Guided By Voices: by Wm. Ferguson
Kristin Hersh isn't exactly comfortable among the ranks of female troubadours. She considers the image: the singer for Throwing Muses, alone onstage with an acoustic guitar. Throwing Muses...*unplugged*.
"Yuck!" she says, grimacing. "I always thought there was something wrong with people who play acoustic music, 'cause they all wear biker jackets and act like they *would* be in a band if they *wanted* to. They're so defensive. They don't use the muscularness in an acoustic guitar, 'cause it's just bangin' on a box!" She thumps her hand against her hip. "That's great!"
_Hips and Makers_ is Hersh's first solo attempt since starting Throwing Muses at 14. And though the only instruments on the record are Hersh's voice, a guitar, some cello, and a piano, it's just as sinewy as anything the Muses ever did. The first single, "Your Ghost," a duet in waltztime with Michael Stipe, is appropriately haunting. "The Letter," a stream of subconsciousness rant, is as harrowing as an acoustic guitar and a voice can get. Without the Muses' angular din, Hersh's songs take on a spooky quality. It's like the difference between someone hollering in the middle of an intersection and a figure sidling up to you and whispering, "Do you think I'm crazy?" Which, for a time, Hersh says she was. "I was told by doctors, 'Well, you're schizophrenic, so you're just going to get more and more crazy until you're dangerous.'"
"When songwriting hit me, a spring uncoiled in my head," she explains matter of factly. "The songs started pushing me around. I started hallucinating. A voice would tell me to turn off the headlights and drive to another city. Songs do that to your body if they're stuck in you."
Though the Muses "spent ten years trying to keep it a secret that I wasn't always, um, seeing very clearly," Hersh's episodes somehow never affected the band. But after the tour for _The Real Ramona_ during which she was pregnant with her second child Tanya Donelly, Hersh's stepsister, left the band to form Belly. Hersh was ready to abandon guitar and channel her energy into being a housewife (her word). "I tried to quit," she says, "but the songs didn't give a shit. And they kept coming."
The result was a whole new batch, some for Throwing Muses (whose LP was finished on Christmas day) and some that didn't fit anywhere. These waifs make up _Hips and Makers_. And her health? "It's not a messy bad thing...it was at one time."
"I just try to give the songs a voice. I can't shut the door. I try to shut it and I end up in the hospital. It's really freaky, but so is everything else. It's like having babies. How do you have babies? *That's* crazy."
Back to Interviews