Jack White’s Limitations

Why thinking inside the box is sometimes the better option.

It’s become almost a cliche of the rock concert film: somewhere just past the middle of the set, when the band have the audience in their grasp and can simmer down for a moment, play something slower. This is the opportune moment for a classic shot — the slow track up the singer or guitarist’s moody figure, so that the series of picks taped to the microphone stand make for a dynamic, jagged foreground.

But apparently, it’s an image that will never fit Jack White.

In an interview with Conan O’Brien, White confirms that for him, it’s about convenience. More specifically, the lack thereof. Many artists attach their picks to the microphone stand so that they can quickly carry on playing as per normal if they drop their first. But White keeps his spare picks on a table, right up the back of the stage, so that if he drops a pick, he has to somehow get all the way across the stage to grab another.

Conan says that when he first heard this story, he thought, “That sounds Catholic to me.” White laughs uproariously, and Conan continues. “Why don’t you just, in between chords, flagellate yourself?”

This tiny decision, this choice to withhold one tiny convenience from himself, underpins the whole ethos of Jack White’s approach to music, work, and art in general.

I. JACK WHITE

Jack White is prolific.

He rose to fame as one half of The White Stripes: he sang and played mostly guitar, sometimes piano, while his ex-wife Meg White played drums. Since their disbanding in 2011, Jack has released three LPs as a solo artist (all of which have reached number one on the Billboard charts), co-fronted and released three LPs with The Raconteurs, and played drums and released yet another three LPs with The Dead Weather. He’s earned a stunning twelve Grammy Awards from thirty-three nominations.

White is also a very literal record producer: as the founder of Third Man Records, White has always been on the front lines of the war to keep vinyl alive. He’s a board member of the Library of Congress’ National Recording Preservation Foundation.

Jack White is very busy, and always has been.

I’ve been a fan for some time now, but across three different bands and three solo outings, there’s more than enough in his catalogue for me to find something new every time I check in. When it became clear just how excellent White is, this massive volume of work was the first and most obvious explanation I came up with. Jack White is living proof of the parable of the pottery class.

II. THE PARABLE OF THE POTTERY CLASS

There’s a story that floats around self-help, business and productivity circles, about a pottery class. Sometimes it’s recounted as the story of a photography class, and I don’t know if it’s actually true or not, but it’s everywhere. Though it’s from a book by David Bayles, called Art & Fear, I first read about it in Cal Newport’s book, So Good They Can’t Ignore You, and even though I don’t know if the actual story is true, I’ve found the sentiment to be true, at least in my experience.

A pottery class is divided into two groups. One group are to make only one pot, which will be assessed for quality. The other will be assessed on the weight of their work, literally: the volume of pots created will be the only determining factor in their final grades.

At the end of the term, all of the pots created by the volume group end up being of higher quality than all of the pots in the group being marked only for quality.

The understanding that Bayles comes to is that artists only improve with experience, but that perfectionism is a debilitating roadblock to the amount of experience necessary to start seeing that improvement. The group being marked for quality in the pottery class spend too long “theorising,” too long deliberating, wondering what makes a truly good pot, and how they might go about getting there. In contrast, the volume group improve almost by accident. With their focus trained solely on producing as much as possible as quickly as possible, there’s no time or attention remaining to worry about quality, let alone to worry enough about quality to let perfectionism stop them from producing.

I think about this all the time.

Stories like Kobe Bryant doing conditioning work, sprints, weight training, and shooting practice from 4:30am-11am, before Team USA start basketball training, aren’t uncommon. Maybe this example’s a bit extreme, but hundreds upon hundreds of jump-shots or never missing a pre-dawn workout are cliches of the sports world. But they’re not just awe-inspiring — they’re benchmarks. Nobody expects to play in the NBA without putting in significant hours outside of the requisite high school training schedule.

The difference between this and the pottery class, though, is fear.

Nobody’s scared to miss jump-shots in practice. Maybe it’s because a shot, whatever sport it’s in, lasts barely a second, but I think it’s really because, at least outside of game day, it means nothing about the person shooting. Right from the start, nobody expects to hit 90 out of every 100 jump-shots, so putting in a good few thousand over a couple of years is simply par for the course if you want to get better.

But it’s a different story with art. Maybe it’s because we all feel that art always needs to be shared, or released, but the concept of a “missed shot” as an artist, musician or writer, feels very different to a missed shot as a basketball player.

This is where “wood-shedding” comes in.

The name comes from the idea of practising a musical instrument out in a wood shed, where family, housemates or neighbours don’t have to hear you playing the same scales up and down, over and over again. More importantly, away from unwanted ears, you can make mistakes as many times as necessary in the process of improving. It’s the most common, and common-sense, advice that experienced musicians give to new learners. The relatively modern idea of “work smarter, not harder” definitely still applies, and the work that psychology professor Anders Ericsson that popularised “deliberate practice” is often what separates effective learners from people who brag about “the grind” but don’t seem to improve with much pace. However, wood-shedding is inescapable, and putting in the hours to work on your craft will never be replaced as the baseline method for developing expertise.

Marrying the concept of practising in isolation to the recognition that prioritising quantity often breeds quality by default is probably the most logical way for an artist to become a better artist. The hack is, ultimately, to give up the search for a hack, and just get in as much practice as you can. For an artist, the most effective approach seems to be to stop thinking like an artist, and start thinking like a craftsman or an athlete — remove yourself, your ego, from the results of your practice, and just get some shots in.

III. THIRD MAN POTTERY

The White Stripes made up a significant portion of the early 2000s rock revival, alongside bands like The Strokes and Queens of the Stone Age, but stood out against even those peers for their unique aesthetic, both musically and beyond.

Across six LPs and hundreds of live shows, the pair remained committed to minimalism, almost never releasing or playing anything that consisted of more than drums, vocals, and one other instrument. Likewise, none of their album artworks display any colour other than their trademark red, white and black. Both of these affectations are well-understood by now, having become almost alt-rock lore: Jack says that the reverence for three things and three things only comes from his time as an upholsterer, when he learned that three staples were the absolute minimum required to keep the fabric on the back of a chair in place. He would go so far as to say that, technically, three staples are the minimum required to consider a piece upholstered. Not well, not cleanly, not perfectly, but by definition, done.

This pattern started showing up everywhere for White: a table or a chair cannot stand on any fewer than three legs, for example. And so he applied this to music. Every song would be built on three instruments, usually guitar, vocals and drums. Even deeper, each song could be built on three concepts, such as lyrics, rhythm and melody.

So, three is a good minimum, certainly, but why was it so often The White Stripes’s maximum?

Because Jack White doesn’t try to think outside the box. Instead, he wants the box to be as small as possible. This is evident in his trademark distaste for modern technology. He’s infamous today for instigating smartphone bans at his concerts, touting the benefits of recording straight to tape instead of digitally, and for installing vintage microphones and a PA system in the roof of his house so he can hear the rain better. But he’s careful to point out that these aren’t merely affectations or purely aesthetic decisions.

Instead, White believes that limitations breed creativity. In a Channel Four interview, he suggests that artists should try what he and Meg would do in The White Stripes, and book as few recording days as possible when producing a record, instead of the other way around.

“The number one rule [of being an artist] is knowing when to stop,” White says. “And if you have a lot of choices in front of you, it makes that decision a lot harder. I’ve definitely seen younger artists, through Third Man Records, have a lot of trouble completing a recording, completing a session, completing an album, because there’s too much in front of them. Too many choices and too much availability going on. If you tell someone, ‘hey, you have a week to do this and you can only have two thousand dollars and you have to do it that way,’ those parameters have been set, and the person says, ‘ok well, now I have to get down to work.’

“If you tell someone, ‘take as much as time as you want, take as long as you want…’ That’s really… That’s not a good place to be […] My advice to someone younger would be, don’t look for those scenarios. Look for the circumstances where you have to fight inside of a box and you have to work your way towards a goal where you’re able to tell yourself when to stop. […]

“And I think that’s another thing with that modern technology too, is that it’s very easy to keep clicking and clicking and fixing and fixing. Whereas, if you put it onto tape, for me it was always like, ‘well, that’s the way the drums are. They’re on there. I mean we can mix it, and change the mix now, but the recording is… That’s it.’ That got rid of, whatever, fifty percent of the choices immediately.”

This is the key to creativity, according to Jack White: don’t get lost in choices.

The students on the wrong side of the pottery class were, like some of Third Man’s younger recording artists, paralysed by too much choice. If the only choice that matters is “make a pot,” or “do the thing,” you free yourself up to simply practice.

IV. THREE CHOICES

In The White Stripes, decisions were limited by the very design of the band. They could only ever do three things at a time, so they only had to make three decisions at a time for any given song: What’s the riff, what are the lyrics, and what’s the beat?

The freedom of limitations intoxicated White, apparently, and has informed everything he’s done since. Making things harder makes things happen. If all his spare picks are sitting right in front of him, nothing happens when he drops one. For most artists, that’s the point. But for Jack White, the point is, at every opportunity, to make something happen.

“I make struggles for myself,” he says. “I purposely play guitars that are out of tune; things are too far away from me on stage that I can’t reach. I do that all the time because I want to create struggle. I want anyone in the crowd to witness not everything going easy for me: people handing me beautiful, in-tune guitars, and everything’s nice and the lighting’s perfect.

“That’s too easy, and there’s no struggle there, and no story. I’d rather see them watch me overcome some problem.”