A Muse Alone
Kristin Hersh is a rocker, mom and channeler

Excerpted from The Boston Phoenix, January 28, 1994
Written by Stephanie Zacharek





The songs Kristin Hersh has recorded over the years with Throwing Muses, and those that appear on her new solo debut, "Hips and Makers," tend to be beautiful in a dreamy, feverish, twisted-root kind of way. It follows that the woman who's written so many strange and intense songs should come off as a spacy, self-important artiste -- sort of a theater major of the songwriting world -- sans leg-warmers. She should talk the way Tori Amos looks, all tortured and artsy and stuff.

But in a casual phone conversation (like the one she and I had, with Hersh speaking from her snowbound home in Newport), she's nowhere near as strange and intense as her songs. She's really just folks. The mother of two young boys, Hersh, 27, has no compunction about using the word "housewife" to describe the kind of work she does when she's not on the road (though she admits it's "safer" for her to use the word because she also has a career that takes her out of her home). She tells me about the Weimeraner pup the family recently adopted, and about how she's spent the past two nights sleeping in the bunk with her younger son, who's been having nightmares. "I have this permanent crick in my neck from trying to fit in a little baby's bunk bed," she says, laughing.

She's not at all pretentious, even when she's explaining how she doesn't make up songs in her head but just feels them with her in the room. She's willing to laugh a little at her channeling tunesmith abilities. In fact, she laughs a lot -- and it's a great laugh, sort of a broad's laugh that's low and hearty and unfettered. It makes her seem more normal than her fever-dream songs would have you believe.

The all-acoustic "Hips and Makers" may not be the stuff of cornfields in Middle America, but it does have a stripped-bare, organic feel. Hersh says she was wary of doing an all-acoustic album until husband and manager Billy O'Connell talked her into it. "I love acoustic instruments, because they're as close as you can get to a voice. They're very muscular." But she wasn't sure that when it came to touring she could stand on a stage alone and command the attention of a whole room full of people. "I thought, maybe for encores, you know, 10 minutes at a time. But an hour and a half? I just didn't think I had the ego, or even the talent! And then you put all the big loud splashy colors on top of it. And Billy said, 'You like those big loud splashy colors, but they obscure the drawing for other people.' So [with "Hips and Makers"] there is an element of 'Hey, she can draw!'"

If Throwing Muses' recordings weren't proof of that, "Hips and Makers" should be. Hersh's voice sounds more relaxed and less overwrought than it does on some of the Muses' material. It's at once tough and girlish, and she knows how to put an angry buzz around it. Hersh plays guitar throughout, shaping the spare, loosely woven melodies with great care; and cellist Jane Scarpantoni threads her way through some of the songs, a lustrous, melancholy grounding wire. Overall "Hips and Makers" -- superbly produced by Lenny Kaye -- has a beautifully bare, open sound.

All that makes "Hips and Makers" one of those rare acoustic CDs that's not afraid to bare its teeth. "My record is very gentle and very nice. It gets scary and it gets loud, but it's much quieter than I've ever been. And it's very spacious. I had to learn to appreciate the space you leave and how that figures in the texture and even the time signatures."

"Hips and Makers" also made Hersh think about her voice differently. "I was really taken aback by how important the texture of the vocals became and how my own tone was. I had done a handful of acoustic songs, and I had done acoustic tours, but I never had to build a sound picture that carefully."

"And singing is very hard for me. If it doesn't fly out, it's work. I just can't believe there's an instrument that depends on emotion, of all things, and what time of day it is, and what you had to drink that day, and what happened to you. Your throat can't be tight. At the same time, I can't sound like I have a really good voice because I have to sound like a real person in the songs. So I don't want it to be overly pure. It wouldn't respond to the songs right, and it would sound like 'Singing,' capital S. With a guitar, it's so easy. You just tune it, and it's in tune. With a voice you just don't know what it's going to do. I'd have to start songs over and over."

But if singing is mysterious to Hersh, that's nothing compared to the way she feels about songwriting. She claims that since she was a teenager, songs have just presented themselves to her. She doesn't go out of her way to write them, and she's not sure where they come from. As screwy as that sounds, it's not hard to believe her when she explains it.

"I don't try to write songs. I may have at one time, but all that did was open this door that I've never been able to shut again. That process is entirely different from the craft of songwriting that I tried to learn a million years ago. All it feels like now is listening. I know when there's a song in the room, because my hair stands on end, I feel like there's electricity running up and down my arms, and I get feverish, and I can't sit still. And I still am so stupid about it that I never know what's wrong. I never think, 'Ooh, time to write a song, because I'm an ARTIST!' I think, "I'll never drink Vodka again!' But it usually hits at an inconvenient time, or when I should be sleeping, or when it's gonna make me look weird to have that going on. And two hours later, I've heard the song, okay, it's done. And then my work starts."

There are plenty of other things Hersh is hard-pressed to explain, like success, or lack thereof. "Hips and Makers" was a side project, recorded just before she went to New Orleans to cut a new Throwing Muses album. Throwing Muses' last recording, 1992's "Red Heaven" did well in Europe but stiffed in America.

"I do get angry. I've been working for about 10 years, and I feel like I'm in the best band in the world -- my favorite band, anyway. And I adore music, and it just breaks my heart to hear what they play on the radio and to see what they put on MTV and call music. It's frustrating to me because I do adore music so much. MTV is like televangelism, and no one will admit it. It's just hairdos asking for money in the name of music."

Even if Hersh is a little hard on the hairdos, it's easy to understand why they frustrate her. Her music isn't at all about her physical image. She confesses she's always been a lousy dresser. And sometimes she comes off seeming stranger than she really is. In conversation with her, it's easy enough to see that her musical strangeness does collide a little with her -- well, her overall momness.

"We just got the video for 'Your Ghost' back, and it's beautiful. It's a hard song because it's about people dying on you, like they always do. But the hardest deaths make you realize how many ghosts there are around. They're right there for you. I was worried that the obsessive qualities of the song would be brought out in the video, instead of the sweet qualities."

"There was a knife in the video treatment; and me scrubbing stains out of a garment, Lady Macbeth-style, and I just said, 'No craziness!' A few things got in -- like the scrubbing of the garment, which just looks like housework. There's a tea party -- just me by myself in a field! And it does all look kind of crazy, but in a nice way. Like, that's my house -- 'Come in!' -- which is so funny. It's really sweet."

"Warner Bros. got the video and Billy was talking to some guy there who liked everything. He said, Michael Stipe is great and the house is great, and the jump cuts, blah, blah, blah. He talked about everything except me. And Billy said, 'How was Kristin? Is she okay? Does she look alright?' And the guy goes, 'Yeah ... I mean, you know ... I don't want you to take this the wrong way.' And Billy goes, 'What? What's wrong?' He said, 'Well, she looks like a ... a lunatic!'"

Hersh has to laugh. "A lunatic! And meanwhile, I was trying so hard! I thought this was my fucking country-music video! I had a little Victoria's Secret busty thing on, and I've got my acoustic guitar, and I'm so gentle, and I'm trying not to look crazy. And he says, 'No, it's cool. She looks crazy, but we think we can sell that!' It's just amazing what looks crazy to them. Not blinking? Is that it?"

But even if Hersh is a little incredulous that some record company guy would think of her as looking crazy, she's not mean-spirited about it. She's been in the game long enough to know that showing yourself off -- whoever or however you are -- is part of what you do to sell albums. She also knows that if you've turned out a recording most people seem to like, you milk it for what it's worth.

"I'll tour till my ass falls off, I guess. And then they'll release the Muses record. But right now, everybody likes this one. I did something people actually like. So far, my only reward for making a record is to do hundreds and hundreds of photo shoots. I just have phantom false eyelashes all the time, I'm wearing this mask of makeup. Someone sent me this thing I did for Interview magazine. Right by my head, there's some little arty thing about ghosts writing music, and down below, "Clothes by Calvin Klein'! It was so great! So that's my life now."




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