Songfacts®:

• Jack White wrote this heavily distorted screamer for the 2009 electric guitar documentary It Might Get Loud. The White Stripes/Raconteurs guitarist penned and recorded the song in just 10 minutes, with the film crew witnessing the song's entire genesis and completion.
• White teamed up with Alicia Keys on the 2008 song "Another Way to Die" from the James Bond movie Quantum of Solace, but "Fly Farm Blues" was his first single as a solo artist - it was released in 2009 after appearing in the It Might Get Loud documentary. White didn't release his first solo album until Blunderbuss in 2012.
• This might be the best modern song ever written just to win an argument. It started when Jack White told It Might Get Loud director Davis Guggenheim (who also directed An Inconvenient Truth) that most songs nowadays are over-prepared and over-produced. Guggenheim disagreed, so White improvised "Fly Farm Blues" on the spot just to prove his point.
  
  By the way, deliberately under-producing songs is also one of the hallmarks of the punk rock movement. Garage rock, which will always be the close cousin of punk, shares this ideology. The argument goes that polishing and perfecting music, such as is done with progressive rock, may make it technically better, but at the price of sacrificing the passion and soul out of music.
  
  For another feat of speed-song-writing, see Leiber & Stoller's "Santa Claus Is Back in Town," written for Elvis Presley in just 15 minutes while his manager, "Colonel" Tom Parker, glowered at them for taking too long.
• White's improvised lyrics lean into a common blues trope: girl trouble. The song finds him arguing with his lady and threatening to leave her. He came up with some rather impressive lines right on the spot:
  
  Stone or rock ain't movin'
  Neither is a tree
  That may be good for you, girl
  But it ain't good for me