Life, Love and Loss: Taylor Momsen on the Rebirth of The Pretty Reckless

If it’s true that what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, The Pretty Reckless vocalist Taylor Momsen could probably bench press a herd of elephants. Much like the band she’s fronted for the past 13 years, the former child actor turned rock ‘n’ roll force of nature has repeatedly shown how the resilience of the human spirit can triumph over all forms of adversity.

A few years ago Momsen and her bandmates Ben Phillips, Jamie Perkins and Mark Damon must have believed they could endure anything that was thrown at them. Having been greeted with huge suspicion after forming, because their singer was a reluctant teenage paparazzi darling who starred in the TV drama Gossip Girl, The Pretty Reckless’s commitment to the cause eventually saw them silence their critics.

But everything changed in May 2017 when Momsen’s idol Chris Cornell killed himself during a time when the band were opening for Soundgarden. Unable to process that devastating loss, The Pretty Reckless took time off to regroup before planning a return to the studio that was derailed in equally tragic fashion when their producer and unofficial fifth member Kato Khandwala died in a motorcycle accident. 

It was the straw that broke the camel’s back for Taylor, who spiralled and turned her back on the music she loved until the inescapable draw of that formative passion, and all the artists who’d inspired her younger self, pulled the singer back from the brink and inspired 2021’s visceral masterpiece ‘Death By Rock and Roll’. 

Prior to the group’s first UK tour in five years, we spoke with Momsen about her inspirational recovery, how they continue to honour Kato’s legacy and why the band decided to strip things back, and cover a few noteworthy classics, for their forthcoming ‘Other Worlds’ album.

You recently performed at the Taylor Hawkins tribute concert in LA, fronting a band composed of former Soundgarden and Nirvana members. Knowing how much those artists inspired you growing up, I can’t imagine what that must have been like. Can you put it into words?

I’m still kind of reeling from the entire experience, so I will do my best. First and foremost, Dave [Grohl] and the Foos, I can’t express what an incredible job they did putting on that show. The energy in the room was so beautiful and the best way I could imagine of celebrating Taylor’s life. I knew Taylor, I loved Taylor, he would have loved that. Getting to play with Matt  [Cameron] and Kim  [Thayil] from Soundgarden, who I know very well and love dearly, Krist  [Novoselic] I’ve met a few times but he’s now become a real friend, was an absolute honour and it was a wonderful evening. 

There was definitely an element of ‘holy shit’ but as soon as I walked out all the other things disappeared because they had this giant Taylor Hawkins hawk illuminated over the audience and, as a performer, you could just stare at that and go ‘This is for you, this is why we’re here’ and it was very grounding and centring. It put everything into perspective. The whole experience was emotional, heavy but beautiful.      

You’ve stripped back a lot of your material on ‘Other Worlds’ and it’s enlightening to hear how powerful those songs are in such a comparatively bare-boned, acoustic format.

I write everything on acoustic guitar, I like starting everything in its purest form. And giving the listener an inside look into the songs’ incarnation has always been interesting to me. That’s something I really love with the artists I love. Quicksand by David Bowie is the perfect example. I chose to do Quicksand because, obviously it’s an amazing song, but I grew up listening to the demo version that’s just Bowie and a guitar before it was done up into the album version everyone knows and loves. You hear the song in this whole new way. You hear its incarnation, its roots and it makes the lyrics hit in a very impactful way. So that was an inspiration. You can get a different perspective on the music and maybe even understand it a bit better.

How does your vocal delivery change when you’re singing over an acoustic backdrop as opposed to fighting against the big wall of sound?

I don’t think my approach changes. I just open my mouth and hope I like what comes out. That’s true to a degree, but I don’t sing covers I don’t mean. I can only sing words I personally connect to in some way. There has to be a quality to it that’s extraordinarily genuine otherwise it’s just gonna suck. It doesn’t matter if you’re hitting the right notes, you have to evoke what the song is saying. So I’m very strategic with the songs I sing.

I’ve written plenty of songs I haven’t put on records because they’re not quite as deep as the other ones, or whatever the right word isq. Everything on this record is something I love and genuinely think that, because it’s acoustic and my voice is so prevalent, you can hear that. I hope my voice can connect to you in a way that, like you said, it’s not competing with electric guitars and other things that are distracting your ear. You’re purely listening to the lyrics and the emotion of the song itself.   

It’s well known how much Soundgarden and Chris meant to you. I imagine you could have picked any of their songs to cover, so what was the significance of the ones you chose to recreate for this record?  

It started with Halfway There. That was actually Matt Cameron’s idea. It was the first thing we did for this collection and kind of spurred the whole idea. He called me and said ‘I really want to do a tribute to Chris for his birthday coming up and would you do Halfway There with me?’ It was an obvious ‘yes,’ but I’d never recorded myself professionally. This was during lockdown, so I pulled out my little Tascam eight track recorder, battery powered, so that’s how technologically advanced I am, and we did it remotely. He was in Seattle, I did my stuff from my house in Maine, and it turned out quite haunting. It had a thing to it we were both proud of. 

And then over the course of the pandemic I recorded all these things to keep myself busy. At the end I looked and it and went ‘This is a collection of music we should put out in some sort of official format so that people can listen to it all in one place.’ It tells a story, has a similar feel and vibe and there’s something very cohesive about it. Something very calming and pleasant, which is a little different for us.       

On ‘Death By Rock and Roll’ you took something incredibly negative and turned it into the kind of powerful and positive statement that will undoubtedly help others through their darker days. That makes it very inspirational and adds even more meaning and importance to the album.

‘Death By Rock and Roll’, as cliché as it may sound, writing that record saved me. I went through a lot of loss, a lot of death, and was in a very dark place. I was in a deep hole of depression, substance abuse and on a very bad path I didn’t see a way out of. And the scariest part was that I was fine with that. I’d become content knowing I was going to fade into nothing. I’d given up and didn’t see a reason to move forward. 

[Eventually ] I turned to music. I turned to writing, not intentionally, not as intentionally as making a record, just to get through the day. But by the time I finished writing the album I’d started to come out of the other side. I worked my way through everything and it pulled me through the grief. So it is a very helpful record, which I didn’t know while making it, but it tells a full circle story of life, love and loss and that it does get better. If you hang on a little longer life will sort itself out and it will turn around. There is light at the end of the tunnel, you just have to wait it out.         

When you hit rock bottom you ended up in a place where you couldn’t listen to music because it was so painful. That must have been like completely losing your identity and sense of self? 

It was exactly like that. I felt like my life was over. Like ‘Everything I love is dead and music is dead to me because it isn’t bringing me joy. It isn’t filling me up like it used to and is bringing me nothing but pain.’ That leads back to my point of it being a waiting game. Grief and depression, you have to wait it out. Eventually I got to a place where I was starved for music, because I personally need music like I need food or water and oxygen.

I need it to live. I got to a point where I was so desperate for it that I started by looking into The Beatles again, which was the first band I heard and fell in love with, and it was kind of rediscovering music in a new way of re-understanding and relearning it. Almost like a child when I fell in love with it to begin with so many years ago. That was a very awakening experience. 

Did it take a little longer before you could listen to Chris?

Eventually, I could listen to Soundgarden again and it brought me joy and made me feel something other than just pain and sorrow. When I got to that point, that’s when I knew I had turned a corner. That was the moment where I could step back from myself and go ‘I can listen to this and it’s bringing me happiness again, I’m connecting to it again and not just trying to hide from it.’

Was expressing yourself so honestly a natural thing or were there any artists that inspired you to open up like that?

No, that came very naturally to me, which is why I gravitate towards the artists I do. It was the thing that made me love music and why I started writing songs. I lived a very strange life as a child. I had a very weird upbringing, working at such a young age and being in the public eye etc etc, that writing was the place where I was free from everything and the thing I could turn to that was just mine. It was personal, intimate, expressive, honest and where I could be myself and not have to colour myself in any one way or other for the outside world. That’s where I connected to it and what made me want to make music, the writing aspect. So it was purely self expression and that always came very naturally to me. 

You said you weren’t going to stop making music because Kato was no longer with you physically. And physically is the key word, because I’ve heard both Dave Grohl, with regards Kurt Cobain, and Brian May after Freddie Mercury’s passing, say that when they went into the studio they could almost feel them guiding their work. Did you experience anything similar with Kato?

Oh, 100%. He’s still here. It still gives me chills. One perfect example is Death By Rock and Roll, the song. “Death by rock and roll” was a phrase Kato said all the time. It was a motto we all lived our lives by. Even though that sounds morbid it was not. It was very positive: ‘Life life your own way, go out your own way, fuck anyone who doesn’t get you, rock and roll ‘til I die, live life to the fullest.” [That] was the battle cry for life. So when he passed that phrase resonated with me in a whole new way that I couldn’t escape. And the song starts with a recording we had of Kato walking across our studio. So the very first thing you hear on the album is Kato’s footsteps. If you bring that up and take all the music out, you can even hear him breathing and it’s very haunting and chilling for me. 

To have that there is kind of like...that’s the point, to keep his memory alive and honour his legacy. If you’re still saying the name and speaking about loved ones, even though they’re no longer here physically, their memory and legacy can’t die. It was important to put that into music because what better way to honour someone than in a song? Every night on tour we play his footsteps when we walk onstage so he’s there with us, echoing across arenas, and it’s very grounding and beautiful. He’ll always be a part of me. That will never go away. 

How do you top ‘Death By Rock and Roll’?

I keep calling that album a rebirth for The Pretty Reckless because, in one way, it feels like we’re a whole new band. Like we’ve rediscovered that initial flame and original fire. It feels like the first record all over again because we lost everything and had to rebuild. It’s an exciting place to be in now we’ve gotten through that initial pain of ‘I don’t know if we should do this’ to touring. We’re all in a very good head space. We’ve come out the other side and we’re excited about life again, in a new way, and that’s a great place to start. So that’s what we’re gonna try to say, that’s where we’re gonna start, and that’s gonna show itself in the form of new songs.

'Other Worlds' by The Pretty Reckless is out on November 4 through Century Media.

The Pretty Reckless Upcoming Tour Dates are as follows:

Wed October 26 2022 - GLASGOW Barrowland
Thu October 27 2022 - MANCHESTER Manchester Academy
Sat October 29 2022 - NEWCASTLE UPON TYNE O2 City Hall
Sun October 30 2022 - BIRMINGHAM O2 Academy Birmingham
Tue November 01 2022 - BRISTOL O2 Academy Bristol
Wed November 02 2022 - SOUTHAMPTON O2 Guildhall
Thu November 03 2022 - NORWICH Nick Rayns LCR
Sat November 05 2022 - LONDON O2 Academy Brixton

Compare & Buy The Pretty Reckless Tickets at Stereoboard.com.

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