things are coming out, you don't know where they're coming from.
Why they're happening.
If you get in the way and start telling it what to do
you're kind of doing it a disservice.
It's better to just get out of the way and let them happen.
So trace that back for me.
When did you first work out that was the way you liked to create
that was what was going to work for you?
In prison.
Man, we're getting some exclusives tonight.
A lot of people don't know that I was on devil's island for several years.
And that was after they closed down the prison too.
I was there on my own.
You're just a squatter at that point aren't you.
Basically just squatting on devil's island.
Made my own butterfly tattoo on my chest out of...
rare inks I found.
The infections only just healed.
Yeah, it's just coming around.
I don't take my shirt off anymore.
Disappointing for us all.
For me early on as a teenager
I liked the idea of what not to do.
I liked to watch footage of tons of bands.
I'd love to see a documentary of a hair metal band
And say "Okay, never do that
never do that
but that one thing they did, there was something to that."
When you do go back and listen to old work
are you the sort of person that wants to
You listen to something and you want to redo it.
You're like "It doesn't sound quite right."
Or have you got a degree of zen about stuff you've done in the past.
Where that represents me at a certain point in my life
and now I've moved on.
Oh man, that's a good question.
I find that the things that I definitely went with my gut
I'm usually, it's kind of good for life.
It becomes a time capsule.
Like, that's what sounded good to me at that moment in 1999.
And, the ones I work really hard on
I worked on for weeks and tried to perfect them
those are the ones where I kind of feel like
You know, I should have just left that.
Be a lot more raw and a lot more instantaneous
that would have carried a deeper, a heavier message.
When you were 14 you wanted to enter the seminary.
Fast forwarding all this time, and all the stuff that you've done
What, if any, role does faith have in your life?
I sort of feel like religion's a bad word for me.
I sort of gets in the way of being in touch with what God really is.
To me God I think, as I grow older I'm starting to feel just an idea.
That maybe God is on a molecular level
on a quantum level.
There's scientific sort of research where like
you can shout at molecules and it effects them.
That might be God.
They might have mislabelled that.
I'm not going to tell the megachurch down the road that you said that.
That would be great on their sign when you're driving by.
This is going to be one of those new Jack White quotes
that you're going to end up having to explain in interviews forever.
Oh yeah, exactly.
No it'll be 'Jack White hates God'
That's what you do when you're the editor.
See now that you've actually used the words in front of the camera
Yeah it's done.
You got me.
Jack White.
Thank you so much for taking the time for this.
Really nice to talk to you.