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Sidewalk
MSN.com
by Peter Terzian
As the leader of the late, great Throwing Muses, Kristin Hersh helped to shape today's alternative rock landscape. While the ladies of Lilith Fair may sell more albums, they wouldn't be anywhere if it hadn't been for the dark confessionals that Hersh consistently created with her now-defunct band and on subsequent solo efforts. Her latest release,
Sky Motel, is a dreamy look at marriage and motherhood that returns to the electric sound of Throwing Muses' classic recordings.
Sidewalk: You've mentioned that the process of writing Sky Motel was different from writing previous albums. How?
Kristin Hersh: I never actually wrote consciously; I used to hear songs. It sounded as if someone was playing a Throwing Muses record I'd never heard before in the next room, and if I didn't learn the songs and write down what I thought the words were, it would just play louder and louder until I couldn't hear other people talking. I didn't enjoy the process — it was freaky and everybody called me crazy because of it. When the band broke up, it just stopped, and I thought, well, what a relief! But I still had a recording contract, so after a year I thought I'd write for fun.
SW: This time around, you actually had to make up the songs yourself.
KH: I'm addicted to the guitar the way a runner's addicted to running. I never have any problem with the guitar. So I would just play and think, "That's a groovy riff, I wonder if I can think up some words." [Laughs] I had to admit, looking at them objectively, they weren't that different from the songs that I had just heard. I think I'm just being a little more aware of the process. I'm using more of my conscious brain, and yet it's still the same process. I'm just taking more responsibility for my actions.
SW: On Sky Motel, you played all your own instruments, and you went back to playing electric guitar. How did that feel?
KH: I really love the acoustic guitar. It's beautiful and it can carry bass, rhythm and lead at the same time. It's a lot more forceful than I initially gave it credit for, because people use it as this lame-ass backdrop for their endless words. They just do this plink-plink blah-blah-blah-blah-blah-blah, and I thought, I don't want that to happen to me. But I learned that the instrument is really versatile and powerful and can be delicate, and you don't have to ultimately lie about it by stepping on pedals and boosting the distortion or the volume. But I was always a little confused by playing alone and in folk clubs.
SW: Do you think you'll ever go back to making all-acoustic albums?
KH: Some songs will just come out wanting to sound that way. The Internet makes it possible for me to make a record and sell it to people who want to hear it, instead of fooling pre-teens into buying it by playing a dumb song for them and wearing an outfit they'd like to wear.
SW: You have a very active Web site, throwingmusic.com, where you host Q & A sessions with fans and offer rare MP3 recordings and mail-order-only albums. There aren't many other recording artists who go that extra mile.
KH: This is the kind of musician that I wanted to be. I wanted to be like a plumber. People would say, come over here and fix this mood. But I was just born without the ambition gene. You have to be really ambitious to make that kind of success happen. To want to play that game and actually do it. To be born with the show-off gene and to want it. I don't have any of that, and I don't understand what it should have to do with music.
SW: Your recent albums seem to be made up of quirky love songs.
KH: I always think, "I really sold out this time." There's this Tracey Ullman sketch where she's this Patti Smith English rocker chick. Her big hit is "I Slit My Wrist For You." She's dressed in black and acting all suicidal. And then she falls in love and gets married and has a baby and she tries to go back to work and her big single is "Duane is Cute." And she gets booed off the stage. I always think, that's me, I just get lamer and lamer every year.
SW: You and Billy, who's also your manager, seem to have a great relationship, balancing work and being together. How do you guys do it?
KH: We actually don't get along very well at all [laughs]. We're really different. We have a sick relationship, to tell you the truth. Addicted to each other, and we don't get along at all [laughs]. And yet, we can't be apart for more than a week at a time. Every time we try, he ends up flying to meet me because I'm losing it or he's losing it. It's weird. He's a New York Irish Italian Jew and I'm just this white nuthin' Southern hippie kid. I grew up on a commune. So my frame of reference is about 50 years off from his. His parents listened to Frank Sinatra, and mine listened to Patti Smith and Talking Heads. Plus, he's an asshole and I'm an idiot [laughs]. Two assholes at least can understand each other, and two idiots just bump into each other a lot.
SW: That comes across in your songs. They reflect the everyday give-and-take of relationships.
KH: Wow. Yes. There seems to always be, in my songs, people bumping into each other and changing each other's shape. Maybe we are inertia, and that's why we need to bump into each other so much. It's painful...
SW: But it can be exciting, too...
KH: Yeah, as if they care enough to bump into you in the first place, and you care enough to alter your shape because of them.
--Peter Terzian, Sidewalk
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