Has Meg White retired from music?
Next month, The White Stripes will be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
Over the years, plenty of other broken-up bands or otherwise estranged artists have put aside their problems and their differences to reunite and be honoured at one of music’s biggest nights of the year. Simon and Garfunkel got back together in 1990, Led Zeppelin followed suit five years later, and even the Talking Heads played a few numbers together following their 2002 induction.
Jack White is no stranger to the spotlight and will surely be in attendance at next month’s induction proceedings at the Peacock Theatre in Los Angeles, California. He has been releasing records and touring non-stop since the last days of The White Stripes, but drummer Meg White was never too keen to be seen stepping out from behind her drum kit at the best of times, and so will surely be skipping the ceremony altogether.
Not that there is much, or even any, animosity between the pair. Though they disbanded their marriage in 2000 before disbanding their band 11 years later, Jack White came to Meg White’s defence with a poem in praise of her talents in 2023, following a tweet that dismissed her talents from the journalist Lachlan Markay (more recently, Jack posted about his former music and life partner Meg again in celebration of her 50th birthday).
Markay’s tweet was beating the dead-horse drag that Meg White Can’t Play the Drums, our generation’s answer to the tired myth that Ringo Starr Isn’t Even the Best Drummer in The Beatles. Neither claim is true. Meg White plays in a raw and minimalistic style, sure enough, but the band wouldn’t have had half the power without her.
Just because every other drummer in our time overplays with double bass drum pedals and oversized drum kits has never meant that White’s roots-rock rhythms weren’t up to the standards of her peers. Perhaps she just never felt the need to overcompensate for a lack in any other departments.
And if her drumming was minimalistic, well, it was nothing on what she had in store for us post-White Stripes.
Jack White might have released eleven albums, either solo or with his bands The Raconteurs and The Dead Weather, since the final White Stripes record came out in 2007, but Meg White hasn’t appeared on any. Nor has she performed live since the final White Stripes appearance on Late Night with Conan O’Brien in 2009 or, even, really made any public appearances at all.
So, has Meg White retired?
From the quiet one of the pair to full-blown radio silence, Meg White has, for all intents and purposes, retired from the music industry and from the scene entirely. She doesn’t do shows, she doesn’t make surprise appearances, and she doesn’t do interviews. Just like one of the lyrics in a Bob Dylan song that The White Stripes used to sing, ‘Love Sick’, say “sometimes, the silence can be like thunder”.
Even when approached directly for comments, they come back unreturned or with second-hand thoughts attached, or in answers finding their way back to the interviewer through friends, almost in a sense, doing interviews by proxy. “She spent 15 years traveling and touring and playing”, one close friend of White’s said to journalist Melissa Giannini in 2023. “It’s not that odd to think that she just likes to be home.”
But, judging from another comment shared with Giannini about Meg White by one of her friends, it’s clear that she still steps outside her Detroit home from time to time, and even still feels connected to that old music, as well. She was spotted sitting at the side of the stage during Jack White’s 2018 show at the Detroit Arena, and was described as “really, really getting into it, like, kind of drumming along, like a spark might be sparking. Hopefully someday we’ll see her back behind a drum kit”.
