Taylor Momsen thought she would never record her song from How the Grinch Stole Christmas.
Every holiday season, The Pretty Reckless frontwoman receives calls from fans to put a new spin on Where Are You Christmas?, which she sang in character as Cindy Lou Who in the 2000 festive classic.
“That was something that when I first formed The Pretty Reckless when I was 14, every year people would put the connection together that I was Cindy Lou Who in The Grinch, and every year it got more and more exponential and more and more people put that together and it was always kind of a funny thing that you smile at and go ‘Haha, that’s cute,'” she shared on the Call Her Daddy podcast. “And every year they’d go, ‘Do a rock version of Where Are You Christmas?’ And for I don’t know, 15 years, I went, ‘No way, in zero worlds is this something I would ever do.'”
After spending many years rejecting the idea, Momsen finally relented during the Covid lockdown in 2020 and suggested trying it out with her bandmates.
“So we put together an arrangement which was actually kind of tricky because it’s not really a full song – it’s a minute long,” the 32-year-old recalled. “We go into the rehearsal space and we jam through it once and I kid you not, by the end of the song, these four depressed, miserable people had giant grins on our faces and we all kind of looked at each other and went, ‘Was that just great? I think there was something magic that just happened here. Are we doing this now? We’re doing this.'”
However, the former Gossip Girl star didn’t want to release Where Are You Christmas? on its own and felt it “needed context”, so she wrote five more rock-infused festive songs and created the EP, Taylor Momsen’s Pretty Reckless Christmas, which is out now.
