Taylor Momsen

The three-year contract

Taylor Momsen was three years old when her parents signed her first contract with a modeling agency. It was not a personal choice or an early calling discovered through play. It was a work obligation that led her to shoot national commercials before she could even read a script fluently.

In 2000, the world first knew her as Cindy Lou Who in How the Grinch Stole Christmas. That little girl with the upturned nose and impossible pigtails helped gross over 345 million dollars at the global box office. For her, though, it marked the start of a social isolation that would shape her teenage years on film sets across half the country.

And the industry was quick to pigeonhole her.

She took part in productions such as Spy Kids 2 and Hansel & Gretel without finding a place where she felt comfortable. Acting was a mechanical job she did on autopilot, while in her room she listened to records by Soundgarden and Led Zeppelin. In 2007, she landed the role of Jenny Humphrey in Gossip Girl, and her face ended up plastered across the binders of teenagers all over the planet.

The break from Gossip Girl's Upper East Side

Filming the series in New York was the trigger for her definitive exit from film and television. While the writers scripted plots about fashion and teen betrayal, she used the breaks to write dark songs in her trailer. In 2009, she founded the band The Pretty Reckless and began balancing late-night recording sessions with shows in small city venues.

She asked to be written out of the show because she could no longer handle the fifteen-hour days in front of the camera.

At eighteen, she announced she was quitting acting for good. Many analysts called it a financial mistake at the time. But Momsen was looking for an independence that film didn't allow her, and she found it in the distortion of electric guitars.

Her debut album Light Me Up was released in 2010 and surprised listeners with a vocal maturity no one expected from a television star. British music critics were the first to take her seriously outside Hollywood's commercial circuit. Her voice did not pursue friendly pop but the raw edge of 1990s rock.

Tours, Grief and Distortion

Momsen's career on stage has been far more stable than her time on screen. With the album Going to Hell released in 2014, she landed three singles in a row at No. 1 on the rock charts in the United States. It's a feat no band with a female lead singer had achieved up to that point according to Billboard.

But the hardest blow came in 2018 with the car accident death of her producer and best friend, Kato Khandwala.

That loss plunged the artist into a deep depression that kept her away from public life for many months. She only returned to the studio to channel that pain into the album Death by Rock and Roll, released in February 2021. On this work, she had technical contributions from musicians such as Tom Morello and Matt Cameron.

And the result was a much rawer sound.

By 2024, the band keeps a steady pace of work on new studio material after wrapping its last tour of major arenas. The band's crew regularly uses Orange amplifiers and Gibson SG guitars to get the dense tone that defines their live shows. The latest update to their catalog lists more than seventy songs recorded under their official name.