Spotlight : On the Road with Karen Elson

It is the story of a Greater Manchester girl who have been striken by the demon of blues. It sounds like a tale, whose heroine would be an evanescent redhead; this heroine's name is Karen Elson.

You cannot miss this 5'9'' red-haired 31 years old beauty : she is the incarnation of class. Discovered at 15 by a model agency, she did her first shot for Vogue at 18 and from then, she had a successful career. One of the most attractive models of the world, she worked with the major fashion photographers, walked the runways and did several campaigns for the most prestigious designers of the planet.
She even replaced Angelina Jolie as the face of St John and did a serie of gorgeous shots for the brand, epic and magisterical, even if the Photoshoped pictures didn't do justice to her freshness and her porcelain skin. This same skin she shows entirely for the ads of YSL's perfume, Opium.
A true fairytale, you'd think ? Not for Karen Elson. For her, Fashion is not everything.
The life of the 1998 Model of the Year and the 2005 British Fashion Awards' Best Model really changed the day she met Jack White, the leader of the rock band The White Stripes. It was not only love at first sight, it was also a whole new world that opened for the model.


The young lady was already an accomplished singer, who covered Marlene Dietrich with her cabaret troupe The Citizens Band in the clubs of New York. But with Jack, she discovered the wild South, with its torrid landscapes and its mysterious floklore, which have inspired the rock'n'roll, the blues and the country. Karen mixed all of these new roots in her debut album, The Ghost Who Walks. She carries us away, in a trip to Nashville, very far from the podiums.
Each of her songs is a story, melancolic and feverish, narrated through her warm, deep, truly bewitching voice, ideally emphasized by an hypnotic guitar.
In the course of her album, innocence mingles with darkness in a desert road where only coyotes venture, under the moonlight of a Tennessee's night. It is a fantasy, of course, mostly inspired by the superb cover of the album.
It is, surprisingly for a first one, a very good album, slow yet intense, with great lyrics and melodies. An excellent musical find for your summer. The listening of The Ghost Who Walks will definitely proves you that a model is more than a pretty face and a slim body. Beauty is in the inside, and Karen proves it, revealing a genuine talent.
Let's hope that the music industry will stop focusing on easy tunes and give a real chance to this artist. The story doesn't say if the fairy Karen would stop modeling, but what is most likely is that she will live happy in her Nashville home and will compose many songs ...

http://models.com/models/Karen-Elson
http://www.karenelson.com/
http://www.myspace.com/karenelsonmusic