Kristin Hersh will be the first to admit that it's a struggle to keep her
priorities straight. For more than half her 28 years, the Georgia-born,
Rhode Island-raised Hersh has been inseparable from Throwing Muses, the
"arty hardcore" (as she laughingly puts it) band she and stepsister Tanya
Donelly put together in order to consummate a typical teenage love affair
with rock 'n' roll. But while that ardor is clearly undiminished-"for me,
good music still just makes me feel like 'YAY!!" she beams- her foremost
concerns for the past several years have been decidedly more domestic,
wrapped up in raising two young sons.

For rock's more well-heeled parents, the day-to-day difficulties of sucha situation can easily be handled by the help. For the Muses, however, the flow of lucre has yet to match the critical praise that's been showered upon them. As such, when at home, she can be found in the laundry room as often as in the practice room. "Cleaning up after people gives you a greatbig dose of humility, which I think is really lacking in a lot of people,"she says. "I'm not the greatest housewife in the world, but I know what it's like to be up to your neck in shit, and I know how important a job it really is."

She'll freely admit that her domestic situation -one that's grown considerably more stable since she went from being an in-flux single mom to meeting and marrying Billy O'Connell, manager of the Muses and father of her youngest son, Ryder- can cause some odd chemical reactions when pitted against artistic vision. Still, as borne out by University, the soon-to-be-released seventh Muses album, that vision usually wins out in the end. While slightly more approachable than the band's last effort, 1992's Red Heaven, the 14 song collection careens across a mighty broad swath of sonic and psychic territory: even the exceedingly hummable single "Bright Yellow Gun" reveals layers of potential subtext.

"I've been really poor, to the point that when Dylan [her eight-year-old son] was little, I couldn't pay the rent, and obviously that's not a good thing," she recalls. "But that didn't push me to write a bunch of cute, catchy songs to put food on the table. I'd rather be a waitress. Hits and fame have never been my concern: Michael Bolton has hits, Satan is famous. That's not company I want to be considered in."

Cute and catchy have never been buzzwords in any discussion of Throwing Muses. From their earliest self-released forays (which garnered them enough of a cult following that 4AD tabbed the band as the first US outfit on the label), Hersh's swooping vocals and the pulsating rhythmic attack of drummer David Narcizo (the only other constant in the Muses' oft-fluctuating lineup), the eccentric song structures and avant-sound washes were never less than compelling.

Undoubtedly, the band was denied some claim to normalcy by Kristin's outspoken dialogues regarding her own, sometimes precarious, mental state. The ease with which she depicted her hallucinations- spectres that were sometimes frightening, sometimes benign- was downright eerie, particularly in light of onstage emotional moodswings. Gradually, the darker visions subsided, but those that inspired her to write remained. Actually, to hear Kristin Hersh tell it, the writing process goes on pretty much without her input at all.

"When you're young, you write songs that sound like everyone else's, but one day, I was no longer telling them what to do, they were telling me what to do," she says evenly. "Now I can't stop it, but I never want to look too hard at it. I don't think I have the right to ask where the songs come from- I'm just glad they've chosen me."

The songs that chose to alight in Hersh's consciousness on discs like The Fat Skier and House Tornado went a long way towards justifying that "arty hardcore" tag, veiled as they were in unnecessarily theatrical vocalizing. But those that were able to get beyond that- and at times, that number wasn't encouragingly large- became acolytes of the most dedicated stripe.

"People said the main problem with our music was that you couldn't ignore it," Hersh grants. "Most music is flirtatious and it leaves. I hope this doesn't sound egotistical, but our music is music
you have to sleep with, you have to go all the way with it. I know it's hard to follow and hard to take. Sometimes I have a lot of respect for people for sitting through our shows."

Although those shows were running noticeably more smoothly by the turn of the decade, the Muses' innards were often in knots. First, bassist Leslie Langston abandoned the road in favor of a settled married life. Soon after, Donelly (who had grown into an attractive foil for her stepsister) tired of playing second fiddle in both Throwing Muses and the Breeders and took off to form Belly after 1991's lukewarm The Real Ramona. While no hard feelings ever developed- Langston has filled the bass slot at a few of Hersh's solo shows, and Hersh's relationship with Donelly remains strong- Throwing Muses was a band in need of a break, which came when Hersh released her solo debut, Hips And Makers, in 1993.

"Usually I hate people who put their name on their music, but I don't think I had a choice," she says. "in my dream world, I would have just mailed [the album] out from my house and not dealt with the rest of it. It wasn't done to satisfy my ego: I don't think I have a lot of star quality- usually I'd rather be hiding somewhere than be noticed."

The solo shows that followed saw a more relaxed Hersh bantering easily with her audience and leavening the thought-provoking songs with stories of home life that often embarrassed eight-year-old Dylan. "He's getting his revenge, though," she laughs. "He draws this comic called 'Rockin' Family,' and in it I'm always doing the most non-mom things, like walking up to him and saying, 'Hiya, kid, have a cigarette... what's wrong, you don't smoke?'"

Even while promoting Hips And Makers- a process that took a full year- Hersh cleared up any false assumptions that Throwing Muses was history. The self-produced University was actually recorded (in New Orleans) before the release of that solo set, although many months passed before the band reconvened to mix the album, which made life a bit problematic for Narcizo and new bassist Bernard Georges (a longtime Muses roadie).

"I've been biding my time. I got this really tedious job polishing picture frames in a factory so I wouldn't be totally broke," says Narcizo, who stored his idle drums at his parents' house for much of 1994. "And getting back into the swing was kind of hard at first- some of the songs I just couldn't hear any more. But I kind of take for granted how much playing together really means to me- I don't know how I went without it for however many months."

University exudes not only a healthy amount of freshness, but a bracingly vivid tone (often missing on their more "produced" sets) in the infectious melodies of songs like Surf Cowboy and Teller. While Hersh admits that even a decade's experience hasn't changed her notion that the recording process itself is "a big lie" whereby "you rip the song apart little by little and pretend you're all in a studio together," she views the current trio lineup (which may be augmented by a cellist come tour-time) as the band's strongest.

"We have the luxury of dynamics that you can only get in a trio, she says. "When you have two guitarists playing, all you can really make is a wall of sound- and if you back off that for a minute, it always sounds like there's something missing."

She pauses, admitting that talking about the music she makes may well be her least favorite thing to do, hesitating to clarify lyric intent, even expressing surprise that so many of University's songs trade in aquatic imagery ("six of them?" she laughs. "I guess that is kind of a lot"). But while she's hardly a nouveau primitive Kristin Hersh certainly seems to share in certain aspects of outsider philosophy.

"There's not a whole lot of intellect in there. There's plenty of physicality and emotion, which may make the brain work, but the process doesn't begin with the brain," she sighs. "It's hard to care much about what you do, you know. I envy the people that write bullshit music, people who can play the market, say 'Whadda want? Three minutes ten seconds with a country feel? You got it.' Sometimes I think it might be good to just do the job, come home and forget it. But that feeling never lasts."

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