The Dead Weather's Mosshart Goes Acoustic With The Kills

Need to give your iPod a break after listening to the Dead Weather's Horehound on repeat since its release Tuesday? Check out these exclusive acoustic performances by Alison Mosshart's main project, the Kills. Rolling Stone recently caught up the Kills' Mosshart and Jamie Hince in their hotel room in downtown NYC, with the pair performing intimate acoustic versions of their 2003 hit "Kissy Kissy" (above) and Willie Nelson's "Crazy" (below).

Even though the band is six years removed from their debut album Keep On Your Mean Side, Mosshart and Hince both unanimously agree it's still their favorite material to play live. "We play so many things from that record live. 'Kissy Kissy' every night," Mosshart says. "We tend to play more songs from Keep on Your Mean Side than we do on [2005's] No Wow which is funny I think because we toured for No Wow so long we just were like, 'OK, no more.' Those songs were so important to us when we wrote them. It's like that first thing. You're so close to those things so I still love to play them."

After spending the summer fronting the Dead Weather, Mosshart says she'll be eager to get back to working on the next Kills LP. "This summer off and on I'm doing Dead Weather and then coming back we're going to write and write just every moment we can," Mosshart says, with Hince adding, "And record a record this year."

The band say they've already begun working on new material, but won't fully know what it'll sound like until the employ their drum machine. "We'll piece together things on an acoustic guitar, but as you know, that's never how they end up. Soon as you get a drum machine involved, the whole feeling of it changes. It could be something like Big Black, or it could be something like Cabaret Voltaire," Hince tells RS. "That's what I love about drum machines. I think they're far more liberating to work with." As Mosshart can attest, however, having Jack White as your drummer isn't a bad thing either.

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Song Stories

“Piano Man”

Billy Joel | 1973

Billy Joel’s first hit, “Piano Man,” was – ironically – an autobiographical lament about how his first album wasn’t a hit. When Cold Spring Harbor didn’t take off, Joel briefly became a lounge pianist in Los Angeles, and this song, about that experience, expressed his frustrations and fears at the time: “And they sit at the bar and put bread in my jar/And say, ‘Man, what are you doing here?’” “It was all right,” Joel said later, about the gig. “I got free drinks and union scale, which was the first steady money I’d made in a long time.”

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