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Hip Mama Interview: Kristin Hersh
by Audra Estrones Williams
Kristin Hersh is so amazing that I was almost stunned into silence when I had to interview her. I ended up calling 15 minutes late, because it took a tag-team to help me get up the nerve; if Matuschka hadn't been in the room giving me the thumbs up, I would have imploded. She is that amazing.
If I had to choose one word to describe Kristin's music -- by herself or with the Throwing Muses -- it would be defiant. She has incredible skill in that she combines vulnerability, dismissal, playfulness and starkness, then wraps it up in this wonderful defiant air. Her voice, her words, her melodies say: "What doesn't kill me makes me stronger, you bastard, so you'd better believe that I'm fucking strong." She has the power to choke with her voice; when she soars into one of her gritty crescendos my own breath catches in my throat. So I was pretty surprised to hear her calmly cut off my
groveling apologies for lateness with a breezy "Oh, that's okay, it gave me time to finish making macaroni and cheese."
Macaroni and cheese? The same voice that wails "Oh mercy, mercy me" is now happily chatting about making lunch for her kids? Yes indeed. Because as well as being an iconoclastic singer/songwriter, Hersh is also a Real Mom. I'm in awe. When I ask Kristin what people's biggest misconception is about her, she laughs. "That I'm psychotic," she replies.
"You have to look close, to see what this disease has done to me"
For anyone who doesn't already know, Kristin Hersh is bipolar. She is actually on a list of "Famous Bipolar People" that I found online, which I thought was rather odd. We talked a bit about how she feels, as someone who has legitimate experience with mental illness, to see so many women portraying themselves as stylishly unstable to the press, as though it were some sort of hip fad.
"I think it is dangerous. I think we should almost go back to a time when there was shame attached to mental illness, because now there is this notion that it is somehow more intelligent to be that way... and that happiness is dumb or simple, as opposed to being complicated and hard work, which it is."
Even harder work, I imagine, when you are touring all the time, which Kristin always is. Her new release, Sky Motel, has a very on-the-road sound to it, it seems to be all about
traveling. Her husband tours with her, as do her two youngest sons, Ryder and Wyatt, who are home schooled. Her oldest son, Dylan, went on the last tour with them as a roadie. Quite the family vacation, except for the vacation part.
Breakfast at the movies - Gatorade and Blackjack on the bed
"It's tough," says Kristin, "I can exist on coffee and beer if the music is good enough -- groovy as that sounds -- but kids can't really do that."
(note to reader. Kristin Hersh uses the word groovy like it is sort of an insult, kind of drawing vowel sound and adding a twinge of sarcasm. It is an excellent usage. I highly recommend it.)
She told me that she had turned down offers to tour with the Lilith Fair, because she prides herself on the fact that the crowd at her typical show is perhaps more varied than that. While I think you can often recognize... say... a Sarah McLachlan fan at 20 paces, Kristin doesn't have 'obviously identifiable' fans. This may be nice from an idealistic point of view, but it isn't great from a business one. Finances recently forced Kristin to accept that the Throwing Muses were no longer an option, and that going solo was the only way she'd be able to keep feeding her kids. That means that she plays every instrument on Sky Motel, except for drums on a few tracks. This is an achievement she downplays with "It was fine. It isn't like I was playing the bag pipes or something."
Tonight your dream is safe with me - Tomorrow we wake up in LA
Talk about traveling. As well as being constantly on the road, Kristin has also recently moved from New England, to Los Angeles, to Joshua Tree (the place, not the U2 album), back to New England.
"Being in LA was great," she said "It was super to be so close to the record company, and have Dylan [who lives with his father] with me for a month at a time, as opposed to feeling like a weekend parent. But we were just too far away from him, now we are only 10 minutes apart."
In all this moving, however, Kristin got a colossal case of writer's block. "You know how I usually hear songs rather than making them up? Well, that didn't really happen for a year or two, apart from one song right in the middle of the record called Cathedral Heat." To jump start her song writing, as well as to make a record for her kids of all the songs that were the soundtrack of her own childhood, Kristin recorded "Murder, Mystery, and then Goodnight", a collection of Appalachian folk songs. At the risk of sounding like an infomercial, it is only available through the 4AD website and it is 100% worth buying, even if you are only curious to hear what Kristin sounds like singing with the Tennessee accent she lost when she was 8.
Walk a mile, then walk another mile
Kristin is a long way from the Appalachian mountains now. The daughter of "Crane" and "Dude" has become one the most talented and identified with singer/songwriters of her time. Her words mean a lot, to a lot of people. "I don't even know my own lyrics," she told me "they are like phonetic harmony. I don't even know what they mean. I just know that if it isn't honest, I can't sing it. I choke on a lie."
If only that were true of everyone, but Kristin Hersh isn't everyone, that is what makes her so special. She turns down opportunities, for example, that most musicians would jump at.
"You know that show Friends, you have that in Canada right? Well they called my record company and they said that they wanted to have me on the show as a guest. I was like 'I can't do that.' I mean, I don't have anything against that, I just couldn't do it. I'd be in the little
coffee shop... and... I just couldn't do it, you know? So I kept saying no, but they kept calling! And the record company was saying 'It is the highest rated show in the country' but still, I couldn't do it. So I forgot all about it, but then months later I was watching the show and Chrissie Hynde was on it." She laughs. "So it was Chrissie Hynde, not Kristin Hersh they wanted all along."
Audra Estrones Williams lives in Canada's smallest town and is working on subverting its youth.
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