Magic, Music, and Movies: Taylor Momsen Is Seeing Things ‘in a New Light’

Taylor Momsen sits at a desk in her New York City apartment, the place she’s called home since she was 12, a sign hangs just beyond her right shoulder: “love” written in cursive pink neon. “Welcome to my home,” she says, fresh faced and smiling, a natural beauty in black wide-rimmed glasses. In August, her band the Pretty Reckless released their newest single “For I Am Death,” and in the video Taylor personifies death itself, morphing into a slithering Middle-earth-esque manifestation, slick in all-over black body makeup.

When Taylor and I talked last year for the 10th anniversary of Going to Hell, we discussed the original art applied to her back for the iconic album cover. “There’s something very freeing and pure about being as vulnerable and as exposed as possible,” she says, because actual nudity is often a non-option. “I use paint in different forms to cover up. I think that’s why it’s a recurring theme as we keep making music.”

The paradox of power and vulnerability may just define Taylor in many ways. On October 10th, she’s re-releasing the sweet song she sang as Cindy Lou Who for 2000’s How the Grinch Stole Christmas, “Where Are You Christmas?.” The fact that it’s the film’s silver anniversary is a complete coincidence, but rather a result of—in addition to finally acquiescing to pleading fans—a storied journey that brought her to revisiting and embracing her past. 

While Jim Carrey played the title character, it was 6-year-old Taylor, with a wigged blonde basilica on her head, who is the beating heart of the film. The Grinch is highly stylized and vividly fantastic, but little Taylor, who’d started acting when she was 2, shines with genuine hope and fortitude, purity and joy. 

In a Grinch promo interview for WFAA, Taylor, who’d tuned 7 by the time the film was released, stated: “I love fantasy no matter what story it is.” 

“I stand by that,” Taylor says, not recalling the interview. “I stand by that statement today. It’s just proof that you never really change as a person. You’re born the way you are, and you grow and you evolve, but you’re that same person for the rest of your life. At least that’s true with me. I think you’re born with certain instincts and values. I guess values are taught, but inherently, you’re born with some kind of center. I think that’s the key to life. 

“If you can manage to not lose that as you get older, that’s everything. Especially as a musician, as an artist, I spend a lot of time trying to maintain my childlike mind to a degree, because it’s so important and so necessary for writing, and yet still be an adult with responsibilities and bills and all the things that come with being a grown-up. I think that’s the key. I think that’s the key that everyone forgets. You’ve got to remember who you were as a kid, and if you can hold on to that, you’ll always be good.”

Despite audience requests, she resisted the idea of reviving “Where Are You Christmas?” since starting the Pretty Reckless at 14; the initiative, for her, had to come with a purpose. It wasn’t until 2020, going through a time she describes as “a very difficult period…with a lot of loss. COVID had just hit. We were in lockdown, and it’s the holidays again.” And she was with her band, hanging out, and the requests for a rock version of the song she sang 20 years earlier kept coming in. So, they (probably, somewhat begrudgingly) played through the song. “By the end of [“Where Are You Christmas?], these four miserable, jaded, pissed-off, depressed people had giant grins on our faces. Just undeniable, couldn’t help it, huge smiles, laughing, having the best time. We all turned to each other and we went, ‘Was that just great? I think that was just magic. I think there was something really special about what just happened, and I think we have to do this now.’ That was the jumping-off point with COVID, of going back to my childhood and realizing, after having been through such a hard time, wanting things to be simple again and wanting things to be joyful. This song and this memory of filming this movie and being a part of this, I never had a tainted memory about it. The Grinch was something that I hold very dearly and have very fond memories of.” 

The experience inspired Taylor to write an entire Christmas record. “It’s this little coming-of-age story and this full circle moment of me accepting my past and embracing it and realizing that you never really do change, with the intent of just wanting to purely spread joy to everyone. It’s a very hard time for everyone right now if we’re being real about it, and I just wanted to bring happiness. I wanted to bring joy to the world, to quote another Christmas song.”

The new version of “Where Are You Christmas?” “morphs” childhood Taylor’s original vocals into her own now, a concept she says exemplifies the magic of one’s childhood self. “To be a part of something that is so universally loved feels surreal, now, 25 years later, and also has been very cool. I wanted to continue that joy and bring fresh life to it from my own perspective as a grown-up Cindy Lou Who.”

But music, she says, was always her everything—not acting—knowing from a very young age she wanted to write songs, something she did while filming The Grinch. (Young Taylor was clearly an avid animal lover, as one song was about her father’s dead dog, and another was called “Rescue a Pet.”) With all the fluctuation from her early childhood acting career, songwriting provided an all-important grounding. “Writing was this place where I could truly be me without any affect, without having to be this version of me, or this version of me. It was the purest form of myself because it wasn’t for anyone. It was just for myself, and it still remains that. My notebook was my best friend.”

The Grinch also provided Taylor with her first experience in a professional recording studio, with none other than legendary film composer James Horner (Titanic, Braveheart). The entire experience, she says, changed her life. “I left that experience going, ‘That’s what I want to do.’ That was magic. That was everything. There’s a really great photo of me, holding a stuffed animal, sitting at the console with my chin on my fist listening to the song with James Horner sitting next to me. Fast forward years later, there’s another photo of me and our producer, Kato, sitting at the console, and I’m doing the exact same thing. It’s a mirrored image, except I’m now 20-something. It just reassured me that all my crazy decisions in life of quitting a career [in acting] and pivoting and joining a rock band to go on the road and grind it out, and all those things, that was my path. That was the path that I always wanted. I fought for it and went for it, and now I’m doing that.” 

There’s a scene in The Grinch where little Cindy Lou Who is walking up a mountain to the Grinch’s nefarious lair. Director Ron Howard later told her the story. “It was a big mountain. I actually am walking up the mountain, so it was a very long shoot, but there was no dialogue or anything. I was miked. I shoot the scene. I come down, and everyone’s laughing, and I don’t understand why everyone’s laughing.

“I’m going, ‘Why is everyone laughing? What’s so funny?’ Turns out I was humming the entire time up the mountain, not knowing it because I was always singing. I was always humming. I was always writing songs. I always had music in me, which I feel very blessed about because it’s just something that came really naturally to me.” 

Today, she says she’s in a good place, well-earned after some dark and difficult years, the same that inspired the Pretty Reckless’s fourth studio album, 2021’s Death by Rock and Roll. “Living in that space, I had to make a very conscious decision at one point of I was on a very bad path, and I was going to die. I had to choose if I was going to live or die, and I made a very conscious decision to move forward.”

That was the beginning of Taylor looking back at her childhood in an attempt to rediscover her true self. “When I lost some of those people, I couldn’t listen to music anymore. It brought me so much pain I couldn’t deal. To lose an outlet like that, where this music has been such a solace for me, to not have that anymore was terrifying. I felt like I really lost myself.” She says she began almost in chronological succession identifying and reintroducing the things that brought her joy in her early years, starting with the first band she fell in love with: the Beatles. 

And part of this process included going back into her past film and TV work, “accepting them and seeing them in a new light.” 

She says she’s comfortable now, stronger. 

“I was always very me, but…you go through phases. I had my rebellious youth, where I was extra angsty. I wanted to be something and was fighting for that, and now I just kind of am, and that’s just a really nice place to be. I just feel very comfortable in my own skin and all aspects of myself, and I’m not living in a place where I’m shutting off any part of me. I’m firing on all cylinders, and it’s good.

“I’m still that little girl humming, walking up the mountain. I really am.”