Home Is Where The Hurt Is
Excerpted from New Musical Express, March 19, 1988
Written by Adrian Thrills. Photos by Steve Pyke
NME is published by IPC Magazines
The Throwing Muses and I are treading the wooden slats of the famous Coney Island boardwalk, the same sea-front that a quarter of a century ago inspired Lieber and Stoller to pen a few immortal lines of summer escape for The Drifters.
On a bitter and grey Saturday afternoon in February, however, there is no happy sound of a carousel, no hot dogs or french fries and the sand is so cold we wish our tired feet were weatherproof. The amusement park still rises boldly and starkly behind us, and this particular resort unveils a ghostly vista today, full of the empty echoes of former glories.
Singer Kristin Hersh, a rosy-cheeked chipmunk of a girl from Rhode Island, looks seven going on 70. She is in fact a 21-year old mother of a son called Dylan. She looks incongruous as she curls up on the back seat of the transit for the ride back into New York. Is this really the perfect lifestyle for a young mother?
"I love this," she says. " I cannot think of three other people I'd rather spend time with than the people in this band. These people are my best friends."
She is referring to Tanya Donelly -- who plays searing guitar lines below a mop of billowing blonde hair, and who used to work in a bakery and is Kristin's stepsister; to Leslie Langston -- a dreadlocked bass player they discovered in a corner store frying hamburgers; and to David Narcizo -- a drummer who drives both the band and the beat, the former with a scenic router's sense of direction and the latter with a relentless vigor and military precision that doubtless harks back to his days in a marching band in Rhode Island.
So how does someone equate this quartet of smiling, decidedly unpretentious people with the surreal, nightmarish visions and structural unorthodoxy of their music? The answer is that you don't. The two simply co-exist. Let's ask Kristin about her apparent love of danger instead.
"I find it hard to respect beauty that isn't at first dangerous. If something is too soft, its edges are fuzzy and I can't see it clearly. There is not bite or clarity to a safe image. Something dangerous gets your adrenalin going more.
"When there is a potential for pain or hurt or cold, you are more at home with yourself. The most comfortable places for me are where it is a little dangerous. You can't be cozy in the summertime. You can only be cozy when it is raining outside or when it is cold and wintry."
The title 'House Tornado' hints at a sense of foreboding and fear even in the sweetest hearth of security itself.
"Home is a savage place to be. There can be incredible dynamics and hardness and craziness in the home. You can die in an insane asylum, but you can also die at home. You can be crazy in both places. There's just as much viciousness in both places."
In an age where most pop music unashamedly promotes images of either gleaming health or shallow hedonism, Kristin Hersh is not afraid to explore deeper psychological, spiritual and emotional terrain. But the Muses music is not a direct exorcism or commentary on their individual situations. Again, the two simply co-exist.
"I wouldn't like people to think of the songs as me expressing my pain. The songs are not about things in my life. They might say something about my humanity, so that it has something to do with everybody. The music is bigger than we are as people. It's a problem when I start thinking about my own life in my songs. I don't think that's very correct. In some ways, the listener probably has a more honest attitude towards them than I do."
There has been a tendancy among writers to go out of their way to avoid impaling Throwing Muses on the stake of meaning. Once a song has been defined by an explanation, its resonance is automatically limited. Kristin, however, is also wary of the opposite extreme -- of being deliberately mystified in print. She might write graphically oblique lyrics, but she is no weirdo. And her least favorite descriptions of the Muses music are "quirky" and "cryptic."
"It's very scary that some people think of us as an art band or an intellectual band. Maybe I can sometimes seem sort of heady intellectual person. But I do try to be as apparent as I need to be. If a song is good enough, it is going to stand up by itself."
The irregular, angular music of the Muses, with its time and tempo changes, is a twisted, shifting backdrop for Kristin's words and the handful of songs in their live set penned by the talented Tanya. If they avoid anything, it is the debased cliches of standard rock lyricism. Their language is very much their own.
"It is too bad that a lot of the really simple words have been so misused that they have lost their meaning. A lot of the simple things are the most pure, the most perfect. The strange thing about a lot of pop songs is that they use totally abstract terminology. People sing about love all the time, but that word has been stripped of any real meaning. I find it has more meaning just pointing out a shoe or something!"
"I trust my dreams more than I trust my thoughts. Your dreams don't say things like soul or love, the date or the time. But I wouldn't push my thoughts on anyone. My one argument with a lot of bands is that they use their music as a vehicle for themselves rather than the other way around."
Have you ever written a straightforward pop song?
"I started writing very young, so it never occurred to me to write crafted pop songs. I was never schooled. After a while, I eventually taught myself to write pop songs. In fact, I've got hundreds of them, songs that The Bangles would die for! But I try and stay away from the straightforward writing process as much as possible."
Do you think commercial pressures and considerations might ever dictate that you do otherwise? After all, 'House Tornado' is going to be released by Sire in the States. Their demands on the band's ability to "shift units" are likely to be greater than those of 4AD in Britain.
"I'm certainly not going to start taking my steps backwards in my songwriting. I've spent years working towards the sort of feeling I get from our songs at the moment, the vividness and the spirit, the feeling of being a vehicle for this good thing. But I am also aware that we have to keep on working as a band.
"We have to find some way of reaching people. It is certainly hard for us to get on Top 40 radio, and I haven't found a solution to that yet. Maybe I need to make our language more accessible to new listeners, simplify it and create some sort of happy medium."
On 'House Tornado,' Throwing Muses are already making their music more accessible without losing any of its unique edge. The harsh modernity -- achjieved again with just the primary colors of guitar, bass, drums and a smattering of piano -- is not too rigid that other, more traditional formats are not admitted. Tanya's 'The River,' for example, is a traditionally dirty and down-home blues song.
"I don't think the newer songs are any simpler. But I think they are easier to follow. They ride a thicker line than the old ones. They are not all over the place. As for the songs that are more complex, they just tend to turn out that way. The various parts just seem to call for each other.
"We never sit down and decide we are going to have a fast part and then a slow part just to confuse people. They just call for each other. But if there is a really scary or solemn or jagged part of a song, there will still be warmth to the bass playing underneath. When we asked Leslie to join the group, we knew that our songs would really benefit from the more jazzy and reggae bottom that she would give them."
One of the keys to this particular muse is the undeniable sense of beauty that lies under a musical surface that can be harsh, frenetic and unorthodox. It is an alluring balance and one that gives Throwing Muses a place that is all their own. There is literally no other band like them on the planet.
It is no wonder that even they sometimes ask themselves if Throwing Muses are for real.
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