SONG FOR TODAY: Jack White - Sixteen Saltines

Taken from this year's solo album 'Blunderbuss', which has been in many people's 2012 Album Of The Year lists, in fact it came top of MOJO Magazine's. My own Top 50 albums of 2012 will be unveiled over the next two days, but in the meantime here is Jack White with 'Sixteen Saltines', the second single from Blunderbuss. It was when White first played this song on Saturday Night Live that the album had a surge in popularity. In December 2012, the song was named by the Rolling Stone Magazine as the eighth best song of the year.

Jack 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 also 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!'"