#but she still has that bright optimistic magical girl outlook where she knows that the *magic of Friendship* actually has power

[dailysquiddo]

but what if she was a superhero-ish guy. what then. what would you do then

[x--daughters-of-darkness--x]

Will the real Taylor Momsen please stand up?

Think you know Taylor Momsen? Think again. After years of personal turmoil and soul-searching, The Pretty Reckless singer is back with a new album and a brand new outlook on life

On the cover of The Pretty Reckless’ upcoming album Death By Rock And Roll, lead singer Taylor Momsen lies naked on a grave. White hair flowing beneath her, gone are the eyeliner-rimmed raccoon eyes. Instead, it’s a stripped back image, one that radiates vulnerability rather than her usual defiance.

Shot by Danny Hastings, who was also responsible for 2013 album Going To Hell's more provocative cover, Momsen is proud of what it communicates. “It’s an untouched photograph," she tells Louder over the phone from her home in Maine.

"That was my intent, trying to show complete purity and baring myself. I wanted to express that you come into this world with nothing but your soul and that’s all you leave with, too.” She pauses. “I’m pretty proud of it, if I’m being honest.”

That vulnerability seems to be something Momsen is starting to feel comfortable with after a lifetime in the spotlight. Now just 27, she started a modelling career aged just two. She later became known as Jenny Humphrey, the Gossip Girl character audiences loved to hate, before leaving to focus on her music career, forming The Pretty Reckless and releasing their first album in 2010. She must be exhausted, we motion. “I don’t know if I feel older or younger," she replies. "I have experienced a lot. I feel like I have lived a billion lives. Some days I feel like I’m two years old and sometimes I’m 107. It depends on the day."

Speaking carefully but freely, Momsen’s answers are peppered with small, shy laughs. She’s spent the last several months locked down, leaving only briefly to film a music video for recent single 25. “I feel like I’ve been handling it relatively well, but I’ve certainly had my moments. I think everyone has their breaking point. It’s a lot! It’s a really fucked up year!” She pauses, before finding her way to a bright side. “I think this is a really humanising time.

"Everyone’s lifestyle is different, and where you come from and how you’re handling the situation is different, but we are still all in essentially the same space and point in time together.”

The peace in Momsen’s voice is hard won after a painful couple of years for her and her band. The first blow came in 2017, when The Pretty Reckless landed a spot supporting childhood hero Chris Cornell. He died by suicide on the tour, shaking Momsen to the core: “After we were on that Soundgarden tour and we played the last show – when I woke up to the news the next morning I was beyond devastated. I still don’t have words to express how crushing that was. I couldn’t handle it. I wasn’t in a good place to be public. I removed myself from the public eye. I cancelled everything. I needed to go home and reflect on what had happened.”

She fell into a deep hole, spiralling and cancelling any upcoming shows. In 2018, feeling ready to rebuild her life, the band started speaking to their friend and longtime producer Kato about the next step. Just as they had pulled themselves together, they got another tragic phonecall: “He’d died in a motorcycle accident. That was the fucking nail in the coffin I guess, for lack of a better term."

“I just went so, so down into this hole of depression and substance abuse. I was a train-wreck and I didn’t know how to get out of it, I didn’t know if I would get out of it. I didn’t care. I had kinda given up on everything. I was like, I don’t even know if I want to do anything ever again.”

Eventually, Momsen had to make a decision: “It was either death or move forward. Luckily I chose to move forward, but it was tough there for a while.” She’s candid about how much she struggled: “I was not well. I returned to music because it was the only thing I knew how to do. It’s the only thing in my entire life that’s always been there and supported me. I started listening to records that I love and started from the beginning again.” She sat down to write, finding that it took no effort – Death By Rock And Roll poured out of her, in part inspired by Kato.

The album is named for a song, the first single, that Kato suggested ten years ago: “He said “write a song called ‘Death By Rock and Roll,’” and we started it and never finished it and nothing came of it. When he passed it became very relevant again, and so we finished it.”

The song starts with his footsteps walking down the hall. She’s insistent that it isn’t morbid, but an homage and an optimistic battlecry: “I have one life and I’ll live it the way I want.” The band wondered whether they could even work without Kato – “the hole and loss was so grand”. They chose to, eventually finding a kindred spirit in the producer Jonathan Wyman. “He is the sweetest, kindest soul on the planet, a great engineer and producer, an amazing friend. We called him up and made the record in Maine,” she says, adding that it was the first album she and bandmate Ben co-produced. “He allowed us to be the train-wrecks that we were at the time and let us go through all the range of all the emotions and was so supportive throughout the entire thing. He really helped us to accomplish something.”

The album itself is classic Pretty Reckless: big guitars, old school rock'n'roll influences, with touches of jukebox Americana. But there’s something different, too, and maybe it’s the feeling of “complete rebirth” that she wanted to imbue it with. Around the middle there’s a turning point, with more vulnerable, personal touches. On 25, Momsen breathily sings of her disbelief that she made it this far: 'and all through my teens, I screamed that I may not live much past 21, 22, 23, 24.'

It’s an honest declaration: “We recorded it right as I turned 25. It’s very much just an autobiographical song of me at my lowest reflecting on my life and trying to put that into music somehow. I’m really proud of that song. I’m proud of the whole record, but I think that song was a shift in my writing.” She calls 25 the first “stepping stone towards that light.”

Those moments of tenderness and reflection are wrapped up, of course, in the in-your-face rock and roll that Taylor Momsen has always loved. Cynics and critics have questioned her authenticity, and that of The Pretty Reckless. But ten years into her music career, it’s pretty clear rock runs through her veins. She’s dorky and obsessive, running through rock'n'roll history from the 60s through the 90s, sheepishly apologising when she hasn’t heard of a newer artist I mention. “I don’t pay attention to new stuff. It’s bad, I should,” she laughs. She references music with an ease that only comes to a true nerd, gushing about rock: “It’s ballsy and cooler than everything else. If you’re not afraid of it, you find the freeing aspect of it. Nothing beats it.” True to its word, Death By Rock And Roll is full of heavy guitars and snarling vocals. A true catharsis.

In the last two years, Momsen feels like she’s aged ten. “They were extraordinarily hard. To the point where I wasn’t sure I was going to make it through them. I think there’s no way to go through that tragedy and trauma and not come out, if you make it through, not as a different person but with a new perspective,” she tells me. Her fight with her mental health is ongoing, but she’s learned to manage it: “If you don’t, it’s very easy to take a wrong turn and that can be hard to come back from.”

She’s found that music has been her one grounding stone, holding her down to earth: “I can listen to music and it brings me back, almost like meditation. It brings me to reality and completely takes me away, too.”

Momsen is reflective, reckoning with thoughts she had long held. Starting her music career as a 17-year-old girl, she was often indignant about the idea that misogyny impacted her possibilities. With time, though, she’s reconsidered: “I was so in denial for so long about sexism, but as I’ve gotten older I’ve realised it exists. Misogyny is a real thing, and it’s unfortunate that it is, but it is. There are a lot of shitty things in life but we have to deal with them, and hopefully we progress as a society and this becomes a topic we don’t ever have to discuss again,” she laughs.

“I’ve recognised it more as I’ve gotten older that there is a boys’ club when it comes to rock'n'roll and it is a struggle to break into that and be accepted and treated with the same respect as if you were a man.”

Recently, Momsen appeared on Evanescence’s Use My Voice, a song Amy Lee wrote when inspired by assault victim Chanel Miller. Momsen is open in her adoration of Lee, who took The Pretty Reckless’ on their first big tour, telling me that Amy’s perspective on misogyny in rock is far “more developed” than hers. “I love Amy, she’s just the kindest person and so talented. We really learned a lot from that experience in so many ways. I have the utmost respect for her, I love her.” She adds that she was impacted by seeing Evanescence when she was nine: “It was very cool to have that be our first proper tour, suddenly I was opening for a band that I had gone to see with my dad. It was very full circle.”

Understandably, after a lifetime of scrutiny, Momsen is at times reticent to answer certain questions, aware of how things can get twisted. She avoids the internet, finding that, “maybe it’s because of how I grew up, but it can get very toxic very quickly.” But she indulges more annoying questions with patience and grace. I ask her, is the 'Jenny died by suicide' line in Death By Rock and Roll a sly reference to her Gossip Girl character Jenny Humphrey? She laughs: “I’ll leave that to the listener’s interpretation.”

She’s willing to explain, however, in far greater depth, why she feels that way: “I think it’s unfair to the listener when the artist explains things directly, I think it takes away from the magic.”

“Once you put the music out into the world, it’s so exciting, but on the other hand it’s almost sad. The body of work you’ve been slaving over is so precious and it’s so yours and so intimate, and suddenly it doesn’t belong to you anymore. It belongs to everyone else,” she pauses, “I think that’s the beauty of music but it’s a strange thing because it doesn’t matter what the song means to me, it matters how it connects to you and whatever you relate to it." She says that hearing Roger Waters elaborate on Pink Floyd lyrics that meant a lot to her once spoiled the magic: “Since then I’ve been very cautious to not over-explain. I really do think that it’s unfair to the listener. It’s not about me, it’s about you, it’s about the audience.”

Death By Rock and Roll is, conversely, a commitment to life. After a year relaxing at home and three years attempting to recover from a constant succession of blows, Momsen is aching to get back out on the road and see her fans again. “I get to go on stage every night in front of an audience who care and connect to music that I slaved over and worked over and hypothetically move them and give them the experience of a lifetime,” she laughs, calling it the “greatest job on the planet.”

“I really miss it. There’s nothing else like it, that high that you get from playing a show, that adrenaline, that feeling. It’s the best drug on the planet. I feel like an addict and I’m going through withdrawal.”

The last few years have taken it out of Momsen, but she has come out of the other side with peace and an enriched perspective. That growth is audible as she speaks, and it’s woven into the fabric of Death By Rock And Roll.

“You can’t beat that feeling of complete rebirth,” she tells me. Maybe for once, she doesn’t seem either two years old or 107, but a very wise 27.

[eshtarwind]

Tokyo 7th Sisters Character Commentary - Yamai Sawori

Other character commentary:

Seto Ferb - Mimori Matsuri - Kawasumi Sisala - Shiratori Tomoe - Yukuhashi Ei - Echizen Murasaki

Warning: May contain spoiler of:

Episode 1.5 (Sawori, Ferb) - Episode 2.5 (Sawori, Madoka, Kyouko, Chacha, Ei) - Episode 3.0 (Sawori) - Event Episode: Hip Hop dance - Event Episode: Snow and Maiden’s Heart is Still Far Away

Yamai Sawori

An orange haired girl with bandages around her head and numerous bandaids and other injuries almost 100% of the time, Yamai Sawori for some reason always attracts accidents. She is a member of 7 Members Unit Nanabana Otome. Just walking to Nanastar can get her being hit by a car, hit by a falling flower pot, or even hit by a falling electric pole-Almost all of her cards feature her on the brink of some kind of accident. Yet, even then, she keeps smiling. Thanks to that, Sawori garners fans from the first responders, who took a strong liking of her since no matter how injured she was, she’s always smiling. Her character development revolves around this aspect of her and how it affect the people around her. A kind and bright personality, Yamai Sawori does not back down from a broken bone or two.

Characters

Optimistic

“No matter what happen, I will go through it with smile!” is probably Sawori’s strongest personality. No matter what kind of bad luck happening, Sawori always faces them with smile and change whatever bad luck they are into smile. She also did not think of what happened to her as bad luck--just like what she said to Coney and Sawara during her 2.5. If she doesn’t think of it as something “bad“ and smile to it, everything will be alright. With this forward looking and optimistic view, Sawori survives her accident-prone life and supports people around her. This, too, is one of the cores of her character progression and also one of the most attractive parts of her personality.

Selfless

In Sawori’s episodes, it was said that Sawori perhaps attracts bad luck because she drew bad luck from others around her and made her the one who received those bad luck. Sawori said those words made her happy that if it were true, since that meant she had shield someone else from bad luck every time an accident happened to her, thus she would be able to accept what happen to her as something good. She was shown to very down if she could not help someone in her Episode 2.5, as she wish that she could help anyone to get over their pain with smile and turn those pain into smile as well. If it were of help, she would also take any kind of harsh words from others, if that would help them to vent out their frustration or sadness and turn it into smile. She also would rather go alone for her sport if she felt like going with anyone will end up with them hurting themselves as well. Sawori also would go out of her way to help someone, like what she did when Manon was crying.

Energetic

Even with her really accident-attracting luck, Sawori loves to move. She was shown to really enjoy snowboarding and usually she seems to prance around running or moving her body in one way or another--which sometimes make her friends freaked out in case she hurt herself, which she usually did. It seems this part of her personality also become one of the things that caused accidents somewhat, since during the time when she was super careful and not as energetic as usual, she appeared to not getting hurt as much.

Sensitive

Sawori reads situation pretty fast, and sensitive enough to act accordingly, as shown to how she did not say anything even if she understand from the very beginning what Ei and Xiao tried to do in her episode 3.0. Although there are times where she took on the “wrong” course of action such as what happened in her episode 2.5, she is sensitive enough to understand that it was more of a vent of anger than it was ill will.

Character Development

Throughout her episodes, Sawori’s character development focused on her optimistic outlook in the face of bad luck and how it affects the people around her. In her 1.5, the episode mostly focused on no matter how much bad luck she got, Sawori would always smile through it all, showing her determination to not bend down to bad luck. In her 2.5, Sawori was faced with “the limit of smile”, where there might be “bad luck” that she cannot cure with her smile directly or when her philosophy may clash with reality. She eventually learn that to smile, doesn’t always mean immediate smiling and that people might need time to smile and what she can do is to wait for that time where these people might need her to remind themselves how to smile again. In her 3.0, Sawori learned that, just like how she would like to take on the bad luck of people around her, there are also others who would be glad to take on hers, which made her cry and exclaiming that she was the world’s happiest person.

Relationship

Yukuhashi Ei

Sawori and Ei’s interaction happened mostly in Sawori’s 3.0, although they had been interacting since the Hip hop event where they were in the same unit (but it seemed Ei did not remember much thanks to being possessed most of the time) and also during Ei’s 2.5 where Sawori took on the role of a monster and one of those who persuaded Ei to be Magical Girl Mikora. Ei appears to be very careful with Sawori around so as to not be a trigger of Sawori hurting herself, warning Xiao whenever the later seems to move too fast or too much, in case accident happen. Ei seems to also understand Sawori’s selfless part of personality, as she would like to keep Sawori not knowing they deliberately be with her to protect her from bad luck so as not to make Sawori feel bad. Both of them appeared to develop a strong bond later on, as Ei was shown to be willing to take on Sawori’s bad luck as well, risking her own safety when Sawori was falling.

Xiao Fei Hung

Sawori and Xiao’s episode interaction only happened in Sawori 3.0 where she and Ei was assigned to the same PV as Sawori, even if Xiao appeared in some of Sawori’s card and vice versa. Xiao, being energetic and outspoken, was needed to reminded by Ei time and time again to be careful so that she doesn’t hurt Sawori in one way or another. Xiao appeared to care about Sawori very much and Sawori appeared to enjoy her company as well. Xiao also willing to take on Sawori’s bad luck and risked her safety for Sawori. She also the one who initiate them to hold hands together, brightening the atmosphere with her jubilant personality.

Futagawa Mimi

Sawori and Mimi’s interaction mostly happen during event episode where they talked of the time they went to a ski/snowboard resort together for a photoshoot. In the episode, Mimi was shown to care about Sawori very much, choosing her snowboarding outfit and encouraging her that Sawori has every right to look cute and wear cute clothes, that she should not mind about getting injured in it. Mimi also appeared to be willing to look after Sawori and go with her for snowboarding, regardless of the chance that she might get hurt while looking after her.

Kawasumi Sisala

Sawori and Sisala’s interaction happened during the Hip hop event. Although seems to be nonchalant, Sisala quickly identified that the last member of their unit was Sawori, just by hearing an ambulance siren stopping in front of their office.

Trivia

Yamai (夜舞) means “Night Dance”, which is also a pun since sickness or “病” can also be read “Yamai”. Since Sawori is written in Katakana, I don’t know the meaning tho.

Sawori has the habit to call herself in third person from time to time, and by her last name “Yamai”, instead of “Sawori”. She also likes to use expressions that tied with injury, such as “cracking ribs” or words with the kanji “bones” in it.

Sawori loves to ride a bus. She also seems to enjoy it the most with the company of others, even if they do practically nothing and just sit by the bus together.

Sawori is reluctant to buy cute clothes, because she believed she would ruin the clothes since she fell or get injured way too easily.