In the months before Karen Elson releases her debut album, she’s writing songs—secretly, literally in the closet. When she plays them for White, he calls her “a natural” and cuts the album at his production studio Third Man Records.
Like Nico from the Velvet Underground, Karen Elson is a world famous model before singing and it shows in visually pleasing stage performances of Elson in a Greek-style dress, flanked by band members who also appear to be models. So far, the resemblance ends there: Elson’s voice is soft and feminine; Nico’s a kind of masculine falsetto. Still, Elson covers the Velvet Underground song “Candy Says” in her cabaret group The Citizens Band.
I don’t particularly connect with the genre—a dark-ballad cabaret—though I might have a decade ago if the lyrics were edgier than they are sad. Still, the music is good if you can get past the sadness.
In the album’s title song “The Ghost that Walks,” Elson sings about the childhood name she was given for being the tall and skinny pale redheaded girl. In “Stolen Roses,” she sings about stealing away to escape bad memories.
Elson has vocal range, but her voice sounds new and raw, too.
In the song “Cruel Summer,” for instance, she strikes out alone in a lo-fi video that, like the music video for White’s “We’re Gonna Be Friends,” looks like it might have been made with a Mac. She sits on a vintage porch swathed in the warm peach hues of her hair and the cabin’s curtains, guitar in her lap, as she sings the lyrics: It’s been a cruel summer
The sun has been hit by the storms /My darling was bewitched by another /Her black magic tricks stole his heart /I saw her scheming as she twirled her hair /So long and black like the storm /She caught my darling’s eye and/ As quickly as the lightening / I muttered a lonesome goodbye/ It’s been a cruel summer /The kind that makes grown men turn pale/ My darling was bewitched by another /I could not compete with black hair
It’s a bold move—not just because Elson plays solo, exposed, but because the message feels so personal: In 2009, just two months after White formed the Dead Weather, her husband was touring Europe with the raven-haired punk rock priestess Alison Mosshart, of the adored British Indie-rock duo, The Kills.
Even more devastating than the image of Elson penning the song while White is away with Mosshart is the song’s resonance with a cover White does of Dolly Parton’s “Jolene” in the latest White Stripes album. In both songs, another woman catches the attention of the singer’s love; here, it is the redhead who wins hearts.
Jolene, Jolene, Jolene, Jolene /I’m begging of you please don't take my man /Jolene, Jolene, Jolene, Jolene /Please don't take him just because you can/ Your beauty is beyond compare /With flaming locks of auburn hair /With ivory skin and eyes of emerald green /Your smile is like a breath of spring /Your voice is soft like summer rain /And I cannot compete with you, Jolene
Elson says "Cruel Summer" is about both the scary electrical storms in Tennessee and competition between pretty girls, but it feels more like Jolene coming clean about the woman worrying her.
Fear of another woman—of her beauty, of the possibility a storm can overshadow the sun or that we are maybe not the sun after all—reminds me of a lesson my dad tried to impart over a pool table one night. “Everywhere you go,” he told me, “there’s always going to be a better player.” Most of us aren’t expressly taught how to deal with a world populated by worthy others, and so we suffer and are driven to express that suffering in our art.
In the same google search I find Karen Elson’s “Cruel Summer,” a video interview of White and Mosshart appears in the sidebar. Mosshart looks at White the way she looks at her rock-duo Kills partner Jamie Hince—with deference and admiration. White looks at her, too, but he looks away more often, as though one of them has more to hide.
By then, Hince was dating supermodel Kate Moss, now his wife, but how did he feel once Jack White came along and borrowed Mosshart, first for the Ranconteurs “Steady As She Goes,” then for good? Gossip magazines speculated there was something between Dean Fertita and Mosshart, but anyone paying attention would have seen more sparks between Mosshart and White.
Elson tells Vogue contributor Jonathan Van Meter that "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."
Still, with The Ghost That Walks, I feel like I’m overhearing a love letter to Jack White—a please-come-home letter destined to fail because its appeal is rooted in feeling sympathy for a girl in pain rather than the promise of good times.
It’s the message that prevents me from loving the album.
In music, we get the chance to envision our lives the way they are supposed to be—which doesn’t mean songs need to be struggle free. In a song that asks me to re-live losing, I need the artist to offer some redemptive spin, assuring me our innate badass-ness allows us to take a beating every now and then.
To reach for The Ghost that Walks, I’d have to be all right with feeling sad and abandoned, yet pretty, which would mean missing out on being Jack White’s schoolboy crush in “We’re Gonna Be Friends” or Mosshart’s adversarial lover in “I Hate the Way You Love.”
That’s the other thing about music. In childhood, there are crushes and there are bullies, yet later on in life, we can recall the past from a number of vantage points. It’s the reason we turn to music in the first place: to rewrite history, to imagine winning.
It’s gutsy to pour your heart out while your husband traipses around the globe setting another woman’s lyrics to music, taking another woman’s songs on the road—gutsy, but sad.
After the end of the White Stripes and after the end of White’s marriage to Karen Elson, I want to imagine The Ghost That Walks as Elson’s last goodbye to White and to the intolerable sadness of that minute just before walking.
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