Jack White finds it "boring" to write songs about himself.
The singer and guitarist released his first album under his own name earlier this year, and while he makes up different characters who his songs are about, he admits they are based on his own experiences.
He told the Seattle Weekly newspaper: "I always find it kind of boring to write about myself. But whatever happens to you, if you’ve gone through anything -sort of a literal train wreck in your life, for example – you have to have that inside of you in some way.
"Even if you choose not to write about being involved in a train wreck, it would come out of you no matter what choice you have.
"So whatever characters I was writing about during the record, I’m giving them these problems. But the problems are only things that I probably have seen or experienced sometime along the way.
"The funny thing is, I always think I’m writing about, you know, a couple of characters, but by the end I’m mixing the song and listening to it back and thinking, ‘Oh, now I know exactly what this song is about. I’m the only one who’s going to know.’
"It’s very funny."
Jack also said that now he owns his own Third Man studio, it changed the way he worked, recording the album, with him feeling much less restricted.
He added: "I used to really force myself to go in there like, oh, a White Stripes album, or Raconteurs, we got to record this, and we have eight days to do it, and we’re going to do it for only $5,000, and have all these limitations to myself.
"But now that I have my own studio, I can take advantage of those things right now – actually record something off the fly and come back to it. I never would have done something like that back in the day."
Jack’s solo album, ‘Blunderbuss’, is out now.