The limits of control.

Hello, upper east siders! Spotted: Little J releasing a record with her band, The Pretty Reckless. The biggest surprise? It’s actually good. Xoxo.

IN A CORNER booth at Remedy Diner on New York City’s Lower East Side, the same place we met six months ago for her NYLON Japan cover story, Taylor Momsen sips from a steaming skim latte, her long, center-parted blond hair shrouding most of her face. The first time, we shared cheese fries while she talked candidly about her acting career and bubbled over with excitement when the conversation turned toward her band, the Pretty Reckless, and their forthcoming record, which was still very much “in the works”. Now the as-yet-untitled album is set to come out this summer, and it’s the reason that we’re meeting again in the same booth, at the same diner, with another order of cheese fries.

This time, Momsen, Who says she has “absolutely” fulfilled the hopes she had for the album, is joined by her guitarist, Ben Phillips (bassist Mark Damon and drummer Jamie Perkins are absent). “She was completely in charge from one end to the other”, says Phillips, who co-wrote the record with her. “She’s very diligent – one might use the word pedantic at points. We could spend 18 hours editing a track. She truly doesn’t know the meaning of downtime”. At this, Momsen smirks contentedly.

Lots of thing – big and small – have changed since our last meeting: In addition to finishing the recording, Momsen just shot her first music video and assembled a permanent band that will accompany her on this summer’s Warped Tour. Also new are her “fucking cool John Lennon sunglasses”, behind which her heavily lined and shadowed lids are barely visible. She says they were her dad’s and that she likes them a lot, and I believe her because she opts to wear them for the entirety of our conversation.

“[The album is about] sex and drugs and religion and politics and arguments”, explains Momsen, dipping a fry in ketchup and popping it into her mouth. “But whatever I felt when I was writing it isn’t what I need people to get out of it, exactly. Whatever they want to take from it is what the songs are about. My intention doesn’t really matter”: Momsen cities Oasis, the Beatles, and Audioslave as longtime musical influences but adds that her producer introduces her to Marilyn Manson during the recording process. After announcing this, she chants a string of lyrics from Manson’s “This Is The New Shit” and falls back into the booth, giggling.

On the album’s first single, “You Make Me Wanna Die”, Momsen’s voice growls over dense guitars (“Take me, I’m alive / Never was a girl with a wicked mind”) but switches to a haunting purr for the bridge: “I can see your eyes / Your eyes”. “This is he first time ever that I’ve been able to choose the people I’m working with”, she says. “When you’re an actress, you’re chosen for a role. It’s hard to find people who can reflect your vision and make it come to life”. For Momsen, it was essential that she be able to pick her producers and have creative control of her videos. “Otherwise I wouldn’t do it”, she explains. “I’d rather put it out myself than have people (at a label) dictate what my songs are going to sound like. Fuck that: I’m the artist”.

It’s been a painstaking process for Momsen, but she says the long hours were nothing new and ultimately satisfying. “It just feels like a success to finish it”, she says. “Past that, it’s all really kind of bullshit. If you’re in this for record sales and fame, then you don’t really like music”. So how did Momsen celebrate once the album was finished? “Those are things”, she answers coyly, “that I don’t say in magazines”.

Thanks so much to Septimiu for the magazine scans.

GALLERY LINK
Magazine Scans » Nylon June / July 2010

Having made a name for himself back in the ’90s in U.S. teen drama My So Called Life, Jared Leto is now ranked among the most iconic rock stars of our era. So while you may not have heard of The Pretty Reckless yet, the band’s 16-year-old singer Taylor Momsen could well be set to follow in the 30 Seconds To Mars frontman’s footsteps.

In case you’ve been living on another plane for the past three years, Taylor is one of the stars of hit U.S. TV show Gossip Girl. However,like Jared, her true passion has always been music.
“Making a record is more than a dream of mine, it’s a need and necessity” she states with disarming sincerity. “I’ve been writing songs since I was five, and no matter how big our record becomes, I just want to play and sing and write.”

Listing their influences as Courtney Love, Nirvana and Led Zeppelin, The Pretty Reckless completed by guitarist Ben Phillips, bassist Mark Damon and drummer Jamie Perkins – recorded their forthcoming debut album last year with producer Kato Khandwala, who has previously worked with All Time Low, Paramore and Madina Lake. With the prontwoman’s filming commitments taking up a lot of her time, the record became a true labour of love.

“I’d be shooting all day and the going to work on the record starting at midnight until five in the morning,” says Taylor. “It was spread out over a year, and when we finished it really was a case of ‘Wow, the record’s done, finally!’.”

The World’s first taster of The Pretty Reckless takes the form of their gritty, snarling new single Make Me Wanna Die, taken from the recent Kick-Ass soundtrack.
Having racked up an impressive number of plays on big name radio stations around the globe, the band are determined to make their dream of rock stardom a reality.

“We’re playing the whole of the Warped Tour, and I’m going to work around my filming schedule so we can tour as much as is physically possible”, Taylor enthuses. “We want to play to the UK so badly, I cannot tell you! Our favourite bands are English so we can’t wait to come over!”

Thank so much to Ray for the magazine scan :)

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Magazine Scans » Kerrang Magazine – May 2010

Make sure you check out the gallery :)

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View All » Last Uploads

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Magazine Scans » UK Glamour – April 2010
Gossip Girl » Season 2 » Screencaps

Edit: 4 HQ stills from “The Hurt Locket” have been added.

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Magazine Scans » Most Wanted – Spring 2010
Gossip Girl » Season 3 » Stills » 3×13 – The Hurt Locket

GALLERY LINKS
Magazine Scans » Kiss Magazine – April 2010
Gossip Girl » Season 3 » Stills » 3×15 – The Sixteen Year Old Virgin

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Magazine Scans » Fabulous Magazine – March 2010

She’s the fash pack’s latest muse, but Gossip Girl’s Taylor Momsen reveals how her edgy look was inspired by classroom mean girls.
Taylor Momsen is not your regular teen starlet. The actress best known for her role as Jenny Humphrey in Gossip Girl is not old enough to drink alcohol, drive a car or buy cigarettes (even if she does smoke them) but she’s got the ambition and attitude of a showbiz veteran – not surprising given that she has been acting since she was three. Yes, you read that right, people. Three.

In fact, just one look at her CV is enough to give even the most accomplished child genius an inferiority complex. She may be sweet 16, but she has already made her name in one of TV’s most popular teen dramas to date, is a lead singer in a punk rock band and has been feted as Hollywood’s hottest fashionista, with designers falling over themselves to dress her. They know that what Taylor is pictured wearing today will become tomorrow’s latest trend. So it makes perfect (style) sense that fashion’s latest muse fronts our new-season special. But not everyone is a fan of Ms Momsen’s edgy look. Some conservative types have lambasted Taylor’s love of long socks, grungy tops and barely-there skirts, saying she’s a poor role model for her teen fans. Not that she’s bothered. “Clothes are a form of self-expression. I don’t care what other people think,” she says. “I’ve had lots of people say I’m disgraceful because I should act like a role model for other young kids but I’m not a role model. I’m an actress, I’m a singer and I don’t want to be a role model. If you like me that’s fantastic – but if you don’t, stop giving me a hard time.”

When we finally catch up with her (it’s taken five days to pin her down) it’s in the back of her chauffeur-driven car in New York en route from a Gucci fitting to a night out with friends from her band, The Pretty Reckless.

“I’ve always been into my own look and love what I wear,” she says. “I’m not like a lot of other actresses. I don’t use a stylist and mostly do my own hair and make-up. When I get dressed up I always wear what I want to. Fashion is a big part of me but I always believe it’s not what but how you wear clothes.
“I’m not some cute girl that’s been stamped out of a Disney studio and I’m proud of that. Some people like me for it, others hate it. I’m used to that. I’ve had it all my life.” A teen tantrum this is not. Taylor’s defensive for good reason. She was just three when she started to act professionally, six when she made her big-screen debut alongside Dennis Hopper in the thriller The Prophet’s Game and seven when she got the part as the lead little girl in the Jim Carrey movie The Grinch.

You would expect that such amazing parts at such a young age would have been the sign of a charmed life, but Taylor – who grew up in Missouri with parents Michael and Colette and younger sister Sloane, 13, and then moved to New York aged 12 – shakes her head. “I didn’t have a great childhood,” she says. “I loved my family, I loved my work but I hated school. I had a really bad time. Other kids didn’t like me. I didn’t fit in.

“Maybe a lot of people think I have a great life. I do in lots of ways, but believe me it’s been pretty tough. I know a lot of girls couldn’t handle everything I’ve been through.

“The way I am in my attitude, my clothes, my music is all to do with what has happened to me in my life so far. I do what I choose, I wear what I choose, I sing what I choose and I don’t care what anyone else thinks. I’ve had to learn to get tough enough to be like this but it’s the way I have to be.

“I was made fun of all the time – the other kids used to taunt me religiously. I never had a best friend.”

It’s undoubtedly this that has led to her “trust complexes” and she’s said in the past she’s only close to two people. “My life was just not normal. I was in commercials, I was in TV series, then I was the Grinch Girl.”

And it was a hint of the wild dress sense that got her noticed more recently which set her apart from the rest of her peers too. “I dressed differently. I definitely wasn’t a fashion icon at school,” she admits.

“I used to always wear knee-high socks and I got teased all the time. Girls would point at them and laugh. It makes me laugh now that one of my fashion statements are my knee-high stockings. Now a lot of girls think they are pretty cool. You have to admit that’s ironic.”

These days, everyone is desperate to be Taylor’s friend, but back then those dark days were terribly lonely for her.
“I really wanted a friend but it just never happened,” she explains. “I didn’t get talked to or invited anywhere. I never got hit or anything like that. It was much more snidey and personal.

“I also never got asked out once at school. I was the weird one. Maybe people thought I was stuck up, maybe they thought I was above them. I wasn’t.

“I was very, very unhappy at school so I moved schools a lot which didn’t help matters. I guess my parents and I thought that I’d finally find somewhere where I’d be OK. But it was the same story.”

It’s clear that Taylor is nothing like the social climbing, squeaky-clean character she plays in ITV2’s super-cool US series Gossip Girl. She started out on the show when she was 13 and over three years transformed her preppy innocent character into a bit of a rock chick.

“I started dressing myself for events,” says Taylor. “The producers noticed and wanted to incorporate that into Jenny’s wardrobe, so I was very lucky. Now if someone doesn’t like what I’m wearing, I don’t care.”

But does that extend to her nearest and dearest? Ask Taylor how her mum reacts when she steps out in revealing outfits like the black stockings and suspenders combo she wore at the Teen Vogue Block Party in New York last September, and she laughs. “There are a few occasions when she raises her eyebrows but she never tells me to get changed,” she says.

It comes as little surprise that Taylor’s role models are outrageous rock stars. “I love people like Joan Jett and Kurt Cobain. But what I love is more about their attitude than what they wear.

“I don’t copy anyone in how I dress,” she insists. “It bugs me when people say I’m the next Courtney Love. Number one I’ve never been a heroin addict like she used to be, and number two I don’t look anything like her.”

And Taylor – who recently collaborated with US designer Jen Kao to create tour outfits for her band – doesn’t take her role as a fashionista remotely for granted.

“I’m so amazingly lucky because I get to go to fashion shows, I have designers giving me clothes and I can pick what I want,” she says.

“But I mix everything up to put my mark on it. If a designer gives me a dress I may hem it up to make it shorter – I’ll make it how I want it. I’m 16, I have an opinion and I think I can go out and do what I want and wear what I want. I want to inspire other girls to follow their own ideas and not care what other people think.”

And like the big names before her – Agyness Deyn, Alexa Chung, Lily Allen and Pixie Geldof – Taylor recently bagged a contract as the face of New Look. But she’s not just modelling the clothes. This is an opportunity to put her style spin on the whole collection.

“The cool thing about the campaign was wearing clothes with my twist,” says Taylor, who is currently single and who has commented in the past that she would “eat a boy my age alive”.

“I don’t dress for men, I don’t dress for boys, I don’t dress for women or other girls. I dress for me.”

With so many years ahead of her Taylor knows only one thing about the future – that she’ll be doing fashion her way. “I don’t know how I’ll be dressing when I’m 20 or 30, but I know it’ll be my style and it won’t be boring.

“I absolutely love fashion because it reflects who you are,” she says. “When I was a kid I always used to think: ‘What would I save if my house was on fire?’ Even now it would have to be my rag doll, but it would also be my guitar and my vintage leather jacket.” A style statement if ever there was one.

source: newsoftheworld.co.uk

GALLERY LINK
Magazine Scans » Kiss Magazine – April 2010

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Magazine Scans » Seventeen – February 2010

Edit: I also added some pics in HQ from New Look photoshoot.

GALLERY LINKS
Magazine Scans » Teen Vogue – September 2009
Magazine Scans » Inside Love Magazine – Fall 2009
Photoshoots » Session #19 (HQ)
Photoshoots » removed