Taylor Momsen: „You have to remind yourself that, even in the darkest of times, there is light waiting for you.“

Taylor Momsen: The album is incredibly personal to me. It’s like one giant confession, plea, or prayer. I cracked something open inside of me. The songs have a sense of vulnerability and brutality to them. It sounds like they were almost ripped out of my diary. There’s an honesty and bluntness to this record that we’ve touched upon before, but never to this extent. I keep saying that this album feels like me through and through. It’s all me. All of my life.

I’ve been through a lot in my life up to this stage. Anytime I go to write a record – I write songs in general; they’re not always for a record, – I spend a lot of time reflecting on my life. At 32 years old, looking back, I’ve left pieces of myself behind and come to the realisation that all the stages in my life have led me to where I am now. They’re all a part of me. In order to be a whole person, you can’t shut any of those doors. You can’t turn off a section of your life and pretend it didn’t happen. You have to face it. A lot of that is reflected in this record: me looking backwards but also looking forwards and confronting myself with many of my demons and past mistakes, however you want to call it. I’m moving forward, asking myself where life takes me now.

It always feels good to do that. I’ve never censored myself when writing because it doesn’t do the music any good. I don’t want to put a wall up around myself to lock away my best work. I had an overwhelming amount of material that I was dying to get out of me. When we started recording, the floodgates opened and everything just clicked. I don´t know how to explain it other than that. I think age and time also had something to do with this album. I can see things more clearly now. That’s also reflected in the writing and in its honesty. There’s metaphor, but it’s not hidden. It’s a very blunt piece of art.

God is a grand concept. The title Dear God to me is more about spirituality in a general sense. It’s less about religion and more like spiritually talking to someone—whether that’s ourselves, someone you know, a figure, or a notebook in my case (chuckles). It’s more reflective of the grand concept of confessing and getting things out of you in order to heal and move forward. For me, the meaning of God is grander than organized religion. But the imagery definitely has a Catholic Christianity nod to it. I was raised in the Catholic Church, so to me that’s the imagery I personally associate with when speaking of a figure of God or whatever. I’m not a practising religious person. But I do appreciate the concepts.

I almost didn`t when I`m being honest. There were a few years – I don`t even know how many honestly, because it all blends together – in my life when I was out of control, not caring whether I lived or died. This is where life can take you when you play too close to the edge, chasing substances, sex, and dopamine highs to escape depression. It led me down a rabbit hole of self-destruction that leaves you emptier than where you began.

Music is how I cope. Music and comedy are actually my two favorite things. Life is too hard to not be able to laugh at everything. I’m a big fan of gallows humor. It took me a long time to come out the other side of that and be able to reflect on it clearly—and to see that life is worth living. I think that kind of seriousness is reflected in that song, but also a lot of fun. This record is interesting to me because, musically, it’s very exciting. It can be very uplifting and feel powerful, but lyrically it touches on a lot of very serious subject matter.

We lost a lot of people and went through a great deal of personal tragedy, including death, loss, and other turmoil that I’ve never spoken about publicly. That almost took me down if I`m being frank about it. I wasn’t equipped as a human being to handle that kind of pain, shock, and trauma. Life is pain a lot of the time. Art reflects that. I often question whether life imitates art or art imitates life. I think it’s both at the same time, which is a very strange thing to come to terms with. It’s very easy to drown in darkness. You have to remind yourself that, even in the darkest of times, there is light waiting for you. It can just feel impossible to see it when you’re living in a heavy space, whatever that may be. It can be hard to believe that the world can feel light again. It’s something you have to tell yourself almost like a mantra until you can see it. That’s probably the biggest thing I’ve learned in life.

I did indeed have a very unusual upbringing. I worked a lot as a child and moved around quite often as a kid. I started writing when I was very, very young. I don’t remember exactly when or how I began writing; it’s just something I’ve always done. It was the way I processed the world and my life. So my notebooks, my diaries and my journals, my lyrics and all of those things became my best friends. For me, it was the way I could process what was going on inside of me so I could then go out into the world and be a functional human being. That tool I developed for myself as a very young girl still serves me well to this day. It’s how I deal with everything.

I always had a goal that was bigger than myself. So I never lost myself in it because I became famous for something that wasn’t me. I don’t want to say I didn’t care about it, but it wasn’t my main intention.  It was this other thing. This other entity. This job in this world I was put into when I was a kid. It was never something I wanted. So fame, even though it was thrust upon me so young, never really fazed me in the grand scheme of things. It wasn’t important to me. It was something I didn`t want. It was never a goal of mine and it still isn`t. Fame is a fleeting thing you have to deal with. Liam Gallagher once said it right at some point in his career: fame is something you’ve just got to kick over your shoulder. Because it’s not the point. Fame means absolutely nothing.

I have always had a drive inside me to be great at something – and that was music. My goal is to improve myself as a human being and continue to grow as an artist. That is what I set my sights on as a very young girl. I have always known that. I have always had a very strong sense of self. That was my coping mechanism for something I never saw with any kind of importance. I didn’t believe the hype. Fame was just something I was waiting to go away so I could do what I really loved: making music. When you have a goal that is bigger than you, it takes up all of your mind and mental capacity. When you focus on something productive, everything else just seems stupid.

When I first started the band and quit acting, I made a very calculated choice to step away from anything that wasn’t directly music-related—anything to do with acting, modelling, or fashion. Anything that wasn’t music or didn’t feel credible. I was trying to establish my band in a serious way. Fast forward: I have now been in The Pretty Reckless longer than I was in my entire acting career, and we’ve accomplished quite a bit. So I think some of the jadedness I felt toward my early years—something I initially tried to outrun—I now have found a fond space for.