On a new podcast episode, Taylor Momsen said the deaths of Soundgarden’s Chris Cornell and her friend and producer Kato Khandwala plunged her into a period of deep depression.
In a wide-ranging interview with Alex Cooper on the latest episode of Call Her Daddy, Taylor Momsen of The Pretty Reckless touched on a wide range of topics. Her early role as Cindy Lou Who opposite Jim Carrey in How the Grinch Stole Christmas gets a look-in, as does her time on Gossip Girl. But we get into darker territory when she talks about how the death of her longtime idol, Chris Cornell of Soundgarden, quickly followed by the death of producer and friend, Kato Khandwala, plunged her into depression.
“That was the nail in the coffin for me,” Momsen reflects during the episode. “It was a giant one-two punch because they were not that far apart from each other. I just went off the rails, I didn’t handle that well. I got very heavy into substance abuse and this cloud of depression that I couldn’t shake.”
Momsen and the Pretty Reckless were supporting Soundgarden on tour when Cornell died by suicide on May 18, 2017 in Detroit, Michigan, while the prodigiously talented Khandwala, known for his work with Blondie and My Chemical Romance, was killed in a motorcycle accident less than a year later on April 25, 2018.
Elaborating on her experiences around Cornell’s death, Momsen said, “It was the last night of tour and we played the last show in Detroit, and we all said bye, let’s do this again sometime, see you on the road. We all got on our tour buses, went to bed. And I was woken up the next morning really early because the news had been passed around the camp.
“Learning the news that someone I just spoke to, and hugged, and talked to a couple hours ago is no longer here, I couldn’t process it at first. Like, I was confused. I was going, ‘What are you saying to me right now?’ And that turned into sinking in, which turned into the biggest pit in my stomach of devastation and just the worst feeling in the world. I mean, I fell the fuck apart. I fell on the ground. And that was kind of the start of what we can call my dark period.”
You can check out the entire episode here:
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