|
The
Independent
For
one brief moment during this interview, as Kristin Hersh blinks
reddening eyes, I fear it might turn into another "galumphing
journalist makes sensitive artist cry" shock.
It doesn't, because Ms Hersh has a fine old sense of humour to go
with her Johnny Cash-deep voice. Any
hack who hadn't met her might be forgiven for being tentative, though.
Hersh has been around the psychic block a time or two, and it
comes out in her songs: first the ground-breaking music of her Rhode
Island band Throwing Muses, which was wild and traumatic, full of
shifting time signatures and distorted guitar, and then the dark
acoustic ballads of her solo album, Hips
and Makers, released in 1994 to commercial and critical acclaim. Shortly
before this, she admitted to suffering bipolar disorder, a cousin to
schizophrenia; since then, she has been seen by some as the Mrs
Rochester of indie-pop or, as she usefully puts it, "one wave short
of a shipwreck". Hersh, 31, is far from barking, as the warmth of new LP Strange
Angels, with its folky laments and Wild West guitar, will confirm.
Still, though it feels like a love letter to her husband and
mentor, Billy, there is a hint that the badlands aren't quite history
yet. I think we're here to find out where this dislocation comes from. A
starting point might be the acid-fuelled hippy commune on which she grew
up in Sheffield, Massachusetts. Apparently,
when the babysitters took the children to the park, they would often
pull up screeching, "Kristin!
Look at all the ostriches!" Your
parents put you in the care of these people?
She shrugs. "I
think they were on too many drugs themselves to notice." The
ceiling of the barn they called home was decorated with a parachute upon
which someone painted "Be together".
"Except the guy was really stoned, so he wrote "Be a
tog eater". And my
father still signs his letters that way -'Be a tog eater, love,
Dad'." Hersh's
parents hailed from the Chattanooga Mountains, where their rather gothic
family still hang out; last Christmas, Kristin noticed a dysfunctional
automated Santa that would only say Happy Holidays once a knife was
stuck in its back. Her
dad, a philosophy professor, lives in a self-built woodland house
"with gargoyles and Greek gods stuck all over it".
She sighs. "He's
remarried an anorexic painter. They
forgot to build a kitchen." Ryder,
Hersh's six-year-old, is growing up traditionally.
"He's got quite a thing with Satan going on. We'll
be driving in the car and he'll look out the window, look kinda distant
... and you know he's thinking about Satan.
Say, Ry, what's up? And
he'll say, I was just thinkin' that horns and a cape and a tail is a
really good way to dress." Hersh
had her own childhood obsessions. When
not stoned, her dad sang her Appalachian folk songs, which made her cry
but got so deep in her psyche that she is thinking of turning them into
her next album. "They're
actually really funny because they're so gross, all liquor, Jesus,
murder. And for the women,
whether or not they're married." If they weren't married?
"They'd just kill themselves.
When dad used to play me this one about drowning, I was like,
right on, sister, go live with the mermaids, you don't have to get
married if you don't want - it's called 'I Never Will Marry' and I
thought, y'know, that was her choice.
But no, she's drowning herself because she doesn't wanna live
single for the rest of her life. Now,
should I really record that?" Hersh
first married (this one didn't last) at 17, three years after starting
the now-defunct Muses. At
14, too, her bipolarity kicked in.
Because the songs she wrote would visit her - and still do -
unannounced, fully-formed and with their own agenda, causing the same
nausea and labour pains as childbirth, she believed her psychic turmoil
was caused by them. She was still seeing wolves leaping out of walls when she
became pregnant. These days
she takes lithium "to keep those things away from me and my
family". Back
then, she thought the visions, embodied in songs, could get inside and
hurt the baby. "So I
had to cut a deal with the songs," she mumbles.
"Because I realised, a few years ago, they wouldn't go
away." Surely
you'd hate it if they did? Innocent
question, relating to inspiration.
But for Kristin, the songs are other-worldly children,
occasionally malevolent Caspars. "I
guess I'd hate it. It's hard to admit that, and I've never really been able to
say it, we should probably change the subject soon, because I'm [weak
grin] about to start crying. But
I did say, I won't censor you ever again if you'll stop knocking at my
door at four in the morning and fucking with my family.
And the songs are better for being told, they don't make me say
such crazy shit. They often
have subtle and very pretty things to say.
Now they're not so mean." "Madness"
can sometimes be affected for a bit of rock biz glam, but not in this
case. Hersh is contorted
with embarrassment and guilt. Embarrassment
because "I'd maintained, this is what normal women are like, my
music can speak for anyone, don't call me crazy just because you haven't
heard this sound before. Then
there I am saying, ah well, I was crazy after all." And guilt
because "it's other people who suffer. I won't say it's affected my
children, because I can't face that.
But I'm sure it has. And
I know my husband spends most of his waking hours trying to make sure it
has. And I know my husband
spends most of his waking hours trying to make sure it doesn't happen
again." As
Ryder and his baby brother, Wyatt, come bouncing into the hotel room,
Hersh is telling me one of the final Throwing Muses stories.
In it, she and drummer David Narcizo are skating near her
Catskills home when they hear a rifle shot.
Of course, it's the ice cracking, 'And we thought that was very
fitting, talking about music and skating on thin ice." If you're
lucky, though, you can pull it off. |