Video Premiere: Karen Elson's "Stolen Roses"

Karen Elson is making the move from the runway to the recording studio with her debut album The Ghost Who Walks, which was produced by her husband (some guy named Jack White) at their Third Man Studios in Nashville. The album isn't due out until this summer, but the LP's title track was released as a single last week through the Third Man store. "The Ghost Who Walks" will be backed by "Stolen Roses," and Rolling Stone is pleased to premiere a new clip of Elson performing an intimate acoustic take on the B Side here.

"This is a song from my album The Ghost Who Walks. I recorded this video version in Laurel Canyon in Los Angeles last month," Elson tells RS. "It's directed by Maximilla Lukacs and Sarah Sophie Flicker, two film makers who go by the name the Belles of the Black Diamond Field." Elson performed a pair of sets at this year's SXSW Festival and will take the stage tonight at New York's Le Poisson Rouge.

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Song Stories

“Smells Like Teen Spirit”

Nirvana | 1991

"Smells Like Teen Spirit," named after a brand of deodorant marketed to girls, was Kurt Cobain's attempt to "write the ultimate pop song," he said, using the soft-loud dynamic of his favorite band, the Pixies. Cobain "had that dichotomy of punk rage and alienation," the song’s producer, Butch Vig, told Rolling Stone, "but also this vulnerable pop sensibility. In 'Teen Spirit,' a lot of that vulnerability is in the tone of his voice." Sadly, by the time of Nirvana's last U.S. tour, in late '93, Cobain was tortured by the obligation to play "Teen Spirit" every night. "There are many other songs that I have written that are as good, if not better," he claimed.

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