In 1993, Hersh recorded Hips and Makers, her first solo album. Writing and performing an album's worth of songs on her Collings acoustic inspired her to expore alternate tunings, which in turn opened up a wealth of possibilities for new chords.
'So much rock music is based on chord progressions we've all heard a million time,' Hersh says between sips of coffee in the Detroit hotel suite where she's preparing for tonight's solo acoustic show. 'I've never had any interest in writing songs to chords I've heard a million times before. I honestly don't know how people do that.
'Before, I'd always thought that alternate tunings were for wimps," she laughs. 'I figured, if you create a chord, you should be able to play it, not fake it. But I must be getting older. With some of these songs, I'd probably need seven fingers to play them in standard tuning."
She picks up her Collings, re-tunes to DADGDE (low to high), and begins picking 'Velvet Days' from Hips and Makers. 'I tune the E down to a D and the B up to a D - which I don't recommend, because the string tends to snap,' she warns. 'That almost makes the tuning into an E seventh [ when fingering an open E chord ] - but your're actually shifting the root. What I was playing should have been an E major, but the tuning makes it into an E seventh, with a D in the bass. So there's always a D drone under what you could consider an E major - but you're really just fooling around in E major and adding sevenths. 'When you bring the chord all the way up to the 11th fret, the progression actually resolves. Because when you bring it up to the 11th fret, it's a D - and resolving it there makes it just off-balance enough to be a little dreamy.
'The perfect chord is versatile enough to be beautiful without necessarily having to be striking,' Hersh observes. 'But the perfect chord should also be a little confusing, so that you have to listen to it. Chords are like colors, and every time you change the root or the accent or the key underneath, they become a slightly different color.'
Explaining her affinity for edgy intervals, Hersh points out that 'dissonance has a very attractive ring for me. When the notes clash, it's like the sound of a bell. It doesn't sound mushy to me, whereas chords that seem to make more sense do sometimes sound mushy.'
'In truth, chords that other people might hear as dissonant, I don't hear as dissonant,' she confides. To demonstrate, she picks up the guitar, re-tunes to standard and plays the opening of 'Colder' from the Muses' House Tornado album, suggesting that 'it sounds a lot stranger than it really is. It's based on an A major, so at first I felt like I was selling out, like I was writing a jingle or something,' she confesses. 'But I replaced the C# with an Eb. I guess if you sat around strumming that all day, it would sound ugly to some people. But for me, it just rings against the E so well. Sitting under an A bass and resolving into a B gives it a sadness, or a bit of stress. And there's nothing better than a little stress for a second if it's going to resolve. It's like ocean waves instead of a straight line - not an unattractive way to write a song.'
Some of Hersh's chords look bizarre, at least to some onlookers. 'When I play live on the radio,' she says, 'the DJs get nauseous when they watch my fret hand. They think I'm double-jointed.' To illustrate, she plays 'Sundrops' from Hips and Makers, fingering the chord above the Collings' cutaway.
'I go up to the 18th fret, so I have to bend the top joint, and my wrist is all twisted up,' Hersh observes with a shrug. 'But to me, it feels good because it sounds great. Using an ascending half-step progression all the way up the neck makes it discordant sometimes - which a lot of guitarists avoid unless it sounds like 'art'. But I think folk music is necessarily discordant. That's where minor keys come from. But it's discordant without sounding sad. To me, it just sounds alive.'
Although Hersh tends to think of herself as a rhythm guitarist, she gleefully transcends the typical time-keeping role. The goal is to throw things off- kilter, to enrich the texture and to play with the listener's expectations - to create what she calls an 'anti-beat.'
'And I don't just mean playing on the off-beat,' she stresses. 'I like to play around the beat and let the song fall into different time signatures, or just speed up or slow down spontaneously. The rhythm guitar should confuse the issue. It would be really easy to just play along with the bass drums, but that sounds too glossy. And too boring.'
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