Melena Ryzik
Life is unfair and everybody knows it, but should you require a refresher, you need only to watch Karen Elson, the redheaded supermodel, design muse and wife of Jack White of the White Stripes, sing. There she was Monday night in New York at Le Poisson Rouge in the West Village, performing songs from her debut album in a voice that can go from retro-breathy chanteuse to rootsy belter in a few notes. It was the fourth stop in a whirlwind mini-tour.
At each gig she took the stage in a peach-dyed vintage gown and a 1917 Gibson Style O guitar to give a preview of her album, ?The Ghost Who Walks,? which was produced by her rock star husband (who plays the drums on it) and is due out May 25. At the New York show, a homecoming of sorts, the audience was filled with fashion and music folk. White was not there ?he is touring in Australia with the Dead Weather, some of whose members also moonlight for Elson. The video for the album?s title song, in which Elson alone sings and strums while her band stands around in the shadows, has already racked up more than 54,000 YouTube views. ?If I wasn?t a model, I would never have been around interesting musicians, even had the financial capabilities to say, ?I don?t have to work right now, I can sit and make my record,?? she said the morning after the Poisson Rouge show, over several coffees at the Breslin in the Ace Hotel. Though she has long been musically minded, ?I could never have made this record five years ago,? she said. ?This record only could have been made with Jack.? They were married in 2005.
Elson is hardly the first model to take up with a musician, or to aspire to make the transition from runway to stage. Recording an album is an ambition that stretches back at least as far as Twiggy, more recently attracting catwalk legends like Kate Moss and Naomi Campbell. (Surely you remember ?La La La Love Song??)
?After Carla Bruni, I expect every model to pick up a guitar,? said Dmitry Komis, a curator and writer who came to the Poisson Rouge show with the designer Zaldy, who styles the Scissor Sisters and who named Elson as one of his muses. (?She?s so down-to-earthy,? he said.) Elson, 31, picked up a guitar?and a four-track?nearly a decade ago when she was living in the East Village, and taught herself to play. Since 2004, she has performed with the Citizens Band, a political cabaret act she helped establish. Before she left her hometown near Manchester, England, to model at 16, she fronted a salsa band. ?I was always singing, as a kid,? she said. ?That?s honestly all I?ve ever wanted to do. But really, I doubt I would have ever done it? if not for modelling.
Her album leans toward dark, spare Americana in instrumentation and themes. Elson wrote the guitar parts and lyrics, and the band and White did the rest. Elson said she listened to Harry Smith?s Smithsonian folk anthology for inspiration. Onstage, eyes closed, she weaves like a 1960s folkie. Elson doesn?t expect to give up modelling. ?I think that would be really pretentious??I?m sorry, I?m now a musician,?? she said. ?Other than viewing them as the golden handcuffs, I might as well just appreciate it. I only hope I can improve the idea of model-slash-anything. I only hope I can do it justice.?