Taylor Momsen Is Getting Raw

Sitting in her home studio wearing black sunglasses, Taylor Momsen of The Pretty Reckless is proud of herself for getting the band to this point in their career, one where they know exactly who they are. Made up of  lead guitarist and backing vocalist Ben Phillips, drummer Jamie Perkins, bassist Mark Damon, and, of course, Momsen, the group announced their identity on the searing, dark new album Dear God, released on June 26 via Fearless Records. Across 14 tracks, Momsen and company dive into topics such as depression, anxiety, and  grief, topics that point to something that encapsulates the entire record: wanting to escape “hell” for something greater. 

Hailing from St. Louis, Missouri, Momsen was first known for her acting—especially for roles as Cindy Lou Who in How The Grinch Stole Christmas and Jenny Humphrey on the CW teen series Gossip Girl—while she worked on music behind the scenes, but she retired from the screen at 16. She was only 15 years old when The Pretty Reckless formed in 2009; the band’s debut album Light Me Up was released in 2010 via Interscope Records and spawned the successful single “Make Me Wanna Die.” Their sophomore record Going To Hell landed at number five on the Billboard 200, and their third, 2017’s Who You Selling For, saw the band open for Soundgarden and generate the single “Take Me Down.” Their 2021 record, Death By Rock N’ Roll, features dark themes and paints the arc of Momsen’s grief after a string of tragedies. Their 2022 release, Other Worlds, is a collection of songs that give insight into the influences that helped her through dark times. The band’s most recent effort, Dear God, is a record that captures them at their most unfiltered and raw. 

Ahead of the band’s global tour for the album, Momsen sat down with Playboy to chat about the “brutally honest” new album, her perspective on sexuality, the ways that art has been a lifeboat when the waves of life crashed upon her, and more. 

What was the inspiration for the track “When I Wake Up,” which seems to  reflect on a moment when dreams begin to turn into something more dangerous?

I’m very proud of “When I Wake Up.” The song itself is very fun, but at the same time it’s a guise of fun if you listen to the song and go deep into it. It’s much darker than you might notice on the first listen, which is kind of exactly what the song is saying. Musically, it reflects what the lyrical content and intent of the song is. I think that it’s not fair to the listener to impart my personal story onto them. It’s for you guys to take [in] and interpret and equate to your own lives and whatever it means to you. In broad terms, it’s about [when] I went through a very challenging period in my life when I was very out of control and using things outside of myself to just escape my mind and the dark place that my mind was living in. It seemed like a good idea at the time, but the reality is that kind of lifestyle of living in the fast lane and living in excess and using unhealthy things to escape is not sustainable. Eventually, it’s bound to crash and that’s what that song is depicting.

What has it been like for the band to lean into a punk sound on this new album and embracing brutal honesty in songwriting?

There’s a directness to this record. There’s a brutal honesty and directness in the lyrics themselves. There’s nothing that is hidden by metaphor or storytelling. It’s almost directly from my diary so there is an element to this album that feels so vulnerable yet entirely aggressive and in your face, which is what it is like to be human. I think it creates a really special record because you’re really getting an inside look as to how my mind works as a person and as a songwriter. I think that these songs have always been the place where I can be the most free. It’s the most important thing to me, what I put in the highest regard. It’s something that I started and picked up when I was very young, when I was 5 years old when I didn’t know what I was doing. Music was always a language that made sense to me and writing is this very natural thing to me where I had a very unconventional upbringing and so writing was personal, it was mine, and it wasn’t for anyone else or any purpose other than for me to understand my life. That kind of purity or whatever you want to call it has remained all of these years. This album is the culmination of all of that, all of myself. I keep using the phrase ‘This record feels like me.’ It feels like us, it’s the most authentic and pure way we know how to be. There’s no affect to it or pretense or any of those things. It’s us effortlessly, which is quite cool. It all fell into place and a lot of that is luck. 

“Love Me” is a song that is so raw in its delivery and heavy in general. What experiences did you pull from to craft it? 

It was so raw and I realized there was power in that. It wasn’t my intention while writing it. It was one of those songs that poured out of me. In a lot of ways, it was the catalyst of this album where it unlocked something in my mind of realizing where I was at as a songwriter and as a person mentally and all those things. So it was a giant jumping off point. It was quite an emotional undertaking to actually record because writing something down gives it truth and power. Keeping it bottled up doesn’t work. It’s definitely one of those songs that I needed to get out of myself.  

What are your thoughts on how your image has changed as an artist, and how do you compare it to the debut of “Make Me Wanna Die”? 

A little less eyeliner, but it’s coming back pretty full force. [laughs] It’s a weird thing to analyze your own image, but I think that in one way it’s changed a lot and in another way it hasn’t changed at all. I think that I’ve gotten older and I’ve gotten more mature and more sure of myself as the years have progressed. So I think my style and the way I feel confident in dressing and the way I present myself hasn’t changed all that much. It’s gotten a little slicker, a little more mature, more serious.  I clearly have always been very comfortable with nudity, like in “Make Me Wanna Die.” That doesn’t come from a sexual perspective, it comes from a perspective of wanting to bare all in truth. I think of clothing and style as things that change and evolve with the times and I always want to make something that is timeless. When you put a piece of clothing on an album cover or in a music video, it immediately puts that piece of art in a time capsule. I’m very consciously aware of using my most vulnerable self to express what the album is trying to say and I try to use that in all of its facets. It’s always been a part of our identity in that way. I never want to date something with an outfit.

Songs are these magical worlds that evolve with you. It’s very cool to me that when I wrote and recorded our first single I was 15 years old and we still play that every single night and I’m not sick of it. It’s transformed over time and grown with me as a persona and an artist. 

What would you say is the sexiest moment of your career? 

It probably depends on what your definition of sexy is. Give me a jumping off point here. 

Perhaps the music video for “Going To Hell”? 

I would count that. There’s always a duality about the art that we make. So I’m a person of extremes in a lot of ways so I’m always toying with elements of sex and sexiness in what we do because it’s a big part of who I am. But there’s also a lot of depth. I don’t really look at it from that perspective. I’m never making a music video going  “I’m going to make this sexy.”  

What are your evolving thoughts on grief, given your experiences with it? 

“Devil In Disguise” is the quickest song in time we did for the record. My friend Michelle [Trachtenberg] passed away and I heard the news and immediately wrote “Devil in Disguise” for her. That song was an incredibly emotional undertaking for me. It was purely inspired by what just happened and it’s sadly not my first experience with this. It’s for anyone who’s lost anyone and I think the line “We all need more time to get it right” is a very telling thing that I think we all feel.

The thing with loss is that it doesn’t get easier. It’s never less surprising. It’s never less shocking. It never hurts any less. All of those things never change. Time is the answer, sadly it’s true. The reality is it hurts just as much when you think about it but at the same time I’m not bleeding all over the floor anymore. So my experience with loss has changed me as a person. I’m not the same as I was before and I never will be again. But I’ve learned to accept that and that’s now a piece of me. Loss is really love with no place to go. I carry those people with me as a badge of honor. I try to say their names. It’s not that you forget, it’s that it transforms into a part of who you are.” 

What do you think of shifting expectations for musicians and AI music or its impact on the industry? 

It’s probably terrifying. I’m more scared of [the] Terminator and that kind of thing. It doesn’t scare me on a personal, artistic level because I would never do that so I don’t care. AI can never emote for me. That’s not why I do this. I don’t write songs to try to have a hit song. I write for myself because there’s something in me that I have to get out. I have done that my whole life and would do that whether anyone was ever gonna hear it or not. AI doesn’t scare me because it’s not something I could see ever infiltrating what I do as an artist. In the grand scheme of the world, maybe how the music industry views that and how it’s going to shift all of those things, that’s a giant topic that I don’t have the answers to and I don’t think anyone does yet. It’s so new. There’s something to that human quality in music that I think has been diluted over the years with advancements in technology and things, but that’s what I love. I think that imperfections are perfection. I wanna hear the wobble in my voice. I wanna hear the emotion and the crack. That’s the thing that’s going to connect. That’s what makes everyone feel connected. Without that you’re creating something very sterile and that doesn’t interest me.

What is your advice for young women actors or musicians who want to break out of a similar mould or expectation? 

I think that the reality is that if you live your life by expectation in art, you’re always going to fail, so don’t. If you have something to say and something that you want to express, that’s all that matters in the end. Know that your idea of success or whatever you may think that it is or imagine it to be, it never looks like what you think it is, so just throw that out the door. The only thing you can do is and the only way that you will succeed and when I feel my most successful is when I made something that I’m proud of, period, without anyone’s opinion or the audience, the label, the industry, the radio—none of that enters my brain at all when I’m writing something, It is simply for me. By doing so, I can never fail.