Taylor Momsen for NYLON: It’s late, on an uncommonly warm Sunday afternoon in February, and the Manhattan skyline glows sunset-orange through the windows of a Chelsea studio, high above the still-snowlined New York City streets. As Taylor Momsen goes through the paces for her photoshoot, Soundgarden blares from the studio stereo, loud and then louder—a tonal approximation of Momsen’s own high-octane shows with her band, The Pretty Reckless. Momsen debuted as Jenny Humphrey on Gossip Girl when she was 13, by which time she was not some dewy-eyed ingenue but already an industry veteran, having begun her modeling career, in her hometown of St. Louis, when she was two years old. That experience shows now: She handles the camera expertly, all long legs and long, ash-blond hair, bright blue eyes incased in her now-familiar cloud of black eyeliner.
Momsen may have begun as a model, and found fame as an actress, but it’s music that she hopes will define the rest of her still-young career. It’s a few days before the U.S. release of her debut album, Light Me Up. Soon after this photoshoot, she’ll fly to Los Angeles, where she’ll celebrate the album’s release; appear, with her band, on the late-night Lopez Tonight show; and kick off her U.S. tour—all while featuring prominently in blog posts asking questions such as “Who had the [more] inappropriate look of the day—Taylor Momsen v. Lindsay Lohen?” (For the record, Lohan was appearing in court, while Momsen was attending a premiere party for Never Say Never, the 3-D Justin Bieber biopic, an event at which one assumes the dress code would be slightly looser than, for example, your own arraignment on a felony grand theft charge. Also, Momsen “won,” with 88% of the public vote.)
If a curious fan Googles “Taylor Momsen dressed inappropriately,” that fan will have approximately 615,000 webpages to choose among. Speaking of Google, if that same curious fan begins to type Momsen’s name into Google, the automatic fill-in function’s top four suggestions include variations of “Taylor Momsen flash” and “Taylor Momsen tampon,” the second a reference to a photographer’s too-intimate picture of Momsen, captured, up-skirt, while she performed at a Warped Tour show in San Francisco.
For an average 17-year-old from Missouri, this might seem like reason enough to set up an alternate community in a polar region, without access to Internet, television, or radio. Taylor Momsen, though, is no average 17-year-old.
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Once the shoot is over, Momsen and I retire to the studio’s lounge. She is incredibly beautiful up close, as perfectly pretty as a punk-rock china doll, with blue eyes rimmed in kohl and streaked with what appear to be two lines of gold across her dark-grey lids. She has just finished touring with The Pretty Reckless in Europe—Glasgow, London, Cologne, Paris; New York, her home, is a pitstop before beginning the band’s U.S. tour. “I’m definitely a New York girl,'” says Momsen. From our seats we can see the sun as it sinks into the Hudson River: It’s a picture-perfect winter evening. “I love it here. I like how grimy it is. I miss the cold when I’m in L.A. The snow has been following me for weeks—we started in France, and it was snowing there; then we went to the U.K., and it snowed everywhere. Then we got snowed in in Germany, and drove to Amsterdam, where it was snow, everywhere. And then we came home, and it’s still snowing.”
Momsen seems relaxed and content as she describes the European tour—presumably free of the puritanism that dominates so much of America’s relationship between the audience collective and the objects of its attention. “It was awesome, it was amazing, it was incredible,” she says. “We sold out 2500-seat venues in Glasgow and Manchester and London—in the U.K., they knew every word to every song. It was the most amazing feeling ever.” Momsen’s live shows in the U.S. have so far been limited to last summer’s Warped Tour: “That’s a very different kind of tour,” she says. “It’s a festival. There’s 80 other bands. You’re playing during the day, and it’s hot outside. I like [stage] lights.” Momsen and her band will play the Punk Spring festival in Tokyo in April; she says she hopes to follow that with an appearance in Seoul. The only Korean person she knows, she says, is this magazine’s editor in chief: “I really like her!” Momsen says. “She’s super nice.” She wants to visit Seoul: “I’d love to go shopping in Korea,” she says. “They’ll have to tell me where to go.”
It’s easy to imagine why Momsen might enjoy spending time outside the U.S., where she has presumably been offered a bit more latitude to remake herself as the classic rock songstress she is set on becoming, rather than the starlet actress we expected—following, perhaps, in the footsteps of Gossip Girl co-stars Blake Lively and Leighton Meester, who are busy bouncing between the TV show and film roles. Viewers with particularly long memories will remember Momsen first as apple-cheeked Cindy Lou Who in How the Grinch Stole Christmas, starring Jim Carrey as the titular Dr. Seuss creation; other films followed, but her big break, by any metric, came seven years later, when she first appeared as arty outcast Jenny Humphrey on the teen-dream hit Gossip Girl. The show was a sensation, dictating the national conversation about fashion, parental television controls, and teen sexuality and mores; Taylor Momsen was at the heart of it, as a wise-beyond-her-years Brooklyn teenager whose skills as a seamstress were only exceeded by her ability to make trouble for her elders and betters. After nearly being raped by Chuck during the show’s first season, Jenny wound up losing her virginity to him in its third; following her appearances in a few episodes during this latest, fourth season, Jenny was shunted off screen. While the reasons for this could have read as straightforward—Momsen’s prioritization of her music over her co-starring role on the show— American audiences have been unforgiving of this transformation, both professional and personal. Internet gossips peppered reports of her leaving the show with descriptions of her as “increasingly volatile.” Project Runway mentor Tim Gunn, who usually restrains from publicly criticizing teenagers, reportedly called her “a brat,” “a diva,” and “pathetic,” to TV outlet E! News.
Even given the typically acidic treatment of celebrities in the press, the reaction that greeted Momsen’s decision to step away from the show was weirdly vituperative. Momsen is beautiful, young, and willful, a combination that seemed to enrage many of her critics, who assailed her new dress sense, as Momsen’s rock-and-roll lingerie and corsets replaced Jenny Humphrey’s relatively sedate uniform at Constance Billard. Momsen views this evolution as a return to her true self. “When you sign a contract to play a character, you have an image to uphold—in the beginning, they want the public to identify you with your character,” Momsen says. “The stylists who were styling red carpet looks for me….” She trails off. Where she is otherwise wholly articulate, for a 17-year-old or a 47-year-old, here she stumbles slightly, as if this particular disagreement, between herself and her critics, is mystifying. “I was told I couldn’t—I dress the same way I dressed five years ago. I couldn’t wear my eye makeup in public. I couldn’t dress the way I do. But if you look at pictures of me from home, I look the same way [as I do now.] People are like, ‘She changed from so sweet to so whatever.’ But I’m, like, ‘I’m really just the same person.’ People just have to see me as myself rather than Jenny Humphrey, because I’m a very different person from her.”
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Momsen’s relationship to the press hasn’t always been so confounding. She was two years old when she first modeled, three when she starred in her first commercial (for the meat preparation mix Shake-n-Bake), and even younger when she began to sing: “There’s a video of me humming before I could speak,” she says. “I’ve been singing and writing as long as I can remember.” Her first song was “something about my dad’s dead dog.” She was “about seven” when she debuted as a singer-songwriter, on a St. Louis news broadcast. “I wrote a song for the Humane Society about rescuing a pet, because I used to volunteer there,” she says. “And then I sang it for the news.” That video has since been unearthed by and broadcast on an entertainment channel. “It was kind of funny, because I hadn’t seen it since it aired,” she says. “I don’t know how they found it.”
Does it bother her to have her childhood replayed—for the consumption, titillation, and criticism—of her audience?
She demurs. “I’ve been in this industry since I was two,” she says. “But the public eye part of it—the tabloid aspect of it—didn’t start to happen until Gossip Girl. I just ignore it.”
It seems impossible that she would able to do so. I tell her this.
“I don’t read it,” she says. “Put it this way—if somebody says something about you across the world, you wouldn’t know unless you looked it up. Everybody’s always going to have something to say. All those stories are spun so negatively—they’ll take something I say and spin it into something entirely different from what I meant. But I think people are smart enough to know that it’s not true—that it’s entertainment.”
I tell her that I doubt that.
“I’m an entertainer—I’m here to entertain. If someone spins a story out of something I said and it entertains people … then cool. Read it.”
Momsen gets endless flack for dressing as she does, at the age she is, but little credit for the poise for which she handles her assaults in the press, perhaps the biggest mean girl of all.
“I just think of it as I’m living my life, and I’m not living it for other people,” she says. “That sounds so contrived, but I’m not. People can say what they want about the record, or the way I look, or whatever, but in the end, I’m happy when I’m performing, and that’s all that matters.”
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About the performing: Momsen’s poise isn’t the only thing about her that’s preternaturally mature. Momsen’s voice is a powerful thing; it’s deep as a chasm, born in her throat and shot through with late nights and hard choices. It’s entirely at odds with her waif-like build; more than anything, it’s a surprise, that something so big and raw can emanate from such a small vessel. It’s in all of the songs on Light Me Up, but it hits you in the face watching her perform, for example, on an otherwise ho-hum video made for the BBC’s Radio Live Lounge: just her and a guitarist, on a mash-up of The xx’s “Islands” and Eminem and Rihanna’s “Love the Way You Lie.” Her voice is throaty, just above a whisper, at its start; when she enters Rihanna’s chorus, it explodes. It’s hugely affecting. Given that power, it seems cruel and capricious to criticize Momsen for wanting to exploit it, and share it with her audience.
“Music’s the only thing that matters to me,” she says. “It’s such a tough industry—you have to not be able to live without doing it, and I can’t. You have to have that passion for it.”
Did her decision to pursue her music career come as a shock to her friends?
“People in my life knew I’ve been in recording studios since I was little,” Taylor Momsen say. “I was working with [celebrated composer] James Horner when I was five, for The Grinch. They were, like, ‘Oh, great, fantastic, congratulations on the record,'” Momsen says, with a healthily dismissive tone. “But for people who knew me as Jenny or an actress—to see you not as your character but as a musician who writes and plays and really loves it and isn’t doing it for any other reason than that … I think that there are still people who won’t give the record a chance because of whatever, because of preconceived ideas they have of me.”
I ask her what she makes of some of the reviews of her music, which have offered an unlikely mix of sartorial critique and personal condemnation—all while the commentary about the actual music is otherwise positive.
“I know, it’s begrudgingly positive! Like, ‘I really don’t like her, but whatever, the music’s good. It’s fine,'” Momsen mimics. She shrugs. “It’s cool. It’s better to prove people wrong than have them think you’re going to be good, and suck.”
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A few days later, we speak again. She’s filmed her appearance on Lopez Tonight—“George is awesome, really funny, the nicest guy ever”—and The Pretty Reckless are about to play their first tour date, at Los Angeles’s El Rey Theatre. She sounds ebullient: on tour again, traveling with her bandmates: “It’s Led Zeppelin and music DVDs on the bus,” Momsen says, with intervals of South Park. “I watch it every night,” she says. “Everyone does voices. I suck—I’m the only one who can’t do it, because they’re all guys.”
Momsen takes her role as the band’s singer-songwriter seriously. “Most of this record was written at night because I was filming [Gossip Girl] during the day,” she says. “I’d write and record all night. It was a very strange thing. I love writing—it’s what’s kept me sane throughout my whole life—but I think every writer will tell you that it’s incredibly hard, creating something from nothing and wanting it to be good. At times, when you’re not inspired, it can be absolutely torturous—it’s up and down. But it’s worth it, the pain and the suffering. What makes a record good is the honesty and the pain and the suffering that you’re expressing.”
It’s an adult album, in its theme and its sound, a million miles from the pop expressionism of current charts-dominatrices like Lady Gaga or Katy Perry. “Here we are and I can’t think from all the pills, hey,” starts the song “Just Tonight”; the video for the barn-burning “Make Me Wanna Die” features Momsen stripping down to her underwear (and then a bit more) as missiles streak across the night sky. If Momsen didn’t sound so fierce, you’d want to give her a hug, and it’s hard to imagine what those who love her—like her parents—would make of the material.
“They let me do my thing, and I’m thankful for that, especially with writing a record, and the content that I write about,” Momsen says. “If there’s somebody looking over your shoulder, and questioning everything, it makes it difficult to be honest. The one thing I can say about the record is that it’s very honest, and and you know, I have to thank them for not sitting there and analyzing it to death.”
It seems like this would be an opportune moment to again try to pin down exactly what her castmates on Gossip Girl make of the album, but her representative, who has been monitoring our conversation, disagrees. “Next question,” she says, curtly. Taylor Momsen, to her credit, offers what by now is probably a pro forma, if polite response: “The show’s been awesome—they’ve been very supportive of my music career and the transition,” Momsen says. “I really have to thank everyone on the show for allowing me to focus on music.”
Will she ever act again?
“The one thing I can’t live without is music, writing it and performing and playing it,” she says. “It’s something I could never give up. I know I’ll be writing and creating music for the rest of my life. Whether I act in the future or not—I can’t decide that. The focus is music and touring.”
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That being the case, Taylor Momsen has much to celebrate. The Pretty Reckless debuted at #2 on the iTunes chart; over the next few weeks, she and her band will perform dates across the U.S. and Canada, including New York, Dallas, Toronto, and St. Louis, her hometown. “I never think beyond a day in advance because everything’s so chaotic,” she says. Her future may or may not include acting; it also may or may not include developing her own fashion label: “I’d love to have a line, but I wouldn’t want to just put my name on it,” she says. “I’d want to be involved in every step of the process.” What is certain is that she’ll continue to be viewed as a symbol; whether as a good-girl-gone-bad, a cautionary tale, or a hard-working artist is likely beyond her control. At least, she knows they’re gunning for her.
“Everyone loves to see someone fall apart—it’s entertaining,” says Momsen, at the end of our first conversation, as she gets ready to fly to Los Angeles. It’s a dark sentiment for such a pretty sunset. “It’s a story. It’s something to write about.”
Plenty of people expect you to fall apart, I say.
“Of course people would,” says Taylor Momsen. The expression on her face is caught somewhere between a smirk and a sigh. “There are people who would thoroughly enjoy that.”
With that, she’s off to meet them.