Karen Elson’s feet hurt. She’s on stage at New York City club Le Poisson Rouge scolding herself about the impracticality of the peach and black suede platform heels she’s wearing. The fabulous retro-style kicks were actually made in her honor by designer Tabitha Simmons. This detail comes to light because Elson banters about it to a front row patron, Vogue creative director Grace Coddington, who is just one of the fashion-world heavy hitters out tonight to see the beloved flame-haired British supermodel play songs from her debut album, The Ghost Who Walks. Elson seems something of an apparition herself. The shoe motif projects upward, continuing into a billowing vintage peach-colored ball gown, trimmed in black fringe, that seems to melt into her milky skin. A spray of feathers and tulle shoots from her saffron hair, and in her arms she cradles a 1917 Gibson Style O guitar. She lets her eyelids droop, tethers her mouth to the microphone, and sways gently side-to-side as she sings a ballad about the moon. Beautifully.

It’s certainly a gorgeous image, but it isn’t necessarily a comfortable maneuver—and not just because of the footwear choice. This performance marks Elson’s official coming out as a model-slash-musician, a balance that has been easy for no one, ever. Heretofore, she’s been known primarily as the uncommon beauty featured in ad campaigns for high-end fashion houses like Chanel, Prada and Yves Saint Laurent. To make matters worse, she happens to be the wife of one Jack White, who, as a member of the White Stripes, the Raconteurs and the Dead Weather, has produced some of the best-loved albums of our time. Considering all that, Elson is faced with a daunting task—legitimizing herself as a musician when it might appear that she’s a mere attention-seeker with undue advantages. A few days later, she explains her determination to become an artist in her own right, despite what the world might think up front. “The things that scare you the most are the things that you need to face straight on with every bit of your soul,” she says. “And I’m so painfully aware of the factors that might make people go, ‘Okay girl, what’ve we got here?’”

In fact, fear of the dreaded model-slash-rock-wife tag kept Elson’s songwriting efforts in the closet for a long time. Literally. Though she had performed many times as a singer with NYC cabaret troupe the Citizens Band, and even contributed vocals to tracks by Cat Power and Robert Plant, until recently, Elson had only written songs in the confines of her dressing room at the home she shares in Nashville with White and their two children, Scarlett, 4, and Henry Lee, 2. “The closet metaphor is hilarious, but it’s the truth,” she says. “For me to write a song, I would have to isolate myself in the most extreme set of circumstances—lock the bedroom door, lock the closet door, hide myself in a place where nobody could find me.” She pauses, chuckles, then adds. “But I forgot that Jack had the key!” It’s another corny analogy, but it’s also true. White not only had the physical proximity to overhear Elson’s efforts, he also had her undying respect. “He’s honestly one of bravest men I’ve ever met,” she says. “He helped me realize that there is something incredibly powerful about being terrified.”

White eventually convinced Elson that she should head to the studio (he has one of those) with a producer (he is one of those) and lay down some songs. They enlisted members of the Raconteurs and My Morning Jacket to realize the arrangements (White played drums) and, after a few weeks, The Ghost Who Walks was complete. The set ranges in style from dust-bowl folk songs (“Mouths to Feed”), to country-tinged tragedies (“Cruel Summer”) and Citizens Band-inspired cabaret numbers (“100 Years From Now”).

Despite its sprawl, the album has an overarching rootsiness, probably a function of Elson’s five years in Nashville, her home since her marriage to White, which happened famously in 2005 on a boat on a river in Brazil after the couple met on the set of the White Stripes’ “Blue Orchid” video. “Nashville is a wild place,” says Elson, who previously lived primarily in model-friendly metropolises like New York, Paris, Milan and Tokyo. “We have coyotes in the backyard, poisonous snakes, storks circling, vicious storms!” she says, explaining the abundance of nature metaphors in her lyrics. On “Stolen Roses,” a flower bed is a safe haven, on “The Birds They Circle,” vultures swoop over the scene of a bloody crime, and on “The Truth Is in the Dirt,” riches are worth nothing compared to the wisdom of the soil you stand on. Meanwhile, the title track is a classic Music City murder ballad, likening heartbreak to a knife-killing. “When you’ve been betrayed on many levels, for a long time you do walk around literally as a haunted individual,” says Elson. “It brings out all these ghostly feelings. Numbness, revenge.”

There is a certain darkness about The Ghost Who Walks, a focus on struggle and sorrow that makes you wonder what a gorgeous supermode/rock star’s wife would know about such things. “Oh, well, you can’t judge a book by its cover can you?” Elson asks. “Believe me, I’ve seen and felt an entire world of happiness and sadness in my thirty-one years,” she insists, noting her teenage years as particularly painful. As an ugly-duckling type growing up in small town England, she endured plenty of teasing for her looks, she says. In fact, the title of the album comes from a nickname she acquired for her pale complexion. “I actually liked it,” she says, “so it made its way into this song, this album, probably on an unconscious level.”

Knowing about the doubt and discomfort behind this release also raises the question, if you’re all cozy in your Tennessee home with your husband and children, and you continue to rock it in the fashion world, why put yourself under the scrutiny that the model-slash-singer tag brings? Elson has an answer for this one too. “I think I was a bit too comfortable,” she admits. “I needed to shake things up a bit. I’m slowly realizing that if you don’t challenge yourself in life, what’s the point? What am I here for?” There’s another good reason: Songwriting has been extremely therapeutic for Elson. “It’s now an essential part of the way I speak,” she explains. “That I can get all these things off my chest, it just made me breathe a big sigh of relief.” In a way, it doesn’t matter what the world thinks of Elson’s music. However frightening it was to come by, the payoff is already in her pocket.