The Kills' Alison Mosshart Is Juggling More Creative Projects Than Maybe Anyone

For Alison Mosshart, life is one gigantic canvas. "I just don't think anything should ever be restrictive," says the rock singer, who fronts both The Kills and The Dead Weather and last year made her solo debut as a painter, showcasing at Joseph Gross Gallery in New York's Chelsea neighborhood. For the 37-year-old, who spoke to ELLE.com while in the midst of a whirlwind tour with Kills' bandmate Jamie Hince to promote the blues-rock duo's latest album, Ash & Ice, constricting her creativity to one specific artistic discipline is often her biggest challenge. "I'm always doing 10 things at the same time," Mosshart, who has collaborated with French brand Surface to Air and served as a model for the brand Equipment, says with a laugh. "I think that's what keeps it all fresh."

At the moment, Mosshart is knee-deep in all things Kills. The band's latest album, highlighted by the low-end stomping "Siberian Nights" and hip-hop inflected "Heart of a Dog," began in earnest, she explains, when both she and Hince were miles apart: Mosshart at her home in Nashville and Hince in London, home with his wife, Kate Moss. "We bring each other songs like little presents," she says of the duo's writing method, noting that each member writes approximately half of every Kills album. "I send him all the things I've written and he sends me the things he's writing and that's how we really start a record. You start cherry picking the ones you feel are different and exciting to both of us. Then when we get together and we're about to spend money to be in a studio we'll have a bunch of material and start working on each other's songs with each other. And however long that takes until it's done."

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With Hince writing material that Mosshart belts out onstage with fiery aggression, is it difficult then to inhabit a role not of her own creation? Hardly. "I have no problem playing different roles or singing from a man's perspective or even a psychopath's perspective," Mosshart says. "It doesn't matter to me. It's fantastic. It's not boring. I love it. For some reason, putting my voice to a song and the way I deliver it I make it mine. I am speaking for myself. Suddenly it just changes. It's that easy."

Stepping into different roles is nothing new for the Florida native: Mosshart spends a great deal of her time as the lone female in the hard-charging rock outfit The Dead Weather, alongside Jack White. That project, she says, scratches a different creative itch. "The Dead Weather write together in the same room at the same time very fast. It's stream-of-conscious wild-style crazy music. I kind of live for that. It's really brilliant."

As for her recent foray into the professional world of painting, Mosshart says it was more a natural evolution than anything. For years, in between soundcheck and showtime with her various bands, the long-haired singer could be seen wielding a paintbrush backstage, working on a new creation. "The difference now is that people know about it," she says of her paintings, each one as wild as the singer's notoriously shriekish wail.

Yes, even for someone who regularly performs in front of raucous crowds, Mosshart says she's a bit shy, a feeling that manifested itself at her gallery show last year. "I kept looking for a backstage," she says. "I was trapped in a room with a zillion people. It was completely nerve-wracking for me. Despite what people think since I'm a singer onstage, I'm not exactly attention-seeking in that way. I have not mastered that yet. I love that line across the stage."

Where Mosshart's creative muse takes her following the current Kills' tour next remains up in the air. That's exactly how she likes it. "Right now the creative stuff is happening in my head and in my notebooks and in backstage paintings," she says. "We'll see where all of that goes."