“CAR MA is a love letter to the motorcar, a book about rock & roll and love." — Rolling Stone

CAR MA is artist and musician Alison Mosshart’s first printed collection of paintings, photographs, short stories, and poetry. It is a book about cars, rock n’ roll, and love. It’s a book about America, performance, and life on the road. It’s a book about fender bender portraiture, story tellin’ tire tracks, and the never-ending search for the spirit under the hood. Mosshart imagines the auto body shop like some other Coney Island. And America’s highways- the last great roller coasters. Shows us that the engine on fire is connected to the guitar feeding back since birth. And the sensation of walking on stage and facing an audience is like the laugh before the scream in a car without brakes. Mosshart ruminates that automobiles- with their doors and mirrors and windows, engines and wheels and radios- portray us. Mirror our need to be in or to exit, our inward reflections and outward visions, our lifetimes of tinkering with the mysterious heart. That which runs until it doesn’t. Throughout history the car has been a symbol of freedom and hopeful adventure. It stands to reason it is also a symbol of our subsequent spinning out … over things we never thought could happen during a song that fucking good and with the volume up that fucking loud.

“Part road diary, part automobile love song, part personal history, CAR MA dives deep into the soul of the American drive." - Interview Magazine

Author:

Alison Mosshart

Alison Mosshart is best known for her work in her musical duo The Kills, as well as fronting the Grammy nominated rock n’ roll band, The Dead Weather. Mosshart is also a visual artist, working in paints, multi-media and photography. She studied art for two years at the University of Florida, following a brief unrecorded spell at the University of Honolulu learning print making in the middle of the night. She is for the most part self taught. She has had 5 major solo exhibitions: “Fire Power” at the Joseph Gross Gallery in NYC, 2015, “Fire Power Los Angeles” at Maxfield in Los Angeles, 2017, “Tonight Only” in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, 2016, “Side Effects” at Panteon in Mexico City, 2018, and “Los Trachas” at FF-1051 Gallery in Los Angeles, 2018.

Alison Mosshart

Car Ma (Standard Edition)