Alison Mosshart by David James Swanson
After going solo for the first time earlier this year with the debut track Rise, Alison Mosshart will continue her time away from The Kills and Dead Weather with the release of a spoken word album entitled Sound Wheel which is to accompany a printed collection of paintings, photographs, short stories and poetry dubbed Car Ma this coming Friday, August 7th.
“When I was writing Car Ma, there were some passages I struggled to get right, and I got in the practice of reading them out loud and recording them, to hear and feel where words or sentences were rubbing together wrong,” Mosshart says. “I’d listen back to these recordings and they’d be real informative to me in that way. This tool I was using to help me, started feeling like this whole other angle or art form. And I started thinking it would be interesting to perform/record the whole book, not in a straight up spoken word way, but more like a sound sculpture of characters and voices and miscellaneous cut ups, no rules.”
“After a full month of being obsessed with making the book, I then spent the next month obsessed with recording it. I told Third Man about this and they dug the idea. Due to the time constraints of vinyl, not every bit of writing is recorded, I took liberties with a razor blade on some stuff, and there are a lot of interludes from old tapes I found from old phone conversations I had in the 90’s, even a whole monologue where I played a crooked car dealer leaving a very long voicemail to a potential buyer- that does not appear in Car Ma, the book.”