“This album is almost torn directly from my diary”

The leader of the pretty RecklessTaylor Momsen, talks about her new job “Dear God” (Fearless/Music As Usual, 26) like someone opening a door that had been closed for years. And he does it with a kind of serene realization: there are things that, sooner or later, find a way out.

(In a few months the band will be performing in our country. You can check the dates of their tour at the end of this interview)

Taylor Momsen had to open doors, let something inside her come out. And he has done it through songs crossed by rawness, the body, memory, excess, darkness and an honesty that does not seem interested in softening its edges. It’s not that that truth didn’t exist before (the singer claims that she has never lied on an album) but here the distance between experience and song seems minimal. “This album, in particular, is almost torn directly from my diary.” That is, perhaps, the key to “Dear God”: confession not only as a dramatic gesture but as a form of writing. Momsen remembers that songs are still songs, with their forms and images, but recognizes that there is a more direct lyrical brutality here. “There is a rawness to his honesty that is not disguised with metaphors, stories or similar devices,” point. In that place, he says, he has touched something he had not explored with that intensity before; something “very pure, vulnerable, true and direct” which turns the album into “very special and very powerful.”

“The magic of the universe in Spain made something happen once in a million”

The body occupies a central place in this story. In the songs he appears wounded, exhausted, desired, judged or reduced to value, as if the life experience could not be separated from its physical dimension. For Momsen, that presence is born from evidence: he has grown inside and outside the band. “I made the first album when I was fourteen or fifteen and now I’m thirty-two. I’ve lived a lot of life in between, and a lot of that life hasn’t been pretty.” What has happened behind the scenes, he adds, also leaves its mark on the music. “When I examine myself, which is part of what I do in writing, your whole being also includes your body. Your body is what sustains your soul and what sustains your mind.” The statement becomes more forceful when it talks about a limit point. “There was a time in my life when I was not well and I had to make a very conscious decision: whether I was going to live or whether I was going to die. It was very serious. Luckily I chose to move on.” For her, depression and discomfort are not just mental experiences. They also manifest physically. “Those kinds of things affect the body. It’s not something that exists only in the mind.” That’s why “Dear God” It works as a personal file. “This album is all of me. It’s everything that has happened up to this moment turned into a song.” That tension between darkness and energy appears in “When I Wake Up”, a song that talks about excess and that moment in which what seems exciting begins to become dark. “That’s just what that lifestyle looks like. It seems like a lot of fun until it’s not.” Music contains that contradiction. “This is great and this is horrible. Both things are there.”

In “Dear God” He also takes the opportunity to dialogue with his past, although not necessarily in nostalgic terms. A line from the album’s title track evokes “the girl we used to know”an image that inevitably refers to having grown up in the public eye as a child film star and for her role in the youth series “Gossip Girl.” Momsen, however, expands the meaning of that figure. “I have reached a point in my life where I fully accept all aspects of myself. That includes my youth and things that I may have previously rejected or distanced myself from.”. Accepting, for her, does not mean staying trapped. It means stopping pretending that what we experienced does not exist. “I am who I am, I have done what I have done, I have lived what I have lived, and I cannot change it. I cannot rewrite it or make it different from what it is.”

The visual imaginary of “Dear God” also participates in that same search. Confession, guilt, prayer, darkness, memory and youth appear as coordinates of an aesthetic that Momsen thought through carefully. “I never want to define something in a way that makes it expire or limits it,” explains about the album’s art. The cover and images of the album had to encapsulate music that she understands as a letter to God and a confession, but also as something dark and bright, reflective and aggressive.

the pretty Reckless They will return to Spain this fall with a headlining tour, something that has Momsen especially excited. “Spain is one of my favorite places to play,” he assures. “The public in Spain is very passionate and fun. You love rock and roll like I love rock and roll, and those are the best audiences.” Her last time in the country was with AC/DC and she left an anecdote that is difficult to overcome and worthy of a true rockstar: in Seville, a bat bit her during the concert. “The magic of the universe in Spain made something happen once in a million,” he jokes. This time, he promises, it will also be “a one-in-a-million concert.”