Sixteen Saltines

Sixteen Saltines

Jack White

White unveiled this raw rocker about a girl with whom he had a complicated relationship for the first time during his March 3, 2012 appearance on Saturday Night Live. The studio version was subsequently released via White’s YouTube channel on March 13, 2012 and the vinyl single was made available to stores a week later.

This was the second single to be released from Blunderbuss, the first album released solely under Jack White’s name after recordings with the White Stripes, the Raconteurs and the Dead Weather.

White told NME about the inspiration for the lyrics: “My daughter asked for a snack, and I said, ‘what do you want to have?’, and she said, ‘I think I’ll have 16 saltine crackers.’ And I said, ‘You’ll have three!’ At times I imagined that character was eating cracker rations on a lifeboat and he’s remembering all these other things.”
White told UK newspaper The Sun that he played the song to his daughter the day after she’d asked her dad for ‘16 saltine crackers.’ “ I said, ‘Listen I wrote a song for you,’” he recalled, “and I played it back for her. She blushed and turned away. The next time I played the song for her, she said, ‘Yeah I never said that!’”

The really weird music video is the product of the fervent imagination of director AG Rojas (Chase & Status' “Hitz,” Emeli Sandé’s “Daddy”). Shot outside Nashville, the clip is three minutes of kids running amok. “Basically, I was working off the energy of the track, and I just wanted to create all these little vignettes about youth,” he explained to MTV News regarding its concept. “The kids are the only people left on earth and Jack is the last adult, and so because of that, he becomes their enemy. And I wanted to explore the rest of that world, and see what the kids get up to. They just kind of go wild.”