Throwing Muses' Hersh Lets the Songs Call the Tune: by Tim Popson
According to Throwing Muses vocalist/guitarist Kristin Hersh, the trip was made partly because the album's producer, Dennis herring, is an L.A. resident with his own home studio. During their visits, the band took up residence in an apartment complex used by entertainers engaged in temporary projects - actors doing voice-over work or musicians making an album.
"The complex was full of heavy-metal bands and actors," recalls Hersh. "It was L.A. to the nth degree, with a pool and hot tub, so we really did bury ourselves in Lala Land. It was funny for the first few weeks, but then it became kinda numbing, like living on TV. It seems really comfortable at first, but then you're thinking, 'There's something sneaky here that's more sickening than comfortable.'"
Working outside familiar surroundings, however, turned out to be beneficial, says Hersh.
"It helped that it really was like recording an album on a different planet because you didn't have to get back to daily life ever," she says. "You just live and breathe the album for three of four months. That was the way it was for me and 'Tea' [Muses vocalist/guitarist Tanya Donelly], anyway. The boys [drummer David Narcizo and bassist Fred Abong] played for about two weeks in the studio, then they didn't have anything to do until the mix. So dangerous things happened to them. They'd sleep until 3 in the afternoon, then watch TV and go out at night...and kind of suffered for it."
Rather than record a clean, flat sound for "Ramona" and then have the engineer manipulate it, says Hersh, the band decided to play "live" as much as possible in big rooms that were miked "everywhere" - "so we got every nuance of the real sound and didn't have to screw around with it from the board."
The album that resulted is Throwing Muses' fourth American release. Signed to the British independent label 4AD in 1986, the band had an album, "Throwing Muses," and an EP, "Chains Changed," released in Britain before the Muses signed to Sire in the States. In America, the band has released "The Fat Skier" (1987), "House Tornado" (1988), "Hunkpapa" (1989) and now "The Real Ramona" on Sire.
The latest album - including the current single "Counting Backwards," which recently reached No. 11 on Billboard's Modern Rock chart - indeed has an immediacy about it. While still in a left-of-center "alternative" vein, the playing seems a little more direct than that on earlier Muses releases - the band's sound taking on a muscular quality shaped in part by strong, forceful rhythms that include some Bo Diddley, shave-and-a-haircut moments on a song titled "Golden Thing."
Hersh, the band's main songwriter, doesn't see "Ramona" as a sign that the Muses - who early on acquired an "art band" tag - are shifting from the intellectual to the emotional, however. Given her somewhat unorthodox approach to songwriting, she undoubtedly would balk at calling any of the Muses' music "intellectual." Hersh maintains that she tries not to control the process of songwriting - tries to keep her mind out of it - and instead attempts to let an outside music "entity" express itself through her.
"I always heard [our music] as very visceral because my job was to keep my mind out of it," says Hersh. "I didn't really want to have any control over what the songs were doing or saying. I'm getting better at staying out of it. I used to not be able to tell the difference between my own songs and the song's ideas, what the song was asking for.
"These songs [on 'Ramona'] asked to be produced in a more muscular, solid, even 'hooky' fashion. 'House Tornado,' on the other hand, was a very dense, very enmeshed, complex album. The production there is small, and it sounds like the band is playing somewhere in the corner of a gym. But 'Ramona' happens around you. You're right in the middle of the gym. Because that's the way the songs asked to be treated."
Affable and good-natured in conversation, Hersh is aware that it might sound a little strange to talk about songs as outside presences that find form in this world through her. But when asked, she will obligingly elaborate.
"It's like these songs are entities," says Hersh, who was a philosophy student in college. "It's hard to find a way of saying this without sounding 'groovy' about it. But it seems like they're ghosts and they want bodies.
"My craft is songwriting, so I give them song bodies. They seem to just happen regardless of my life, my opinions, my personality - hopefully. I hope I don't stick myself in it too much. I used to feel when I was younger that they pushed my life around and made things happen in it so I could write about it. And then I thought: 'This is really crazy. I can't live this way.' But it's become a purer process and has less to do with my life.
"I don't really mean to write," adds Hersh. "I don't try to do it. But I know when there's something to be written. It used to feel like somebody grabbing my ears and kicking me in the back of the head. Now I know I don't have to let it get to that point. I just write a song, and they don't kick me anymore." Hersh laughs, then pauses for a moment. "If I sat down and tried to write, it would probably come out goofy. It would probably rhyme and have some moral."
Not that Hersh doesn't make conscious decisions involving her music - listening to a playback of something recorded in the studio, for example, and saying, "No, I don't like that, let's try it this way."
"Once the song is written, the rest of it is all craft, writing everyone else's parts, doing the production," says Hersh. "I guess most of that is craft. The next time the inspiration comes back is when you play it live."
Hersh's personal life has been a bit rough in recent times, the singer/guitarist having separated last year from a longtime companion who was the father of their 4-year-old son, Dylan. Court proceedings, says Hersh, placed the child in joint custody, although the father has "physical placement."
Now married to Muses co-manager Billy O'Connell, Hersh is expecting another child. The band's current tour - which beings Throwing Muses to Cabaret Metro Friday - wraps up in June, and the baby is due in August, says Hersh. (Touring hasn't been all that tough this time around, she adds. "It's my shape that's the hardest thing," she says. "I've been playing an Ovation acoustic [guitar], which has a round back, and I have a round front.")
While Hersh might try to keep her own mind and ideas out of the songwriting process, she says some of the turmoil in her life seems to have infiltrated "The Real Ramona," notably on a pensive instrumental, "Dylan," titled for her son.
"It seems to be the most literal song," says Hersh. "It seems to be just a photograph of him, and the photograph is a very sad one. I think it's beautiful, but it's sadder than a 4-year-old should be. So it's definitely touched by me. It's Dylan's song body but through my eyes, and I usually don't write that way."
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