It’s famously the most wonderful time of the year, but for Taylor Momsen, the season of goodwill used to be anything but. Now, having spent decades wrestling with the ghost of Christmas past and a certain green fuzzy mountain-dweller, The Pretty Reckless superstar has rediscovered that merry magic and channelled it into reclaiming the past she tried to escape…
‘So this is Christmas, and what have you done?’
Taylor Momsen? Loads. For The Pretty Reckless singer, ’tas been the season since long before most people would consider decent. Dropping an EP of Christmas bangers – Taylor Momsen’s Pretty Reckless Christmas – is festive. Putting it out on Halloween was like waking up to see if Santa had been yet two months early.
But when Christmas eventually started rolling for everyone else, Taylor did it bigger and louder than anyone else. At Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade in her New York hometown on November 27, she pulled the first cracker on the city’s switch-on celebration – moving from one roast turkey dinner occasion to another by riding the parade’s rocking-horse float, and performing Where Are You Christmas? in front of the legendary department store, surrounded by human-sized dancing toy robots, children’s alphabet cubes and angels.
“I’m a New Yorker, and I grew up watching the Macy’s Day Parade every year,” she says today. “So getting to be a part of something that’s so classically Christmas and classically New York and so iconic was really, really fun. I rode on a rocking-horse, which I think is the oldest float, and then performed with dancers.”
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.”
“I spent a lot of time being the Grinch, because of my past”
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…
So it was that during COVID in 2020, Taylor wasn’t in the greatest of places. Three years before, The Pretty Reckless had been on tour with Soundgarden when Chris Cornell took his own life with no indication that it was coming. As the pandemic took hold and the wheels of life stopped, Taylor “was in a very dark place in my life”.
“Everything was very bleak. We had gone through a lot of loss. The world was shut down. Everyone was having a very hard time, personally in our camp, and also in the world in general.
“It got to Christmas time, and I started to see all these comments again. And for some reason – maybe because everyone was stuck at home – there was more of them than ever. Everywhere I looked online, there was this abundance of, ‘Do a rock version of Where Are You Christmas?.’”
Eventually, Taylor thawed to the idea, just a little bit. She did some re-arranging and revamping to make it a Pretty Reckless version, then took it to practice, one of the few things she and her bandmates were allowed to leave the house for. It wouldn’t be for anything, just for laughs.
“What's the worst thing that could happen? We play it once and say, ‘Never mind.’”
Except…
“By the end of the song, four very, very miserable people had giant grins on our faces – stupid grins – and we were laughing and having a great time. We all turned to each other and went, ‘I think that might have been magic.’”
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.”
“Cindy Lou set the course for the rest of my future 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.”
Not that Taylor is wanting for things like that this year. The Pretty Reckless spent a chunk of 2025 out on the road with AC/DC, for one thing. It was actually this booking that interrupted making the Christmas EP. Taylor told their agent, “Don’t call me unless it’s AC/DC or The Rolling Stones.” A week later he called back saying, actually, AC/DC want you. Fine. A week after that, he called again. “You’re not gonna believe this…” Which is how they ended up out with the Stones as well. Nicer problems to have…
“Oh yeah! I pinch myself constantly,” she gushes. “We’ve been touring with AC/DC for a while, and it never gets old. They’re on fire right now. It's like they have something to prove. They come out swinging. Angus Young’s amps are so loud. I think their stage volume is, like, 110 DB before the PA is even turned on! It’s rock’n’roll in its most primal force. Getting to watch that every night after playing a show, it doesn't get better than that. I feel so, so fucking lucky.”
As for her own band, she says the ceiling has yet to be found.
“I feel like we're in a really good place. I’m in a good place personally, we're in a really good place as a band, and I'm very excited for the future. There’s also so much more to come in the next 12 months that I can't wait for, and I can't really talk about yet, but this is kind of just the beginning. That's a really exciting place to be.”
And now that her own Grinch-iness has melted away, will Taylor be getting more festive?
“I'm going to try to make it home to my family's house, which has been a tradition we try to maintain. The holidays, to me, are really about getting together with the people you love and spending that quality time together.
“My family has a weird tradition – we don't do traditional Christmas food, but my mom cooks every year, and she's an excellent cook. For Christmas dinner, she’ll make an excellent potato-leek soup. The actual proper meal changes every year, but her soup takes, like, three days to make, and it's amazing. And then Christmas morning, she makes these amazing scones from scratch. We get them once a year at the holidays, because they take forever, and that's been a tradition since I was a baby. I always look forward to those.”
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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