Taylor Momsen doesn’t have a lot of luck with potentially deadly critters. In May 2024, while her band The Pretty Reckless were opening for AC/DC in Seville, she was bitten by a bat onstage, requiring a two-week course of anti-rabies shots. Then, in April this year, the singer was bitten for a second time, this time by a poisonous spider – once again while on the road with AC/DC, but this time in Mexico City.
“I don’t know whether getting bit twice means I’m lucky or cursed,” she says with a laugh.
The fact that she was even up there onstage with AC/DC is something few could have predicted when she entered the public consciousness as a child actor, first as a button-nosed five-year-old softening a heavily-made-up Jim Carrey’s heart in the 2000 movie How The Grinch Stole Christmas or later as one of the stars of glossy teen soap Gossip Girl.
Her reinvention as the black-eyelinered singer of The Pretty Reckless at the very end of the 2000s was one of the more unexpected career pivots of the last couple of decades. A string of grungy yet anthemic albums silenced the detractors a long time ago, though, as did the backing of the likes of Soundgarden and AC/DC, both of whom hand-picked The Pretty Reckless to support them.
But her journey has been coloured by loss. In 2017, her idol Chris Cornell died while her band were on the road with the grunge legends. The following year, The Pretty Reckless’s producer, Kato Khandwala, was killed in a motorcycle accident. The double tragedy sent her into a self-destructive spiral of substance abuse, binge-drinking benders and meaningless sex to numb the pain.
“For a while, I felt like, ‘What’s the fucking point? Everything I love is dead,’ and that’s a very dark place to be mentally,” she reflects. “I didn’t care if I lived or died, until there was a moment where I had to make a choice between life and death.”
Thankfully, she made it through the darkest period of her life. Now 32 years old, and having just released The Pretty Reckless’s fifth album, Dear God, she’s finally living by her own script.
“I live and breathe rock’n’roll,” she says sincerely.
How are you recovering from the spider bite on your leg?
“If I hadn’t caught it, I might have had to get it amputated. My doctor was joking that I should go and buy a lottery ticket because it’s such a bizarre, one-in-a-billion chance. I got out of the hospital against medical advice; they wanted to admit me, and I went, ‘No, I have a fucking show to play.’ Even if it might lead to a poisonous leg amputation, I’d literally die for the music.”
Why is rock’n’roll your top priority?
“It’s a love you can’t outgrow. I resonate with the ethic of rock music so deeply – it’s existential and powerful and everything I am always searching for in humanity. It’s more than just loud guitars, but then, at the end of the day, loud guitars are also fucking awesome. So there’s that.”
How has music help you understand yourself over the years?
“I grew up in a household where my father revered rock’n’roll, so I was very fortunate to be exposed to really, really great records. I was humming songs before I could talk; it was a language that always made sense to me. I started playing instruments and writing songs when I was about five or six, and it gave me an outlet from my very strange upbringing.”
I didn’t understand that I was working on The Grinch. It felt like playing dress-up.
You rose to fame as a child actor. What was that life like?
“I booked The Grinch when I was five. At that age, it’s fun, and it had always been a part of my life. I didn’t understand that I was working, it felt more like playing dress-up. Then there was an element of moving around a lot for work, going in and out of schools and trying to make friends. It felt isolating a lot of the time, but that’s also what made music so important for me. I loved it because it became my solace.”
When did you realise it was time to make the big shift from acting to music?
“When I started working on the TV show Gossip Girl, it felt like my character became my identity. Rather than shooting a commercial or a movie, it was a regular part of my schedule, and it never went away. I was this character all the time to the public. And it was the first time the tabloids were interested, and that sort of fame can be cruel. It got to the point where Gossip Girl was almost overtaking myself and my identity. I wasn’t a young girl coming into my own, someone with these grand ideas of what I wanted to do. So I quit, formed The Pretty Reckless and I never looked back.”
How did you find the transition from acting to music?
“Thankfully, the Gossip Girl writers made it a little bit easier for me – I couldn’t get out of my contract, but they were gracious enough to write me out of the scripts. They understood that I just wanted to make music and said, ‘You don’t have to act this season, you can go on tour.’ I’m forever grateful to them for that. Then I was able to go and record [The Pretty Reckless’s 2010 debut album] Light Me Up and live life on the road.
“[Producer] Kato Khandwala and [guitarist and songwriter] Ben Phillips were the first two that really got me. They didn’t try to change what I was doing or shape it in any way other than supporting and embellishing it. I always wanted to be the one telling the story, and I wanted to be the one in control, creating the vision, and they let me do that.”
How did the public react to the shift?
“It felt like being a rock star, like I’d always dreamed – the fans were there, going crazy, identifying with the music. But when I looked at the grander picture of public perception, there was a lot to overcome. I understand how people must have seen it: a 15-year-old girl quit a teen soap opera to go on tour with a rock band, trying to be taken seriously as an artist. It’s a fairytale I’d forgive people for laughing at. But there was a lot of pressure to prove myself.”
How did that feel?
“It was frustrating when people wouldn’t take me seriously, even though I was doing everything the real way. I didn’t try to take a shortcut – we toured in a small van, played small shows, really worked for it. But it was perceived as if I’d taken a shortcut. People might’ve known me from my acting, but in reality that was its own hurdle, because I had to overcome my youth. It was exhausting… I just wanted to be taken seriously. Eventually I just stopped caring what people thought.”
Who were some of your earliest supporters who took you seriously?
“Obviously the band, but I’ve also been supported by so many musical idols of mine. Being taken on the road to support Soundgarden was one of the craziest phone calls I’ve ever gotten. Knowing that Chris Cornell appreciated my music… they’re my favourite band in the world, and hearing that from him was huge for me.
Taylor with Soundgarden’s Kim Thayil at 2019’s Chris Cornell tribute gig. (Image credit: Kevin Mazur/Getty Images for The Chris Cornell Estate)
“It was the same with AC/DC. When Angus Young calls you and goes, ‘Hey, I love your band!’, you know you’re doing something right. Before the tour I told my manager, ‘I’m making a new record – unless AC/DC or The Rolling Stones call, don’t bother!’ About two weeks later, my agent calls saying, ‘Taylor, you’re not gonna believe this, but AC/DC called and they want you on their tour.’ I felt like I was tripping. About a week after that, he calls again, and he goes, ‘You’re not going to believe this, but The Rolling Stones have also called…’ I kind of manifested it.”
Chris Cornell passed away in 2017, and your producer Kato Khandwala died the following year. How did that impact on you?
“Relationships like those feel so intimate that it’s hard to put into words… but both of them played such an important role in my life in so many ways. Chris was an idol of mine, and I hugged him the night before [he passed away]. Kato was my musical partner and best friend – I talked on the phone with him every single day. Losing him felt like losing a piece of myself.
“I just try to do my best to keep Chris and Kato’s memories alive, but grief is a wound that never heals. The one-two punch of losing them made me enter a very dark period of my life. I shut down, lost a lot of elements of myself, forgot who I was. I didn’t know what the point of life was any more.”
I hugged Chris Cornell the night before he died
When I Wake Up on the new record hints at some of that period. When was the moment you realised that something had to change?
“It’s quite a dark story, but there was a there was a moment where I had to make a very conscious choice whether I was going to live or I was going to die. It wasn’t subtle. After that, I chose life, got clean, and I wrote [The Pretty Reckless’ 2021 album] Death By Rock And Roll to help process the grief. I’d usually turn to music, but I couldn’t even listen to music, because it all brought back too many emotions I was not equipped to deal with yet. It felt like a core part of my identity had been taken away.”
How did you rekindle your love for music?
“The simple answer is, it took time. I had to look back and rediscover where the love began, and the answer was The Beatles. They were the first band my dad ever played me, when I was coming home from the hospital. Then, almost in chronological order of bands I fell in love with throughout my youth growing up, I re-listened to all those records and trained myself to remember where the love stemmed from. Then, I could eventually listen to Soundgarden records again, and they brought me comfort instead of immense pain. Music was the path back.”
Devil In Disguise, from Dear God, is dedicated to your Gossip Girl co-star Michelle Trachtenberg who died in 2025. Does your music help you reassess your relationship with death?
“Lyrics will always be a way for me to process life, and life and death are two sides of the same coin. So it only makes sense that writing helps me process death, too. It’s something I’ve explored in my writing ever since the first record, and I’m constantly coming to terms with it. A lot of this new record is processing things like that, wondering whether to let grief destroy you – which it almost did, in my case – or whether you can turn it into something that gives you power. To go back to Death By Rock And Roll, the record starts with Kato’s footsteps. Having him with me became my superpower.”
It’s like you can let the people live on.
“It’s like rock’n’roll transcendence, putting a person’s memory into a track. That, and it allows you to process and move forward in life. But the grief never gets easier, it just transforms. Everyone I’ve lost in my life is scarred onto my body forever, and they’re a part of me that I carry with me.”
You were raised Catholic. How has that shaped how you view death?
“I was raised in the church when I was younger, but I’m not involved in any organised religion at this point in my life. But there are some things that stick – like an awareness of those grand concepts of life and death. It gets you thinking about our physical being, our spirituality. I like to get a little existential and confessional. To me, Dear God is looking to something larger than yourself – you could even call it the universe – and wondering why life is how it is.”
On tour with AC/DC in 2025. (Image credit: Frank Hoensch/Redferns)
The title track of the new album features a lyric about the neighbours looking over and thinking ‘that little girl we knew has surely gone insane’. Do you think anyone from your Catholic past thinks your career is some act of grand blasphemy?
“Probably some of them. I’m sure there’s some people from my childhood that are confused… but I could be totally wrong. They could be in the front row at a show for all I know!”
You had a real full-circle moment last year, when your Grinch co-star Jim Carrey inducted Soundgarden into the Rock & Roll Hall Of Fame and you performed Rusty Cage and Black Hole Sun. How did that feel?
“Crazy – talk about a universal alignment. When I got asked to sing at the induction, I didn’t even know Jim Carrey was going to be there. When I found out, my head just about spun around on my body. I hadn’t seen him in 25 years, and it was the 25th anniversary of The Grinch, and I’d just released Taylor Momsen’s Pretty Reckless Christmas album.”
I told my manager, ‘Unless AC/DC or The Rolling Stones call, don’t bother!’ Two weeks later, my agent says, ‘AC/DC called.’
On the 2016 single Take Me Down you sang, ‘I gave my life to rock’n’roll.’ How much have you sacrificed?
“I’ve given my entire life to music. So it’s fair to say I’ve sacrificed everything for it. But at the same time, I don’t think that that’s a sacrifice at all, because it’s the only thing I love. I wouldn’t change anything.”
Would the young Taylor be proud of you today?
“A young version of me would be really proud of me. I wanted to play in a rock’n’roll band, write my own songs and express myself openly, and so I’m doing exactly what little me wanted to do. And I think she’d be proud of everything I’ve overcome, and the fact that I’m still here, still alive. Every day I wake up and I don’t know if I’m going to be a mess again, or be absolutely fine. Against all odds, all obstacles, I’ve bulldozed through to get where I am right now.”
This interview was taken from Metal Hammer issue 415, July 2026, available to order with an exclusive Pretty Reckless cover and cassette tape.
Dear God is out now via Fearless. The Pretty Reckless are currently touring North America and will play across Europe from November to December.
(Image credit: Future)
(LouderSound)
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