[CREEM April/May 1994 Vol.3, No.5]

     Kristin Hersh defies as many categories as she's slotted into by

the press, her family, and the music industry. She's the lead

singer/madder hatter of a 14-year old electricity flailing band called

Throwing Muses that was nutured on the Boston music scene. Recently,

however, she recorded 15 sparesely backed acoustic songs and released

them on a solo album called *Hips and Makers*. She is a self-made

career woman, having first picked up a guitar when she was nine years

old. And yet, she is also the wife of Billy O'Connell, who is her

manager, and has two children, Ryder (two years old) and Dylan

(seven).

     It is in the prominent Kingsway Studios in New Orleans' French

Quarter, where Hersh is working on material for a future Throwing

Muses record, that these qualities are revealed as unschismatic. The

interior of the converted two-story house is grand, with enormous

rooms and high ceilings. Everything and everyone is cloaked in fuzzy

sepia and Dionysian red hues, as there are no operating overhead

lights; small lamps and assorted candles provide minimal assitance.

     "There she is," remarks O'Connell, as we ascend a huge staircase

in search of Hersh. Instead, however, a blond mop hobbles up to my

knee and greets it. Once introduced, their youngest son, Ryder,

scuttles into one of the many little doorways and Hersh appears.

Unlike her music, which very often offers shrieking, clawing

desperation and eerie, spatial-sounding loneliness, Hersh conveys an

unreal composure. With an almost Victorian fragility, her ivory face

bears shocking blue-eyes and is capped with blue-black hair.

     "It frustrates my mother to no end that Kristin dyes her hair,"

O'Connell, a thunderous Type A, says of his wife, whose hair is

naturally blond. Hersh shakes my hand firmly, and we descend the

stairs into the recording room to meet the sound engineer along with

drummer David Narcizo, the only remaining original Muse besides Hersh.

     "I want you to hear this," O'Connell says of a string sequence

that is playing, one that had been recorded earlier by cellist Jane

Scarpantoni for a future Muses song. Scarpantoni also provided quiet

assistance on *Hips and Makers*. She and Michael Stipe (In the process

of making a whole new careers of guesting on other people's CDs), who

sings background vocals on the CD's first single release, "Your

Ghost," are the only other musicians who grace the songs. Hersh

herself plays acoustic guitar as well as occasional piano trickle. The

engineer then reels off a track called "Snackface," also new Throwing

Muses material. True to Hersh's decade worth of songs mired in sexual

tension, this one writhes in ecstasy and is accompanied by polyrhytmic

percussion.

     O'Connell, Hersh, and Ryder then amble into the kitchen and the

singer queries offhandedly, "Hey, does anyone have a plan for Ryder's

dinner?" No one seems to know, and Hersh serves him a plate of

falafel. She eats undisturbed along with him until he becomes

mesmerized by her food and wants to trade. "Okay, you can have mine.

I'd rather have yours anyway," she says strategically, and he

immediately places his head over his own plate in a territorial

stance.

     Later, when Hersh takes a break from laying down organ swells, we

venture into a cavernous corner bar on one of the Quarter's tiny side

streets. In between sips of noxious, lethal liquid masquerading as

drinks, Hersh muses boisterously about her family. "I'm kind of a baby

machine. It's a good thing," she says, quickly shattering the doomy

cynicism the alternative scene has come to expect of its leaders.

Perhaps it is because Hersh, who is 27, has been firmly rooted in the

industry for years that she feels comfortable placing a scuffed combat

boot in the motherhood arena.

     I'm very into babies, but I haven't slept in about seven or eight

years," she says, and then launches into stories about motherhood in a

way that I have never, ever heard a mom relate. "Dylan, Billy, and I

were sitting at breakfast, and [Dylan] said, 'My brain is a television

and its flipping through the channels.' He said it over and over and

over. I said, 'Dyl, stop it.' Then Ryder started telling us that he

has music in his head. And I looked at Billy and said, 'Billy, slap

him! Tell him it's dirty!'"

     Hersh's personal trials with her art explain much of why she

thinks it can be potentially dangerous. They also convey why she's

been known throughout the years as somewhat of an eccentric who calls

her songs "personalities" and treats them with as much dignity as you

would a real human being.

     "I don't know, I never asked for it," she says of her

songwriting. "It just happened. It's like I opened a door I couldn't

shut again. I got seizures when I didn't write songs. I had a fever

for, like, six years. I was hot. I couldn't wear a coat. I had bad

chemicals stuck in me, and all those things were a called a ton of

words by doctors. I was diagnosed with a lot of different things, like

schizophrenia, manic-depressive. I just think that I wasn't ready for

songwriting to get stuck in my body. It's a real thing. It has teeth

and electricity and chemicals. So, I don't let them get stuck there

anymore. I spring out of bed at 4 in the morning.

     "When it happens," she concludes, as if wrapping up a story about

the weather, "I feel hot and fuzzy and my hair is standing on end.

It's like being possessed. Six hours later, though, there's a song

there."

     There are songs, however, and then there are Hersh's songs. "The

Letter," a track on *Makers*, is a disturbing passage about

loneliness, fraught with awkward phrasing that knocks against edgy,

lurching acoustics over which Hersh whispers, "You make me die/I'm

gonna cry/I won't go home/Don't kill the god of sadness."

     "I hate it. It makes me puke and cry," Hersh says vehemently. "I

wrote it when I was 17, I think. I was living in an apartment called

the Dog House. If you have any drug memories--pictures are whipping by

you and you can see with one eye what's really going on, but the other

eye is just a whirlwind. That's the way my brain was at the time. The

song is terrifying to me, but at the same time so moving. I would keep

coming back to it over the years. I'd try to play it and I'd hit one

chord and just flip out and throw the guitar back in the case."

     Narcizo and O'Connell had spent a lot of time convincing her to

use it for the solo album. She played piano on it by having them play

it back in the control room without her there and then telling her

when it was over. She hasn't listened to it since.

     "I'm not very good at explaining where they came from," Hersh

says of the lyrics on *Makers*. "I've spent my whole life trying to be

the songwriter who stays out of the process and just let the songs

write itself. This record fucked me that way. It's very personal. I've

been so proud of writing songs that are beneath my personality, that

are deeper than that, and also more exterior, so that other people can

relate to them. But I had to admit to myself that this record is just

life pictures of mine. One after another. At first I though maybe it

shouldn't be published. Maybe it was like a diary. Maybe it's tacky,

or maybe I can't write anymore and I suck now," Hersh recalls

thinking.

     A combination of her husband's three-year prodding and the

encouraging audience response she received from encore acoustic Muses

songs are what convinced Hersh to unplug for a solo album. "I didn't

have much resepct for the medium itself," Hersh admits. "I'd never

really heard anyone play an acoustic guitar in a gutsy way. It was

always this kind of dead string sound with poetry or politics strewn

across it. That's really unfortunate, because an acoustic instrument

has so much guts inherent in its acoustic quality."

     At the mention of other accomplished acoustic musicians such as

Patty Larkin and Suzanne Vega, the songwriter is disinterested. "I

could nver relate to...derivative is a bad word, standard is a good

word...roots-oriented is a good way to put it. I could never relate to

that because I had never imitated anyone else in my songwriting. The

song structure, the chord progressions are very roots-oriented. You've

heard them before. People are very much attracted to that. That's

valuable when it comes to blues and folk, and things that are so old

that they're mythical to us.

     "Songs had never come to me that way. They had always come from a

place that was more confusing," she says, as if it all weren't

confusing enough. For a woman who professes to having "grown up

crazy," and who thinks "X was the greatest band ever," it would be

hard to envision her embracing folksy idealism or pop's platitudes.

     It is interesting to note that *Hips and Makers* comes on the

heels of the debut of former Muses cohort Tanya Donnelly's meteoric

fledgling group Belly. Donnelly's departure is still somewhat of a

curiosity. When asked about Belly's *Star* album, Hersh was vague,

saying only that she'd heard it once in a club.

     "We actually broke up [for a while] because I hated the

business," Hersh recalls of the situation that led to Donnelly's new

career. "I just cared too much about music to be in the business, and

I wanted to get out." During this time, Hersh remembers that Donnelly,

whom she said had only written one or two songs a year, suddenly wrote

10. "And I said, 'Well, they're not Throwing Muses songs,' and they

weren't, obviously," she says.

     Hersh and Narcizo subsequently released *Red Heaven*, a live

album, with the assistance of former TM bassist Leslie Langston. The

musician recalls that although it entered at #2 on the English charts,

the president of her fan club in the U.S. didn't know it had been

released.

     For the most part, Throwing Muses have been a very well-kept

secret. Hersh, however, isn't bitter, as shown by the lyrics of her

new album's title track. Although she won't say for sure what the tune

should mean to us, she does impart that it's about "taking all these

rides--whether it's the ride of a record or a date or an affair or a

life. Whether you live in the end or you fall in the end, you end up

with the clay you started out with.

     "We're so afraid of going down low," she murmurs, while crushing

a cigarette definitively into a grimy ashtray, "but low is the only

reason we know how high the highs are."