In the Studio with Gossip Girl’s Leighton Meester
EW recently caught up with Gossip Girl star Leighton Meester in the recording studio, where she’s working on her still-unnamed debut album, due this fall (her first single is slated for July). The actress, who’s best known for her bitchy-one liners as Blair Waldorf, says the album will have an electro-pop sound, and she’s working with producers like Kenna (Lupe Fiasco, JoJo) and Polow da Don (The Pussycat Dolls, Fergie). “It’s very pop,” she says. “You can listen to it on the radio. You can listen to it in your car. You can dance to it.”
Meester offered us an exclusive listen to three of the album’s potential tracks. “Push and Pull” is an elegant anthem about making a relationship work; she says the song “takes my breath away.” On “Almost Perfect,” she takes a break from electro-pop for a stripped-down ballad lamenting a lover’s lies. The song ends with Meester bluntly spitting, “F— you.” “That was what we call an adlib,” she says. Then there’s the pulsing “Lights Out,” produced by J.R. Rotem (Britney Spears), which has her singing very un-CW things like, “Don’t turn the lights out/I bet you like to watch.” Meester plays coy when it comes to the subject matter. “Who knows what I’m talking about? Everything is kinda in metaphors.” Maybe, we ask, she simply wants someone to spoon with? “Or fork.” Even so, “there is somewhat of a sexual undertone to a lot of songs,” she says. “I’m a grown woman [laughs].”
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