Alison Mosshart puts pedal to the metal with book, spoken album
Alison Mosshart’s spoken word and visual art are a lot like her rock and roll: Wild, energetic and full of intrigue.
The Kills and Dead Weather frontwoman hasn’t been quiet during shutdown. In May she released her first solo song, “Rise,” and this month her first art and poetry book, “CAR MA,” with a companion spoken album, “Sound Wheel.” Both are being released by her Dead Weather partner Jack White on his Third Man imprint.
With no formal songs, “Sound Wheel” is more a collage of readings, musical snippets and informal tapes; the subject matter is part autobiography, part road trip and part detour.
“I had no real idea what I was doing,” Mosshart said by phone from Los Angeles. “When I’m in the studio, I circle around like a hawk, if I’m working on a song I might turn around and paint something.
“When I was writing the book and I got stuck on a passage, I’d read it to myself and record it. It got weirder and weirder and I got obsessed with trying out different ideas, making a sound sculpture. And that brought me back to the early Kills days, when I recorded these little parts on four-track and put them between songs on our first EP. It made it feel a little more cinematic.”
A running theme is her fascination with automobiles, in which she finds sexiness and glamour.
“They’ve always made me excited. I grew up in Detroit and my father is a used-car dealer to this day, so there’d be a different car in the driveway every week. I got to love the way they were designed and I came to love driving, the freedom of movement.”
One of the spoken pieces looks back fondly at her first tour with the Kills.
“It really was magic. We drove ourselves around the country in a two-door car, Jamie (Kills partner Jamie Hince) was from London and hadn’t seen much of America besides Texas and L.A., so he was fascinated and dazzled by everything he saw — which made me feel that way too, like I saw it through his eyes. We laughed all through that tour.”
Currently she divides her time between Nashville and Los Angeles, where she’s now spending the shutdown. “They’re both really mixedbag kind of places, everyone is from everywhere. I’m fascinated with L.A. because everyone you meet is an actor, but in Nashville you can be at the meat counter, and there’ll be someone there who plays six instruments and wants to tell you about his band.”
She and Hince are about halfway through the next Kills album, and hope to be on the road next year. But like many musicians, she’s worried about whether the club scene they love will be back intact. “It’s the independent clubs that I really worry about, the wonderful places that we’ve had in every city. To my mind, it’s not the person onstage that puts the show on; the crowd is 95% of it. That exchange of energy is so powerful; it’s my way of life and I can’t really live without it. So it feels weird to wonder if it will ever happen again. The way I’m dealing with it right now is to make some good energy out of it.”