Taylor Momsen: “I took this thing that I had shunned for so long and turned it into something I can embrace”

Christmas 2025, then, belongs to Taylor Momsen. She’s completed it. She joins Slade and Mariah Carey and that bloke from Wiltshire who’s eaten Christmas dinner every day since 1993 in being part of the cultural festive carpet. “I have an evergreen hit!” she grins when Kerrang! points out that the seasonal gravy train is a very good one on which to ride. “It’s been a fun holiday season, doing a bunch of things that I never really thought I would do.”

And not because it’s an incredibly difficult and specific thing to do, playing in front of Macy’s on their biggest day of the year. But until very recently, Taylor Momsen was a Christmas denier.

Where Are You Christmas? is a volume-up re-wrapping of the song she sang as a kiddie in the live-action 2000 movie of Dr. Seuss’ classic How The Grinch Stole Christmas. After Jim Carrey’s titular green holiday-ruiner nicks her presents, young Cindy Lou Who – played by a five-year-old Taylor – sings the song, sad and confused about where all her gifts, and her cheer, have gone. Rather than filling her with a warming glow every winter, the movie had the opposite effect on Taylor. The Grinch may have been watching the Macy’s gig, but for the longest time, she put him to shame.

“I spent a lot of time being the Grinch, because of my past,” she admits. “Christmas became something that I'd kind of roll my eyes at. Holidays can be hard. Some are easier than others.”

Hence, she says, one of the other tracks on the EP, the oh-so-jovial Christmas Is Killing Me. And for the longest time, it would roll around again, and the ghost of Taylor’s past would creep up on her, and she’d greet it as warmly as Ebenezer Scrooge with his own yuletide poltergeists.

“The long and short of it is that I formed The Pretty Reckless when I was 14, and as soon as we started putting out music every Christmas, fans made the connection that I played Cindy Lou Who and now had this band. And so every year, fans would beg for a rock version of Where Are You Christmas?. And for 15 years, or whatever it was, I would hear all this and go, ‘This is never going to happen. In no world am I doing this.’”

Bah, humbug. But this wouldn’t be a Christmas story if its least-festive protagonist weren’t touched by the magic of the season right when they needed it the most…

Actually finding something to smile about during COVID was an achievement. But Taylor says that deeper than that, the song, reconnecting with something she’d shut away for so long, was “a full-circle” moment. Filtered through her adult self as they worked on things over the next couple of years, wondering where all the good times and innocence and simple joys had gone, Taylor found that, actually, she wasn’t so different from Cindy Lou Who.

“I was in a very reflective place, dealing with loss and going back through my history and coming to terms with things. I wanted to add things from now, to give it context as to who I am as a person, and tell the story. It was interesting reflecting on my life and realising all this. It was good to spend time with this, and kind of come to terms with a lot of things that I'd shunned from my past.”

One thing was Grinch. When she’d started The Pretty Reckless, Taylor wanted it to stand on its own two feet. Hollywood Goes To The Stage isn’t always an attractive bit. She wasn’t an actress having a go at singing in a band. She was a rocker, a roller, a stage-controller, and that’s the foot she was leading with.

What she didn’t realise was that Cindy Lou was part of that as well.

“When I did that I was five, six years old. When I sang that song, it was my first time in a recording studio. I didn't realise at the time how much that whole experience would end up shaping my life, because you don't think about those things when you're a kid. But being the first time in a recording studio, working with James Horner and getting my first taste of studio training and hearing my voice come through a microphone and through headphones with compression, that whole experience was really impactful on me. It kind of set the course for the rest of my future, unbeknownst to me, in this very odd way.”

This is why Taylor says the new version “has a deeper meaning than you might expect from a Christmas song”. It marks part of life’s ongoing journey, and understanding yourself. And part of that was appreciating that people were asking for her to do a Cindy Lou because it means something to them.

“To be a part of something that is so universally loved, and bring smiles to people's faces every year is actually awesome,” smiles Taylor. “I realised: why am I spending my time as the only one being a Grinch about it?”

This is a major ingredient Taylor took into the studio to finally make Pretty Reckless Christmas. It’s them, with their own loud spin, and a dose of sarcasm among the cheer, but that simple feeling was one she wanted to spread around and pay forward.

“It was interesting to make a record where the only intention was to put some smiles on people's faces,” she says. “COVID was hard, and the world is still really hard. It's a hard time in everyone's life right now. Something to make you feel good is something that everyone needs. And Christmas could always use a little bit of a revamp, throw some rock’n’roll in there. There's not much rock’n’roll Christmas music.”

Is this your mission now, then? To rock up Christmas? You’ve gone all in on it, after avoiding it for so long…

“You have to fully commit!” she laughs. “I'm a completist, so I have to commit to everything I'm doing. I go in with both feet. And the funny thing about this Christmas record is, looking at it, it might seem like a departure, but it’s totally us. It just has a Christmas flair.

“It's two sides of the same coin – as an artist, as me. It’s not a different me, it's just a turn of the coin. It’s cool to embrace all sides and all aspects of yourself as an artist. If you're shunning one side, you're not being fully you. So, in that sense, this whole project has really helped me come to terms with a lot of stuff in my past, and I feel really good about it.

“I took this thing that I had shunned for so long in my life and turned it into something I can embrace. This is a part of me. In order to be your full self, you have to embrace all aspects of yourself. And this is a big part of me that comes around every year. So I turned it into something that is relatable, and it's something that I can stand behind and feel proud of.”

And lucky for the rest of the Momsens, this year they’re eating them with a bit of Cindy Lou again. Having thawed from the Ice Queen of old, Taylor is, for 2025, the Queen Of Christmas. She calls the lowering of walls within herself “healing”. One might also say that both putting them up and bringing them down are part of learning who you are, and in some ways necessary. That it’s taken so long to happen is actually part of that journey in itself.

“If this is something I had done 10 years earlier, I wouldn't feel the same way about it,” she says. “To me, singing Where Are You Christmas? now, through the lens of 32-year-old Taylor, after all of the hardships I've been through, the lyrics take on a new meaning. Singing it from an adult perspective means something different than a six-year-old singing it. What started off as a song about a child looking for that Christmas magic and wonder, turned into something that is deeper than just Christmas. It's trying to find the magic in life, and reflecting on how life has changed as you've gotten older.”

She tells us to calm down when we suggest this would make the base for a Christmas movie, but Taylor doesn’t deny it, either. If the magic of the season – as the films tell it – is about anything, it’s growth, love, reconnection and optimism, all found in the simplest of things. This is very cheesy, which is why National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation tells it by having Randy Quaid kidnap Chevy Chase’s greedy boss, and Home Alone does a PG-13 version of Saw, but they’re all basically the same. In an imagined Pretty Reckless movie, the Grinch dancing along to grown-up Cindy Lou singing her song at New York’s biggest Christmas party is actually not that far-fetched. Nor is the idea that you can carry it all with you as you move forward.

“Things get harder and but it doesn't mean that the light is gone,” she smiles. “You just have to work a little harder to find it.”

Taylor Momsen’s Pretty Reckless Christmas is out now.

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