Meg White Skipped the White Stripes’ Hall of Fame Induction but Edited Jack’s Speech

Meg White was not in attendance when The White Stripes were inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame at the Peacock Theater on November 8, 2025. Throughout his remarks, however, Jack White repeatedly acknowledged her presence in spirit — revealing that Meg had reviewed and refined much of the speech he delivered.

“I spoke with Meg the other day,” he told the audience, noting that she asked him to pass along her gratitude to everyone who stood by her over the years. His opening and closing lines returned to that private conversation, underscoring how central she remains to the band’s story.

Jack added with a wry smile that Meg had even made “a lot of punctuation corrections,” a small detail that highlighted their quiet collaboration behind the scenes.

The most moving moment came when he shared a short piece of prose he had planned to send to Meg but ultimately chose to read aloud. In it he painted a vivid, homespun scene: two young people building a parade float in a garage behind an oak tree, rolling it through Detroit neighborhoods with equal parts pride and innocence. Their makeshift spectacle drew joy from a single smiling stranger, and in that exchange — between creators and audience, between siblings or close friends — he suggested, there was something almost sacred.

The passage framed the White Stripes’ early years as an act of shared creation: a humble, stubborn attempt to make something that made others feel, however briefly, a spark of wonder.

After Jack’s remarks, Olivia Rodrigo and Feist performed a gentle duet of the White Stripes’ “We’re Going to Be Friends,” and twenty one pilots delivered an energetic rendition of “Seven Nation Army” in tribute to the honorees.

Rodrigo has frequently cited the White Stripes as a formative influence. In interviews she’s described learning Jack White’s riffs as a child — even convincing her mother to enroll her in guitar lessons so she could play his songs — and has said that “Fell in Love With a Girl” was among the first she mastered. Rodrigo first met Jack White in 2022, and her reverence for the band was evident in her tribute performance.

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