

Created by Matt Zoller Seitz
Directed by Judith Carter
“If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.”
Haruki Murakami
Photo by Stephen McFadden on Unsplash
Jack White Complete Lyrics and Selected Writing collects lyrics from The Raconteurs, The Dead Weather, his solo recordings, and collaborations, including the Grammy nominated 2024 album NO NAME.
Presented as a full‑color hardcover companion to The White Stripes Complete Lyrics, this volume pairs the songs with never‑before‑published poems, essays, social posts, and personal notes, plus exclusive photographs and rare ephemera from the Third Man archives. Essays by Pulitzer Prize finalist Adrian Matejka, award‑winning filmmaker and writer dream hampton, and Third Man Records co‑founder Ben Blackwell add fresh perspective on White’s craft, career, and the experiences that shaped him.
REVIEW
"I wish I read more people who talked about Jack White as a writer of lyrics, or as a narrator of a very specific kind of interior. He writes in between compelling contradictions, ones that delight me, as both a listener and someone who lives within the contradictions most commonly at play, and who doesn’t necessarily view them as contradictions. There are ghosts everywhere in the lyrics, obsession with colors, obsession with exits. Evil and optimism wrestle with each other, longing and a hunger for loneliness tussle in the same bed. Cynicism and desire, rage and tenderness. All of these things seamlessly stitch together and come alive on the page."—Hanif Abdurraqib
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Jack White is a twelve-time Grammy-winning musician, producer, and actor. He is best known for his work in the bands The White Stripes, The Raconteurs, The Dead Weather, and as a solo artist. In 2009 he also founded his own record label, Third Man Records.
Adrian Matejka was born in Nuremberg, Germany, and grew up in Indianapolis, Indiana. Matejka served as Poet Laureate of the state of Indiana in 2018–19, and he became the editor of Poetry magazine in 2022. Matejka is the author of several collections of poetry, including: Somebody Else Sold the World (Penguin, 2021), a finalist for the 2022 UNT Rilke Prize; Map to the Stars (Penguin, 2017); The Big Smoke (Penguin, 2013), winner of the 2014 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award and a finalist for a National Book Award, a Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, and a Pulitzer Prize in poetry; Mixology (Penguin, 2009), a winner of the 2008 National Poetry Series; and The Devil’s Garden (Alice James Books, 2003), winner of a New York / New England Award. His mixed media project Standing on the Verge & Maggot Brain, inspired by Funkadelic and created in collaboration with Nicholas Galanin and Kevin Neireiter, was published in 2021 by Third Man Books. His first graphic novel, Last On His Feet, was published in 2023 by Liveright.
dream hampton is an award-winning filmmaker and writer from Detroit. For three decades her essays and cultural criticism helped shape a generation. Her most recent works include the award-winning short film "Freshwater" (NYT OpDocs/PBS, 2023) and "Ladies First" (Netflix, 2023). Selected works include "Treasure" (Frameline, 2015), "Finding Justice" (BET, 2019), "It’s A Hard Truth Ain’t It" (HBO, 2019), and the Emmy-nominated "Surviving R. Kelly" (Netflix, 2019), which broke ratings records and earned her a Peabody Award. In 2019, hampton was named one of TIME 100's most influential people in the world.
Ben Blackwell is a drummer, journalist and record label executive. Originally from Detroit, Blackwell has been a member of the Dirtbombs since 1999, playing hundreds of live shows and on dozens of recordings. Blackwell’s writing has been featured in numerous books and publications and won him the 2004 Rolling Stone college journalism award. As an executive at Third Man Records in Nashville, he’s directly overseen the release of over 400 different titles and the pressing of over three million pieces of vinyl.
MZS.Press is the online arts bookstore founded by author, critic, and filmmaker Matt Zoller Seitz and Directed by Judith Carter. It offers new, used, signed, collectible, and rare books on film, TV, music, photography, and the visual arts. The store was launched in 2019 on a different platform and has expanded to incorporate arts books published by MZSPress's private imprint: titles currently include Seitz's The Deadwood Bible: A Lie Agreed Upon and Dreams of Deadwood, about the HBO Western, and Walter Chaw's A Walter Hill Film.
Our deepest wish is to promote, encourage, and distribute work by small presses, academic presses, and individuals. Extraordinary work tends to get swallowed up on giant platforms like Amazon and Barnes & Noble. The titles featured here are personally selected by a group of curators and advisors, including Seitz and an array of critics, artists, journalists, educators, publishers, and arts mavens who are known for their ability to suss out what Seitz's jazz musician dad liked to call "the good sh*t."
In Honor of the greatest auteur of our time, Judith is using one of her favorite quotes by him.
"Every day, once a day, give yourself a present"
David Lynch (January 20, 1946-January 15, 2025)
Matt Zoller Seitz
Critic, Author, Filmmaker, MZS Press Creator
Matt Zoller Seitz is the Editor at Large and film critic of RogerEbert.com; Features Writer for New York Magazine and Vulture.com, Contributing Writer for D Magazine and Texas Highways as well as finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in criticism. His writing on film and TV has appeared in Sight and Sound, The New York Times, Salon.com, The New Republic and Rolling Stone. Seitz is the founder and original editor of the influential film blog The House Next Door, now a part of Slant Magazine.
Seitz has written, narrated, edited or produced over a hundred hours’ worth of video essays about cinema history and style for The Museum of the Moving Image, Salon.com and Vulture, among other outlets such as Texas Highways and AARP. His five-part 2009 video essay Wes Anderson: The Substance of Style was spun off into the hardcover book The Wes Anderson Collection. This book and its follow-up, The Wes Anderson Collection: Grand Budapest Hotel were New York Times bestsellers.
Other Seitz books include the New York Times bestsellers The Sopranos Sessions and Mad Men Carousel; TV (The Book), The Deadwood Bible: A Lie Agreed Upon, The Wes Anderson Collection: The French Dispatch and the new The Wes Anderson Collection: Asteroid City. He is also an interviewer, moderator, and film programmer who has curated and hosted film and TV presentations for the Museum of the Moving Image, IFC Center, San Francisco's Roxie Cinema, and other venues. In October 2024 he brought the legendary filmmaker Oliver Stone back to Dallas for a historic return to the city and the Texas Theatre, considered the biggest film event of Dallas in 2024 by Dallas Observer!
Judith Carter was in the Upscale and Luxury Hospitality Industry for most of her life. In 2004 she had a beautiful baby boy with Special Needs and put the pause on her career until 2017 to dedicate herself to him and then others, assisting and volunteering as a legal advocate ensuring the best medical care, evaluations and educations for Special Needs children and their families.
Matt and Judith were family friends for over 20 years. She was there with her family in support when his wife Jen passed away suddenly in 2006. Then just 6 weeks later while Matt was in Dallas; he and his Father, Dave, and Step-Mother, Genie, were there as support, when Judith was alone and her son received the first of many diagnoses that changed the trajectory of their lives. So it made sense in the turbulent year of 2020, Matt asked Judith to take over running the online store that has become MZS.press. The rest as they say is, "Their"-story.