Jack White Clarifies Comments on Confessional Songwriting After Taylor Swift Backlash

Jack White posted a statement on Instagram Monday night. His earlier remarks about Taylor Swift's songwriting had stirred anger online. The White Stripes frontman wanted to set the record straight — he never said her music was dull.

"I didn't say that I think Taylor Swift's music was 'boring' or whatever click bait the net is trying to scrape together," White wrote in the post he later removed, as reported by Rolling Stone. "What I was trying to say in an interview I did about poetry and lyric writing, was that I don't find it interesting at all for ME to write about MYSELF in my own lyric writing and poetry because I think that it could be repetitive for ME to always write about and It could be uninteresting for people who listen to my music to delve into, and that imaginary characters are more attractive to me as a writer."

The trouble started after The Guardian published an interview on Sunday. A reporter asked White if any of his songs told his own true story.

"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," White told The Guardian. "I think it's a little bit boring for me to write about myself."

White, now 50, described how he creates songs. He takes bits from his own life, then weaves them into stories told through made-up people. "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," he said.

In his Instagram response, White tipped his hat to Swift and others who pen personal songs. He recognized they'd built strong bonds with fans through their methods. Just because he prefers one path doesn't mean others must follow it.

White took aim at news sites for twisting his words. The constant hunger for fresh stories and clicks makes him want to skip interviews altogether. Any comment, he argued, gets spun into manufactured conflict.

Swift will join the Songwriters Hall of Fame this year. She's sold more albums than any other woman in history. Her newest release, The Life Of A Showgirl, keeps climbing the charts.

White just put out Jack White: Collected Lyrics & Selected Writing Volume 1. The book gathers words from his solo work, The Raconteurs, and various poems he's written.