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Now presenting: our November digital cover star. Exclusive to subscribers, Jesse Jo Stark graces the cover of Playboy in a “stark raving mad” pictorial, complete with an animated rabbit inspired by Mr. Playboy, an icon of Playboy’s covers from the ’50s and ’60s. You can see the full story and also experience it in our Winter issue, hitting newsstands next month.
The term “it girl” has followed Jesse Jo Stark for most of her life. Lately, though, she’s been mulling over the role of the it girl’s higher octave: the muse. It’s also the title of her new album.
On a crisp October evening, I meet the L.A. designer and alt-Americana artist at her studio in Hollywood. A rock star with a weakness for sultry, country-inflected songs of heartbreak and defiance, Stark is at the end of her third long day of filming visuals for the record.
Stark, 35, catwalks into the studio sporting a black bomber jacket and hot pants, her striking gray eyes tinted by blue aviators. She invites me into the plush conversation pit at the center of the room, spangled with silver stars woven into the navy upholstery.
We toast over Champagne, and I pretend not to be shaken by her bloodletting in the record I’d just spent the weekend digesting. On Muse’s siren song of a title track, Stark confronts the objectifying eyes of lovers and lurkers past: “I’m your poster, I’m your pinup, I’m your doll / You can have me any way you want / So you like me and you wanna taste it / Then you have it and you go and waste it.”
“Muses, and women in general, can be adored and not really heard,” Stark says. “But I, too, muse on others—on women in my life and sometimes men. As the album went on, it took on [a new] light, because it could be a reciprocation of energy. To inspire someone that deeply is an amazing feeling.”
She wields a chainsaw as she does it, in her emotionally shredding lyrics and on the album’s cover, where one dangles from her right hand.
“I always try to think: ‘What would my mom not totally love?’” Stark says about the chainsaw, with a smirk. “But, yeah, I’m angry. I feel like it’s OK to be angry, but as a woman, it’s considered ugly. There’s an intensity that isn’t understood. But I perform better if I’m mad.”
Born in L.A., Stark designed her first collection for Chrome Hearts as a teenager. The luxury label, owned by her parents, Richard and Laurie Lynn Stark, got its start in 1988 making leather pants and jackets. Stark is now a co–creative director there and has a line of her own, Deadly Doll.
Stark has since developed a croon that catches the air like embers. Her first single, 2017’s “Driftwood,” harks back to the country music she grew up on: Loretta Lynn, Merle Haggard, and even Hank Williams III, the black sheep of the famed country family, who Stark once saw in high school.
“You have to love hard. You have to do it your way.”
“He comes out in fucking braids, all country,” Stark recalls. “The crowd leaves. A new crowd comes in. He takes his braids out … plays a full heavy metal show [with his band] Assjack. I was like, ‘I’m done explaining my genre!’”
Written and recorded mostly in a cabin somewhere outside Aspen, Colorado, Muse finds the glam rock banshee she awakened on her self-released 2022 debut, Doomed, engulfed in new depths of rage and heartache. Guided by the smoky honey of Stark’s voice and the yearning twangs of pedal steel, it’s a western gothic romance flecked with a punk patina.
In Colorado, she worked with songwriter-producer Liza Owen and Doomed coproducer Michael Harris, who helped Stark tease out the most potent verses from her feral feminine id; Ethan Schneiderman and Zach Michel also produced.
“I loved Doomed, but [there were] too many men in the room,” Stark says. “If you were a man in that room [during Muse], you were lucky. My girl Liza and I were screaming, crying, on the floor… and the [guys] were making us fucking veggie plates and pouring us wine.”
“We kept some of the raw vocals. I’m not even on pitch,” she says with a laugh. “But it’s cathartic. I want a young girl to hear that and feel that.”
Stark began writing the album in November 2024, when she ditched the California sunshine for a three-week sabbatical in the snow. Her dog, Billie, who had inspired several of her songs, had died that January. She and her boyfriend, English rocker Yungblud, born Dominic Harrison, had also hit pause on their relationship. “We both needed space and time,” she says. Stark met Harrison when he asked her to appear in a music video for “Strawberry Lipstick” in the summer of 2020; they shot cheeky scenes of her biting his lip and walking him on a dog leash. The two officially became an item in 2021.
“Stevie Nicks wrote ‘Landslide’ in Aspen, and Hunter S. Thompson [lived] out of Woody Creek.… There’s this crazy photo of him shooting his typewriter,” Stark says, explaining her choice to abscond to the Rockies. “The day I arrived, I danced around my living room with tears in my eyes. I was happy because I was free, because I was listening to me again.”
The breakup gave Stark a chance to rediscover herself far away from the noise of Los Angeles, where she’d often been regarded in relation to others: her parents, her guitar hero boyfriend, even her godmother Cher, whose eminence makes it into every story written about her (including, now, this one).
The folky ballad “Hollywoods Afraid of Love” helped Stark articulate the maddening existence she’d broken out of. “Hollywood’s built on an illusion. We’re all kind of catering to everyone’s idea of us,” Stark says. “I wrote that song after [hearing people] talking shit about this public couple. I just … fucking unleashed. I was like, ‘You don’t know them!’ I was backing people I’ve never even met. Liza recorded me on her iPhone. Living in a town that romanticizes everything and then tears it apart … you have to laugh at it.”
Stark later convened with the players in L.A. to record at John Mayer and film director McG’s newly acquired Chaplin Studios, formerly Jim Henson Studios. (The cabin in Colorado didn’t have enough juice to power a full band.) She called in producer Harris and multi-instrumentalist and arranger Kirk Hellie, who played guitar on “Who Knew,” her 2025 song with Lil Yachty.
“[Hellie] is obviously a muse of mine,” says Stark. “He taught me guitar when I was young and has gone through every trial and error and phase of my life. I brought him in because it’s like watching a mad scientist. It’s unhinged.”
For all its piss and vinegar, Muse closes sublimely with the comedown of “Sundays Call,” which ends with a breathy vocal cameo from none other than Harrison. The song refers to their tradition of talking on the phone every Sunday, even in the months they spent apart; “just one more hit of love’s dopamine,” she trills.
“That’s Dom’s voice—my boyfriend,” Stark says. The two have reconciled. What you hear, she explains, is “the reciprocation of [the] muse.”
Given the volcanic furor she raises in earlier tracks—“you want me to be sexy when I feel dead inside,” she snarls in the electric guitar crashout of “Age of Being Honest”—one must wonder what precipitated the happy heel-turn of an ending.
“We’ve been through it, but we love hard,” she says. “I think it’s a cool way to sum up the record and all of its roses and thorns.… Don’t forget that he, too, loved. It takes two to fucking tango.”
Still, “love is a horror film,” she says, half-joking. “You’re surrendering control. Horror is about survival, and when you’re being vulnerable, you’re in survival mode. My idea of romance is a little haunted, but I believe in it, even if it terrifies me.”
“Everything you’ve been taught about love is wrong,” Stark says before we part ways. “If you can’t fall in love with something every day, you’re kind of fucked.… You have to love hard. You have to do it your way. And you have to design it for each other.”
RABBIT, RUN
For Jesse Jo’s Playboy shoot, the rocker decamped to the California desert under the creative guidance of Éamonn Zeel Freel, who had pitched the star on a photo spread that included cartoon animation, a bank heist, and the femme fatale riding into the sunset. (She was instantly sold.) Our animated character is an homage to Mr. Playboy, a rabbit rendered in collage that appeared in our magazine mostly in the ’50s and ’60s. Almost all these shots benefit from Jesse Jo acting the part—playing out poses and scenes with no actors or stand-in models helping her. The rest of the magic was done with Freel’s artistry, applied to each image after we wrapped.
Photography and animation: Éamonn Zeel Freel
Styling: Marc Eram
Hair: Iggy Rosales
Makeup: Shea Hardy
Set design: Nicholas Faiella
Executive producer: Taylor Tindall
Producer: Siya Bahal
Production coordinator: Madeline Kim
Photo assistants: Colin Smith & Fred Mitchell
Animation Assistant: Lily Makoski
Digital tech: Nick Fish
Retouching: Ink Studio
