From: The New York Times:
Karen Elson Is Dressing the Part, and Singing It
By MELENA RYZIK
LIFE is unfair and everybody knows it, but should you require a refresher, you need only to watch Karen Elson, the redheaded supermodel, design muse and wife of Jack White of the White Stripes, sing.
There she was Monday night at Le Poisson Rouge in the West Village, performing songs from her debut album in a voice that can go from retro-breathy chanteuse to rootsy belter in a few notes. It was the fourth stop in a whirlwind mini-tour that included Nashville, where she and Mr. White live with their two children, and Austin, Tex., where she played at the South by Southwest music festival. The shows were intended to introduce Ms. Elson as more than just a pretty face, or even a pretty voice, but as an artist in her own right.
At each gig she took the stage in a peach-dyed vintage gown and a 1917 Gibson Style O guitar to give a preview of her album, “The Ghost Who Walks,” which was produced by her rock star husband (who plays the drums on it) and is due out May 25.
At the New York show, a homecoming of sorts, the audience was filled with fashion and music folk: the bassist Melissa Auf der Maur; Agyness Deyn, the model and tastemaker; Grace Coddington, the Vogue editor. The latter sat close enough that Ms. Elson could banter with her about her coral suede shoes, a namesake pair — the Karen — made for her by Tabitha Simmons, also of Vogue.
Mr. White was not there — he is touring in Australia with the Dead Weather, some of whose members also moonlight for Ms. Elson. Her bandmates include Mark Watrous (who has also played with the Raconteurs, another of Mr. White’s bands) on fiddle and pedal steel guitar, and Jackson Smith — son of Patti and husband to Meg White — on electric. The video for the album’s title song, in which Ms. Elson alone sings and strums while her band stands around in the shadows, has already racked up more than 54,000 YouTube views.
This is not the way most bands get their start. But far from discounting her modeling career and famous collaborators, Ms. Elson is straightforward about the advantages they confer.
“If I wasn’t a model, I would never have been around interesting musicians, even had the financial capabilities to say, ‘I don’t have to work right now, I can sit and make my record,’ ” she said the morning after the Poisson Rouge show, over several coffees at the Breslin in the Ace Hotel. Though she has long been musically minded, “I could never have made this record five years ago,” she said. “This record only could have been made with Jack.” They were married in 2005.
Ms. Elson is hardly the first model to take up with a musician, or to aspire to make the transition from runway to stage. Recording an album is an ambition that stretches back at least as far as Twiggy, more recently attracting catwalk legends like Kate Moss and Naomi Campbell. (Surely you remember “La La La Love Song”?)
“After Carla Bruni, I expect every model to pick up a guitar,” said Dmitry Komis, a curator and writer who came to the Poisson Rouge show with the designer Zaldy, who styles the Scissor Sisters and who named Ms. Elson as one of his muses. (“She’s so down-to-earthy,” he said.)
Ms. Elson, 31, picked up a guitar — and a four-track — nearly a decade ago when she was living in the East Village, and taught herself to play. Since 2004, she has performed with the Citizens Band, a political cabaret act she helped establish. Before she left her hometown near Manchester, England, to model at 16, she fronted a salsa band.
“I was always singing, as a kid,” she said. “That’s honestly all I’ve ever wanted to do. But really, I doubt I would have ever done it” if not for modeling.
Growing up in “a sleepy, grim, Northern English town,” she said, “there was nothing expected of me. You grew up, you got married, you had kids, and maybe you worked in the supermarket. You didn’t have any aspirations to anything grand.”
Ms. Elson’s fashion career is beyond grand; she has walked or posed for nearly every major designer and photographer, carried campaigns for Yves Saint Laurent and Chanel, graced countless magazine covers and really no longer needs a last name.
So despite the musical credentials, she must now battle an attitude succinctly summed up by a fan at one of her Austin shows. “She’s great,” he said as Ms. Elson sang in a tiny pop-up shop for Third Man, Mr. White’s record label. “I mean, look at her. Look at her!”
Told of the comment, Ms. Elson shrugged it off. “You know, models, people roll their eyes,” she said. She herself was one of them. “I for years just believed that this had to be a personal project,” she said of her music. She feared ridicule: “like it’s like me trying to get more attention. I was cautious because if there’s something bad out there, it’s doubly as bad because you’re a model. It’s like, oh, stick to the day job.”
Now she is in the position of both being in thrall to her looks — because they’re a big part of what makes people interested in her — and pushing against them.
Her album leans toward dark, spare Americana in instrumentation and themes. Ms. Elson wrote the guitar parts and lyrics, and the band and Mr. White did the rest. Ms. Elson said she listened to Harry Smith’s Smithsonian folk anthology for inspiration. Onstage, eyes closed, she weaves like a 1960s folkie.
The title track comes from a nickname she had as a child — Ms. Elson says she was teased about her appearance — but the story is even more gruesome: it’s about a man who murders his lover. “Have you ever been in a relationship where you see a gleam in the person’s eye you’re with and it’s like, wow, you’re scary, you hate me?” she said. “Pre-Jack, there was a lot of anxiety even the men I was dating had, about me being a model or maybe me earning more money than them.”
She credited living in Nashville with helping her gain perspective. She and Mr. White set up house there five years ago and have two children: Scarlett, 3, and Henry, 2.
She wrote the album largely in her walk-in closet and recorded it with Mr. White and friends in their backyard studio. (Real estate is unfair, too.)
Still, Ms. Elson said, South by Southwest, with all the insiders and hype, was daunting. “Put with all the industry types and like, ‘All right girl, sing’ — it very much felt like that, like, O.K., I’ve got to prove myself,” she said.
Mr. White did not respond to requests for comment. But he has been hands-on in the album’s marketing, said Kris Chen, a vice president at XL Recordings, which is releasing “The Ghost Who Walks” with Mr. White’s label. But the album “was carried by her voice,” Mr. Chen said.
Asked who the audience is for her music, Ms. Elson said, “I have no idea.” Still, she plans to tour, likely without Mr. White. “Getting my sea legs, that’s I how I describe it.”
Ms. Elson doesn’t expect to give up modeling. “I think that would be really pretentious — ‘I’m sorry, I’m now a musician,’ ” she said. “Other than viewing them as the golden handcuffs, I might as well just appreciate it. I only hope I can improve the idea of model-slash-anything. I only hope I can do it justice.”
Karen Elson Is Dressing the Part, and Singing It
By MELENA RYZIK
LIFE is unfair and everybody knows it, but should you require a refresher, you need only to watch Karen Elson, the redheaded supermodel, design muse and wife of Jack White of the White Stripes, sing.
There she was Monday night at Le Poisson Rouge in the West Village, performing songs from her debut album in a voice that can go from retro-breathy chanteuse to rootsy belter in a few notes. It was the fourth stop in a whirlwind mini-tour that included Nashville, where she and Mr. White live with their two children, and Austin, Tex., where she played at the South by Southwest music festival. The shows were intended to introduce Ms. Elson as more than just a pretty face, or even a pretty voice, but as an artist in her own right.
At each gig she took the stage in a peach-dyed vintage gown and a 1917 Gibson Style O guitar to give a preview of her album, “The Ghost Who Walks,” which was produced by her rock star husband (who plays the drums on it) and is due out May 25.
At the New York show, a homecoming of sorts, the audience was filled with fashion and music folk: the bassist Melissa Auf der Maur; Agyness Deyn, the model and tastemaker; Grace Coddington, the Vogue editor. The latter sat close enough that Ms. Elson could banter with her about her coral suede shoes, a namesake pair — the Karen — made for her by Tabitha Simmons, also of Vogue.
Mr. White was not there — he is touring in Australia with the Dead Weather, some of whose members also moonlight for Ms. Elson. Her bandmates include Mark Watrous (who has also played with the Raconteurs, another of Mr. White’s bands) on fiddle and pedal steel guitar, and Jackson Smith — son of Patti and husband to Meg White — on electric. The video for the album’s title song, in which Ms. Elson alone sings and strums while her band stands around in the shadows, has already racked up more than 54,000 YouTube views.
This is not the way most bands get their start. But far from discounting her modeling career and famous collaborators, Ms. Elson is straightforward about the advantages they confer.
“If I wasn’t a model, I would never have been around interesting musicians, even had the financial capabilities to say, ‘I don’t have to work right now, I can sit and make my record,’ ” she said the morning after the Poisson Rouge show, over several coffees at the Breslin in the Ace Hotel. Though she has long been musically minded, “I could never have made this record five years ago,” she said. “This record only could have been made with Jack.” They were married in 2005.
Ms. Elson is hardly the first model to take up with a musician, or to aspire to make the transition from runway to stage. Recording an album is an ambition that stretches back at least as far as Twiggy, more recently attracting catwalk legends like Kate Moss and Naomi Campbell. (Surely you remember “La La La Love Song”?)
“After Carla Bruni, I expect every model to pick up a guitar,” said Dmitry Komis, a curator and writer who came to the Poisson Rouge show with the designer Zaldy, who styles the Scissor Sisters and who named Ms. Elson as one of his muses. (“She’s so down-to-earthy,” he said.)
Ms. Elson, 31, picked up a guitar — and a four-track — nearly a decade ago when she was living in the East Village, and taught herself to play. Since 2004, she has performed with the Citizens Band, a political cabaret act she helped establish. Before she left her hometown near Manchester, England, to model at 16, she fronted a salsa band.
“I was always singing, as a kid,” she said. “That’s honestly all I’ve ever wanted to do. But really, I doubt I would have ever done it” if not for modeling.
Growing up in “a sleepy, grim, Northern English town,” she said, “there was nothing expected of me. You grew up, you got married, you had kids, and maybe you worked in the supermarket. You didn’t have any aspirations to anything grand.”
Ms. Elson’s fashion career is beyond grand; she has walked or posed for nearly every major designer and photographer, carried campaigns for Yves Saint Laurent and Chanel, graced countless magazine covers and really no longer needs a last name.
So despite the musical credentials, she must now battle an attitude succinctly summed up by a fan at one of her Austin shows. “She’s great,” he said as Ms. Elson sang in a tiny pop-up shop for Third Man, Mr. White’s record label. “I mean, look at her. Look at her!”
Told of the comment, Ms. Elson shrugged it off. “You know, models, people roll their eyes,” she said. She herself was one of them. “I for years just believed that this had to be a personal project,” she said of her music. She feared ridicule: “like it’s like me trying to get more attention. I was cautious because if there’s something bad out there, it’s doubly as bad because you’re a model. It’s like, oh, stick to the day job.”
Now she is in the position of both being in thrall to her looks — because they’re a big part of what makes people interested in her — and pushing against them.
Her album leans toward dark, spare Americana in instrumentation and themes. Ms. Elson wrote the guitar parts and lyrics, and the band and Mr. White did the rest. Ms. Elson said she listened to Harry Smith’s Smithsonian folk anthology for inspiration. Onstage, eyes closed, she weaves like a 1960s folkie.
The title track comes from a nickname she had as a child — Ms. Elson says she was teased about her appearance — but the story is even more gruesome: it’s about a man who murders his lover. “Have you ever been in a relationship where you see a gleam in the person’s eye you’re with and it’s like, wow, you’re scary, you hate me?” she said. “Pre-Jack, there was a lot of anxiety even the men I was dating had, about me being a model or maybe me earning more money than them.”
She credited living in Nashville with helping her gain perspective. She and Mr. White set up house there five years ago and have two children: Scarlett, 3, and Henry, 2.
She wrote the album largely in her walk-in closet and recorded it with Mr. White and friends in their backyard studio. (Real estate is unfair, too.)
Still, Ms. Elson said, South by Southwest, with all the insiders and hype, was daunting. “Put with all the industry types and like, ‘All right girl, sing’ — it very much felt like that, like, O.K., I’ve got to prove myself,” she said.
Mr. White did not respond to requests for comment. But he has been hands-on in the album’s marketing, said Kris Chen, a vice president at XL Recordings, which is releasing “The Ghost Who Walks” with Mr. White’s label. But the album “was carried by her voice,” Mr. Chen said.
Asked who the audience is for her music, Ms. Elson said, “I have no idea.” Still, she plans to tour, likely without Mr. White. “Getting my sea legs, that’s I how I describe it.”
Ms. Elson doesn’t expect to give up modeling. “I think that would be really pretentious — ‘I’m sorry, I’m now a musician,’ ” she said. “Other than viewing them as the golden handcuffs, I might as well just appreciate it. I only hope I can improve the idea of model-slash-anything. I only hope I can do it justice.”
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