Kristin Hersh Interview: Alternative Press, April 1994

by Randee Dawn Cohen

Kristin Hersh - Living Every Moment

For Throwing Muses' Kristin Hersh, music has been her salvation and her burden. And with her latest album Hips and Makers, she's doing it all by herself for the first time.

Kristin Hersh may be first known as a musician, but she is foremost a mother. And as a mother, you can forgive her just about everything, say, her absenteeism at the Newport, Rhode Island Seamen's Institute this blustery fall afternoon. She is late, naturally, because she is a mother. Before she could leave home, her 7-year old son Dylan had to be packed off to attend a neighbour's funeral ("It's a good learning experience," she says), and she had to make other arrangements for her younger son Ryder, who had just returned from the wilds of New Jersey. True anarchy, it would seem, has nothing to do with punk rock - it reigns with a toddler racing through the house, hollering, preventing his mother from leaving on time.

"I guess I should be more grown up by now," sighs Kristin after arriving at the Institute, a place originally chosen for its coffee but also a desirable haven of quiet. She is discouraged over her lateness, over her irreparably ebony dyed hair, over being so - untogether. "I'm just dorky, I'm a slob. I can't get simple things together, and it drives me crazy. I am trying so hard to be grown up..."

And that can be a struggle-trying to be an adult in the music industry is a Sisyphean task. Kristin, who has been playing with Throwing Muses since she was 14, has been forced to mature in that atmosphere. But never totally alone, her music has always been tied in with her family, from when her father taught her how to play guitar, from when she began Throwing Muses with her half sister Tanya, up until today, when the state of Rhode Island determined that to be a musician was also to be an unfit mother, and gave custody of Dylan to his father. With Hips and Makers, however, she's on her own.

Actually, the new album wasn't her idea to begin with. "I was kind of bullied into doing it," she says, speaking softly, often in oblique terms, in the reading room of the Institute. Every so often, the wind outside gusts so hard the windowpanes quiver and she pauses in wonder. The idea, she goes on to say, was her manager/husband Billy O'Connell's. "We'd been talking about it for years and I would always say, `I'm too shy'. To me acoustic songs are just a pencil sketch of a finished song. Then you pile on all the big load colors. And he said, `For other people they just obscure the picture.' So this is something that says 'Oh, she can draw, this is a picture of something.' But I didn't realise the real potential in the raw energy and gentle prettiness, just a perfect combination."

Kristin wrote the new songs while on tour with Throwing Muses, beginning with the eerie, stark "Your Ghost" in Glasgow, Scotland, and ending with the sharply sly little track in Hawaii. Back at home she demoed in a horse stable in Portsmouth, recording at night when the kids were in bed. Later, she brought in sounds and voices from all directions, experimenting with instruments the Muses had
never bothered with ("I'd play these percussion instruments I'd never seen before, just make stuff up"). She also added Michael Stipe's off-balance croon to "Your Ghost"; kept the stable's inhabitants audible in the background ("Horses have these huge barrel chests-they sound like Elvis!"); and surprised herself with a cellist. "I thought [the cello] would be warm and mellow and this gentle sound underneath. And it was very clear and clean in the highs and growling in the lows, so it sounded
like my own voice."

What she and producer Lenny Kaye created was a deeply personal album of emotional depth made equally accessible by its private honesty and distant by a melancholic otherness. Kristin says she has been struck by the effect the songs have had on others. "People have said, `How can you do these songs in public? They're so personal!'" she recalls. "But I'm always personal. Maybe it's more invitingly personal, because I'm not screaming and stuff. On the other hand, some of the stuff on
this record scares the shit out of me."

But Hips and Makers could not have been a Muses album, contends Kristin. "A lot of people have asked me why I didn't ask [the other Muses] to do it. And it never really occurred to me. People are calling it a solo record, and that wasn't the intention. I meant for it to be acoustic. Throwing Muses
is a name for Music. There is no name for my music, they're naming my head: `Buy Kristin.' It's just me. I could have probably taken Black Francis [as a name], he's not using that anymore."

Still the Muses are far from over. "I want to have two simultaneous careers," she says. The Throwing Muses recently completed their sixth album, tentatively called University, scheduled for release later this year. For now though, she is more proud of Hips. "It's working better than anything I've ever done. All those fucking Muses albums I bled, sweated, and cried over, and this little thing I can hardly remember making, is working everywhere," she says, amazed. " I'm doing fucking fashion shoots all over the place. And that's not my ultimate goal, but it does mean that people can hear it. I
never wanted to exclude anyone, but I wanted the music to sound perfect. So it's hard to achieve some kind of balance without leaving someone out or getting goofy or lying. And I'm getting too old for that, I can't lie anymore."

At 27, Kristin seems hardly too old for anything. But she has lived a lifetime since she picked up a guitar at age 9 and created her first acoustic album eighteen years later. She got her start from her professor father, who also dabbled in music, and taught Kristin all of the chords he knew. That didn't last long, however. "I got frustrated with his limited knowledge," she says, "because I'd be writing songs and asking him what the chords would be , and he'd just say, `You make it up.' So I started making up my own chords and later on would find out what they were, try to find some root in them so I could describe them to the band."

That band of post-adolescents got their start playing venues they wouldn't have been allowed in otherwise. "I grew up in clubs," says Kristin. "It was hard, but it was worth it, so it never occurred to me that it was hard. The seediness of it. But you know, ever since I was 14, I've been getting felt up
every time I go into the bar, had guns pulled on me, been dragged into cars and vans and had drunks all over me, and that's not what a normal person would want to go through. But I was doing it for the band, so I just thought, all right, everybody has to go through this, just paying my dues." While choosing the songs for Hips, say Kristin, she came across another paternal contribution, the song "Houdini Blues." "I think that was the first song my father ever wrote," she says. "I found it in one of my filing cabinets when we were moving. He keeps them on index cards, and it was so old no one could remember how it went. So I put it to music, and put in a few verses. I thought it was such a unique idea, to write a song about Harry Houdini. He was the first rock casualty, dying underwater in a trick that didn't work. But maybe he was just paying heavy dues."

What most fans don't really realize is that Throwing Muses has always been Kristin's band. She may have allowed others to play with her, but it is her possession, to do with as she sees fit. She did not see fit to allow her half-sister Tanya Donelly's songs in on anything more than a sporadic basis. "It would have been a mistake to use her songs," Kristin says earnestly. "It was my band, and I had tunnel vision when it came to the band-it is my child and my life. And I was probably rude not to take her stuff seriously, but it was only because it was my band. The band goes here, and you can put some songs in, but this is where the band is going. I'm not going to imitate that radio-friendly sound in the hopes that someone will play it on the radio. Because chances are, I wouldn't be good enough to fake it anyway."

But certain things do not occur to Kristin, and the notion that some people may interpret Hips and Makers as her reaction to the success of Tanya's band Belly, or that she is getting all those fashion shoots months before the album is released because of that success never crosses he mind. "T. has always written pop songs and those are the songs that get promotion money. And that's fine with me. Michael Bolton sells millions of records, and the Meat Puppets don't, it's just kind of random, and she does stuff that can fit very well. In the Muses I always felt that Dave [Narcizo] and I were the partners and Tanya and I just did not work together closely. She'd write a couple songs per album. But we didn't work closely together. But she had a very different style from the rest of the Muses songs."

Kristin is moving soon, leaving Rhode Island for the dry heat and sunny bleakness of Arizona. She reveals personal details inside the Institute, and for a short time it is possible to know more about Kristin's activities than her ex-husband does. But she acts with quiet abandon and talks about finally leaving Rhode Island. "We [Billy and I] knew this was coming. We can afford a house in Arizona, and it's a big deal to have kids and not ever be able to afford a house. It's also really magical out there. But my 7-year old, he can't come. I knew when I lost custody that that was going to happen, that I
couldn't live here forever. Now we have to be a different kind of divorced family. It always has been tough, every weekend when I'm here I see him three nights a week, and he's just a mess every time I get him, and then he's back to himself, then he's gone, and it all starts all over again. It's an old story. Shouldn't have babies when you're a teenager."

But she has leaned a lot since then, and at her current matronly age, Kristin Hersh is finally getting around to coming into her own. And what is not surprising is that her music has taught her the most. "What I've learned from the songs pretty much in the last couple of years, is that you take this ride whether this ride is a record or a second, or a house, or a lifetime , you take that ride or it takes you," she offers somewhat mystically. "And in the end, you're just the clay you started out with, you're just a body, and you can't get higher than that, and you can't get lower than that, and what a great reason to take the ride. And that wants to make me live a very good life. I know my own moral fiber wants me to live every second, live for my children, and my husband, and I don't think we're made up to think about the future and the past, letting people organize us into ways our own morals don't respond to. It's a very peaceful and exciting way to live, living for every single second."

Article written by Randee Dawn Cohen, published in Alternative Press, April 1994

NOTES from Mark: Thanks to John Greene for sending me this article (in addition to many many more!).

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