Photo credit: Alison Mosshart & David James Swanson

Alison Mosshart releases debut solo single "Rise"

9th April 2020

Fierce and fiery, a no-nonsense firestarter, Alison Mosshart is hardly a stranger to taking chances. Best known as one-half of acclaimed duo The Kills, when she’s not moonlighting as Baby Ruthless, the gnarly lead singer of blues-punk foursome The Dead Weather, Mosshart is a forever moving force. Over the years she’s collaborated with everyone from her Dead Weather bandmate Jack White to the Arctic Monkeys, Primal Scream, Gang Of Four, Cage The Elephant, Foo Fighters, James Williamson and Mini Mansions.

Today, she releases the first solo single of her already impressive career. "Rise" is a searing, slow-burner recorded for, and prominently featured in, today’s final episode of FacebookWatch drama Sacred Lies. The track was recorded in Los Angeles with producer Lawrence Rothman, and is available now on Domino Records.

Mosshart is currently hunkered down at her Nashville home and has used this period of social isolation to teach herself video editing, pulling together some of her favorite footage from a recent visit to Los Angeles and editing it into a video for the song. Watch her self-produced video for "Rise" below.

Sacred Lies: The Singing Bones is produced by Blumhouse Television and Raelle Tucker (True Blood, The Returned, Jessica Jones), starring Juliette Lewis, Ryan Kwanten, Jordan Alexander, and Kristin Bauer van Straten. “Rise”, a throughline in the story, is performed by Jordan Alexander (“Elsie”) in the first episode.

For Mosshart, releasing music under her name is a new experience but an entirely thrilling one. It makes sense: she's been compiling a bank of unreleased music for more than a decade now. Back in 2013, Mosshart first wrote the initial sketch of “Rise,” which finds the singer intoning, “When the sky is falling/ and the sun is black/when the sky is coming down on ya/baby don’t look back/we will rise.” Recalls Mosshart: “I didn’t ever forget it. I remember right where I was when I wrote it, sitting at my desk in London, missing someone badly.”

For a multi-disciplinary artist like Mosshart—whose paintings have been shown in galleries across the world, and who recently published her first book, CAR MA, a collection of her art, photography and writing that doubles as a love letter to automobiles—working on a variety of projects, now including her own music, is exactly how she likes it. Currently, she is working with Jamie Hince on the next Kills record and dreams of the day in the hopefully not so distant future, (pandemic-willing) when they’ll be back on the road with exciting new music to share.