Photo by David James Swanson
KUTX at Home with Alison Mosshart will premier online Tuesday, August 11 at 1pm
KUTX at Home: Alison Mosshart with host Laurie Gallardo
If you’ve experienced the fire that is The Kills or The Dead Weather, especially if you’ve been lucky enough to see them on tour, then you must have some idea of what I’m raving about.
Witness Alison Mosshart, and you witness the personification of the unbridled electrical current sparking dangerously from a whipping wire on a fallen pole; that erupting excitement starting at the pit of your stomach when you slam on the gas and peel out from zero to ninety in .02 seconds; so, in a nutshell, my favorite cyclone, and a spirit moving beyond the realms of songwriter and musician.
Mosshart is a multi-media visual artist injecting the same adventure, that far-reaching thirst, into all of her creations. It’s the fuel behind her insanely cool book, a memoir of memoirs called Car Ma, and the sounds breathing life into an already lively entity, the companion soundtrack of Sound Wheel. I say “memoir” because the book includes a multitude of rediscovered treasures – drawings, paintings, photos, short stories and scribblings – collected by Mosshart over the years, and the same applies to some of Sound Wheel‘s intriguing bits and pieces of sound, like recordings from old phone messages.
There’s a visionary poetry to Mosshart’s rumination of automobiles and all they reflect of the beat up/beat down human condition – the speed, the stalling, the spin-outs, the sudden crashes, the damned endless highways – or, endless highways of the damned, if you prefer. It’s the mysteries surrounding the journey, and whatever the hell is going on within. Sounds a lot like the heart, doesn’t it?
I recently sat down for a chat with Mosshart about how the book came into being, and why Sound Wheel really isn’t a “spoken word” collection. Plus, there may or may not be a red balloon waving at you.
-Laurie Gallardo, KUTX host
Car Ma and Sound Wheel are now available at Third Man Records.
“Rise,” and “It’s Ain’t Water” – the solo singles from Alison Mosshart – is out now on Domino Records.
