On the occasion of her debut album's release, Karen Elson and Jack White agreed to be photographed together for the first time. She wore charming vintage-look dresses. (He wore a top hat.)
By Jonathan Van Meter. Photographed by Annie Leibovitz.
On a very rainy, very London kind of morning in Manhattan, Karen Elson, a spidery vision in a peach gossamer shrug and black leggings, is sitting in the Breslin at the Ace Hotel, drinking strong coffee and eating buttered toast. "I'm really English," she says, almost apologetically. "I don't like the crust." She was kept up last night by guests partying in the room next door, but she is not complaining, because that is not her style. Besides, when she is in New York, where she lived for ten years, Elson prefers a groovy vibe. "At some hotels," she says, "I feel like I have to be dressed to the nines—perfectly eccentric—to walk out the door. This place feels like home."
In the fashion world, Elson, 31, is known as what she calls "the vivacious and daring redhead who will jump off the top of a building for a good picture." Little did everyone know that there was always another side to her. "I would go home and be this insular girl who listened to music and brooded in her bedroom." Now, lucky for us, those two elements of her personality—the glamorous show-off and the pensive artist—have come together in a stunning debut album, The Ghost Who Walks.
Fresh off her first-ever solo performance at the South by Southwest music festival in Austin, Texas, Elson describes the confab as "like London, New York, Milan, and Paris Fashion Weeks all put together, with every musician, band, act, record label, manager, whatever—they're all there. So it's quite daunting, to be honest, and I was terrified because I thought, God, now I've really got to make this legitimate. I felt like they were all sitting in the audience thinking, Come on, model, sing." Still, she finds performing exhilarating. "As scary as it is, I like making real, direct eye contact with people from the stage. In a sense it's like modeling: that feeling of locking in and projecting some kind of emotion to try to captivate people." Tonight she will perform at Le Poisson Rouge in the West Village in front of an even more intimidating crowd: New York Times critics, fashion editors, and the muckety-mucks from Spin andRolling Stone.
It is a moment that has been a long time in the making. Ten years ago this past April, a very close friend of Elson's died suddenly. Twenty-one at the time and modeling since she was sixteen, she says the loss came as a "real wake-up call." Being a model had always felt like a fluke, a "lightning strike," as she likes to say, something she did not choose, and so she began asking herself, "What do you really want to do with your life? Are you going to betray the things that are inside of you?"
For as long as she can remember, Elson wanted to write music and sing, but, she says, "You don't just wake up one morning and decide to become a singer-songwriter." So she began to take baby steps: performing with friends; writing lyrics in a notebook; trying her hand at composing songs with Melissa auf der Maur, the bassist from Hole. When she was 22, she went into the recording studio with Smashing Pumpkins guitarist James Iha and "sort of made half a record." But it didn't feel right. "I realized it was absolutely something I had to do," says Elson, "but I wasn't ready. Because I wasn't 100 percent involved in the creative process, it was a struggle. I thought, I already do that for a living: I stand around and wear somebody else's clothes for somebody else's brand. If I'm going to do this, and my name is going to be on it and I'm selling me, I've got to be the songwriter, I've got to be playing the guitar." She pulled the plug and decided to "go back and start from scratch," she says, "and see if I could learn to tap into myself and what I want to say in a song."
And then in 2005, she met Jack White after she was cast in the video for the White Stripes' song "Blue Orchid." The chemistry was immediate. They got married on the Amazon in Brazil that June, moved to Nashville, and a year later their daughter, Scarlett, was born; son Henry came along in 2007.
While maintaining her high-wattage modeling career—fully booked Fashion Weeks; campaigns for Chanel, Yves Saint Laurent, Louis Vuitton—Elson quietly continued to dabble in music, gathering a handful of impeccably bohemian credits along the way: performing with the political-cabaret troupe the Citizens Band; singing backup vocals on a Robert Plant remix; and recording a duet with Cat Power on a cover of "I Love You (Me Either)" for a Serge Gainsbourg tribute album. All along, she kept writing songs—more than 100—but could never finish them. "I wasn't ready to put myself out into the world," she says. "I used to be quite a strange bird—I still am, I guess—but I just had to get over myself, and I think turning 30, for whatever reason, helped me do that. I also think being a mom, having a much more structured and secure life, just enabled me to say, 'I can do this.' " Still, it was tricky to find the time. "If the kids went down for a nap, it was like, 'OK, you've got an hour and a half,' " she says. "Even if you don't like the way it sounds, you're going to finish a song."
Elson eventually got up the nerve to play some of them for her husband. "I was very hesitant," she says. "He had seen me sing in the Citizens Band, but that was as much as I wanted to give away because, for what it's worth, I really love our family and our boundaries with that. And I try to not let those two mix too much. Plus, I was terrified that he might say, 'Oh, that's really great, Karen. Keep at it!' When I did play them for him, he said, 'Wow, why are you hiding this? Are you going to hide it for the rest of your life? You're insane. We are going to go into the studio tomorrow.' "
"I was overwhelmed when I finally heard them," White says. "I would sit with the band in the studio, waiting for her to bring in the next song, and with each new one I would smile because it was always something different than the last. When it comes to music, Karen is a complete natural; it pours right out of her."
Elson, who after all is used to collaborating with the best, was surprisingly at ease working with her rock-star husband. "I think a lot of people, when they work with Jack, are really shocked by how non-torturous it is. There's just no waiting around with him; he's like, 'Bam, we're doing it. Bam, it's done.' And you're like, 'Really? Can we do it again?' And he's like, 'No. That was the performance,'" she says. "But that's where he's brilliant, because he gets the realness of you. And obviously, because we're married and we really know each other in such a different sense, he knew that he kind of had to throw me in at the deep end. So he did, he threw me in, and I had to deliver."
And boy, did she ever. The album is a canny, beautifully produced mix of spooky alt-country, English folk music, and lullaby—genres all perfectly suited to Elson's crystalline, unshowy vocals—that somehow manages to evoke the Robert Plant-Alison Krauss vibe on Raising Sand, Courtney Love circa "Doll Parts," and the sixties English folk-rock group Fairport Convention. But what's most impressive is Elson's assured lyrical talent. "The Truth Is in the Dirt" was inspired by an Eartha Kitt obituary; "Cruel Summer" is about both the scary electrical storms in Tennessee and the ruthless competitiveness of pretty girls; "The Birds They Circle" is a creepy-gorgeous musing about how everyone loves a good tragedy. All that not-quite-finished-don't-want-to-show-anybody songwriting really paid off. "The early songs I wrote were very self-indulgent," she says. "Real woe-is-me. But living in Nashville, the songwriters I like here, they all manage to find a narrative; they use metaphors and stories to explain what they're feeling." She rolls her eyes. "I don't need to show everybody my diary."
As if the album—this inspired collaboration between two strange birds—weren't enough, out of it has also come this photo shoot: the first time the couple has agreed to be photographed together. With every prior request, Elson would ask White if he was interested, and his answer was always the same: Nope. "But when this one came about," she says, "for whatever reason, he was sort of like, You know, this is going to be the only time we are ever, ever, ever going to do this, so it might as well be with the best people on the planet, it might as well be with Annie and Grace, to get that one great image of the pair of us." She pauses for a moment. "And I think, on another level, Jack's just being supportive."
I'm sure he's really proud, I say.
"Yeah," she says with a big smile. "I think he is. I think we both are."
In the fashion world, Elson, 31, is known as what she calls "the vivacious and daring redhead who will jump off the top of a building for a good picture." Little did everyone know that there was always another side to her. "I would go home and be this insular girl who listened to music and brooded in her bedroom." Now, lucky for us, those two elements of her personality—the glamorous show-off and the pensive artist—have come together in a stunning debut album, The Ghost Who Walks.
Fresh off her first-ever solo performance at the South by Southwest music festival in Austin, Texas, Elson describes the confab as "like London, New York, Milan, and Paris Fashion Weeks all put together, with every musician, band, act, record label, manager, whatever—they're all there. So it's quite daunting, to be honest, and I was terrified because I thought, God, now I've really got to make this legitimate. I felt like they were all sitting in the audience thinking, Come on, model, sing." Still, she finds performing exhilarating. "As scary as it is, I like making real, direct eye contact with people from the stage. In a sense it's like modeling: that feeling of locking in and projecting some kind of emotion to try to captivate people." Tonight she will perform at Le Poisson Rouge in the West Village in front of an even more intimidating crowd: New York Times critics, fashion editors, and the muckety-mucks from Spin andRolling Stone.
It is a moment that has been a long time in the making. Ten years ago this past April, a very close friend of Elson's died suddenly. Twenty-one at the time and modeling since she was sixteen, she says the loss came as a "real wake-up call." Being a model had always felt like a fluke, a "lightning strike," as she likes to say, something she did not choose, and so she began asking herself, "What do you really want to do with your life? Are you going to betray the things that are inside of you?"
For as long as she can remember, Elson wanted to write music and sing, but, she says, "You don't just wake up one morning and decide to become a singer-songwriter." So she began to take baby steps: performing with friends; writing lyrics in a notebook; trying her hand at composing songs with Melissa auf der Maur, the bassist from Hole. When she was 22, she went into the recording studio with Smashing Pumpkins guitarist James Iha and "sort of made half a record." But it didn't feel right. "I realized it was absolutely something I had to do," says Elson, "but I wasn't ready. Because I wasn't 100 percent involved in the creative process, it was a struggle. I thought, I already do that for a living: I stand around and wear somebody else's clothes for somebody else's brand. If I'm going to do this, and my name is going to be on it and I'm selling me, I've got to be the songwriter, I've got to be playing the guitar." She pulled the plug and decided to "go back and start from scratch," she says, "and see if I could learn to tap into myself and what I want to say in a song."
And then in 2005, she met Jack White after she was cast in the video for the White Stripes' song "Blue Orchid." The chemistry was immediate. They got married on the Amazon in Brazil that June, moved to Nashville, and a year later their daughter, Scarlett, was born; son Henry came along in 2007.
While maintaining her high-wattage modeling career—fully booked Fashion Weeks; campaigns for Chanel, Yves Saint Laurent, Louis Vuitton—Elson quietly continued to dabble in music, gathering a handful of impeccably bohemian credits along the way: performing with the political-cabaret troupe the Citizens Band; singing backup vocals on a Robert Plant remix; and recording a duet with Cat Power on a cover of "I Love You (Me Either)" for a Serge Gainsbourg tribute album. All along, she kept writing songs—more than 100—but could never finish them. "I wasn't ready to put myself out into the world," she says. "I used to be quite a strange bird—I still am, I guess—but I just had to get over myself, and I think turning 30, for whatever reason, helped me do that. I also think being a mom, having a much more structured and secure life, just enabled me to say, 'I can do this.' " Still, it was tricky to find the time. "If the kids went down for a nap, it was like, 'OK, you've got an hour and a half,' " she says. "Even if you don't like the way it sounds, you're going to finish a song."
Elson eventually got up the nerve to play some of them for her husband. "I was very hesitant," she says. "He had seen me sing in the Citizens Band, but that was as much as I wanted to give away because, for what it's worth, I really love our family and our boundaries with that. And I try to not let those two mix too much. Plus, I was terrified that he might say, 'Oh, that's really great, Karen. Keep at it!' When I did play them for him, he said, 'Wow, why are you hiding this? Are you going to hide it for the rest of your life? You're insane. We are going to go into the studio tomorrow.' "
"I was overwhelmed when I finally heard them," White says. "I would sit with the band in the studio, waiting for her to bring in the next song, and with each new one I would smile because it was always something different than the last. When it comes to music, Karen is a complete natural; it pours right out of her."
Elson, who after all is used to collaborating with the best, was surprisingly at ease working with her rock-star husband. "I think a lot of people, when they work with Jack, are really shocked by how non-torturous it is. There's just no waiting around with him; he's like, 'Bam, we're doing it. Bam, it's done.' And you're like, 'Really? Can we do it again?' And he's like, 'No. That was the performance,'" she says. "But that's where he's brilliant, because he gets the realness of you. And obviously, because we're married and we really know each other in such a different sense, he knew that he kind of had to throw me in at the deep end. So he did, he threw me in, and I had to deliver."
And boy, did she ever. The album is a canny, beautifully produced mix of spooky alt-country, English folk music, and lullaby—genres all perfectly suited to Elson's crystalline, unshowy vocals—that somehow manages to evoke the Robert Plant-Alison Krauss vibe on Raising Sand, Courtney Love circa "Doll Parts," and the sixties English folk-rock group Fairport Convention. But what's most impressive is Elson's assured lyrical talent. "The Truth Is in the Dirt" was inspired by an Eartha Kitt obituary; "Cruel Summer" is about both the scary electrical storms in Tennessee and the ruthless competitiveness of pretty girls; "The Birds They Circle" is a creepy-gorgeous musing about how everyone loves a good tragedy. All that not-quite-finished-don't-want-to-show-anybody songwriting really paid off. "The early songs I wrote were very self-indulgent," she says. "Real woe-is-me. But living in Nashville, the songwriters I like here, they all manage to find a narrative; they use metaphors and stories to explain what they're feeling." She rolls her eyes. "I don't need to show everybody my diary."
As if the album—this inspired collaboration between two strange birds—weren't enough, out of it has also come this photo shoot: the first time the couple has agreed to be photographed together. With every prior request, Elson would ask White if he was interested, and his answer was always the same: Nope. "But when this one came about," she says, "for whatever reason, he was sort of like, You know, this is going to be the only time we are ever, ever, ever going to do this, so it might as well be with the best people on the planet, it might as well be with Annie and Grace, to get that one great image of the pair of us." She pauses for a moment. "And I think, on another level, Jack's just being supportive."
I'm sure he's really proud, I say.
"Yeah," she says with a big smile. "I think he is. I think we both are."
