Now, after a crop of albums and the departures of Leslie Langston and Tanya Donelly, they've contracted to a two-piece. Now Throwing Muses 'are' David Narcizo and Kristin Hersh.
Entitled 'Red Heaven', the new album is a fierce return to the shattered melodic logic of their debut. Kristin sounds like a wild animal trapped in a New York apartment block. The music is dense and dark and rewarding (the guest appearance of king depressive Bob Mould would seem to compound this) and the negative of their last LP, the awesome 'The Real Ramona'.
Thankfully the fact that the album sounds as fucked up as their debut is not reflected in Kristin's current demeanour. Sitting in the sunlight in a room above the 4AD office, she's funny and talkative and OK. She laughs a lot. This is not an interview about a bad year or about the split or about managers and ex-husbands pulling up stakes and sticking them in her back. Things are going a lot better. This is not a scary Kristin Hersh interview.
Which of the senses could you live without?
"Hearing. Ha! No, no, maybe sight. I don't know if I'd mind that so much. I would choose not to lose any of my senses. But I met this girl that fell off a truck and lost her sense of smell and she didn't care. I was so horrified. Like, You can't smell *anything* and you don't *care* -- I don't want to run it in but... and she's like, No, it doesn't really bother me, nobody can tell, I didn't lose my hand or anything. But never smell anything again? If I couldn't smell my son I'd go crazy.
"Smell is connected to a really base part of your brain, connected to the limbic system or something. That's why smells are so evocative, they can bring back a memory in, like, a second and you don't know where you are. Anyway, men are more dependent on sight than women. You can tell, women don't seem to use their regular senses the way they're supposed to. They've got all these other senses working... so I could give up my eyes. No problem."
Is honesty overrated?
"Ah, no, it's incredibly important. That's why I hate everybody, cos they're all fuckin' liars. You can be honest just to hurt people, yeah, but that's not honesty. That's like self-involvement, you can chatter away for hours and not be honest if you don't have anything to say."
Are women agents from outer space?
"Yeah, ha, ha... I mean, I was talking to the press yesterday, this journalist, and he was talking about how women aren't considered people. I was goin', Yeah, dammit, we're people too. But, I dunno, women are definitely women. I have some more thinking to do on that subject.
"I have a problem of never having been incompatible with men, all my friends have been men, I really like men. They seem really honest. It's not necessarily a bad thing, but women have all these layers you have to get through before they are very congruent. [Check: the inside corresponds to the outside.] And that's off-putting to me, nerve-racking. You never know when what they're saying is true. They're fascinating and are very complex that way but... you know, if you're drunk or something you don't know what to expect from them."
Are Throwing Muses songs ugly?
"I think our songs are ugly, yeah. But I don't think ugly is... ugly. I think a lot of people thing they're harsh but they're not, they're simply... I love ugliness but I never do it on purpose. I never thought of the ugly kid in the playground as ugly -- I just think he has more shapes. Ha, ha. True ugliness should be a little more embarrassing, which makes it kinda more naked to most people which is... not a bad thing."
Is Bob Mould a tortured man?
"Isn't his voice wild? I can't tell sometimes whether it's me or him singin'. I mixed the damn thing and I was goin', What the fuck is he doin'? He goes (high pitched wheeeee noise) in a few places. Sometimes you can hear that it's a falsetto, squeaky guy thing and sometimes it really sounds like me. Really cool.
"It's so amazing, it sounds really like *nature* to me. He just came in and turned it on. I was a little let down, like, Oh, it just *happens*? I think maybe he is tortured for that reason -- cos he can just turn it on. He's great though -- he's got this grace and awkwardness and perfect balance. I never let anybody into anything. Bob seemed different. He's got something that keeps him from lying. Maybe if he lied a little more, he could twist a song round or something, make it bigger, but he never lies and that's great."
How are things?
"Almost every bad thing that happened just got cleared away for something cleaner. I had some terrible things done to me but at the same time really good things have happened. It's a terrible life for a manic depressive, up and down, up and down. But I got married -- I never expected to do that -- and I had a baby. The people that did lousy things to me are the ones who are going to have to live with it. I lived with it for a long time and we won't have much money for a long time but I'm not gonna complain. But then I'm back home doing laundry thinking, I bet Jimmy Mascis doesn't have to do laundry today, I bet Charles doesn't have to do laundry today."
Sometimes it's hard to be a woman. Discuss.
"It's really hard to be a lady for a lot of good reasons and a lot of bad reasons. There's the biological thing -- it's hard to live your life in one of these bodies, it's just work. Men are the same every day, but women are different *every*single*fucking*day*. They change day to day, week to week, month to month, year to year. In the past year or so I've gained and lost 40 pounds, had a giant belly out to here, another person living inside me -- and then you make *milk* for a while. What the hell is *that*?
"And the bad part is these women who fill their heads with so much make-up and fashion and hair knowledge -- they know a lot about it, experts in the field. And there isn't much room left. That doesn't let them off the hook for me. They're idiots if they say, Well, here I am in this position. I can get raped but I know a lot about hair care."
Do you think about revenge?
"There's about four people I could hit over the head. I never used to feel the need for revenge. I was too busy hating myself. But now I've got over that. Ha, ha, ha..."
How important are words?
"Words are visceral. And I don't know if the way we usually arrange them is very powerful. Crazy people tend to be a little more powerful with their words than we are. We inject disclaimers into everything we say, surround the words we want with words that don't mean very much. But if you just shout a bunch of words at someone -- I'm justifying my songs here I guess -- and put somebody through something by making them react, it's better than saying, Well, this happened to me and I feel this way about it and you should care."
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