Option Magazine, 1991

AUGUST, 1991. IT'S' BEEN A HECTIC YEAR for Kristin Hersh. In June she returned to her Rhode Island home after a grueling six months on the road throughout the U.S. and Europe just in time to give birth to her second child and witness the break-up of her band, Throwing Muses, and her ten-year partnership with the Muses' other frontperson, Tanya Donelly. As Hersh tells it, both events had been in the works for the best part of the year.

Ryder James, Hersh's second son, was born on July 16, about a month early, but without any other unanticipated complications. The demise of Throwing Muses, however - precipitated by Donelly's decision to start her own band - turned out to be a bit more complicated. David Narcizo, the Muses' longtime drummer, is the only member to continue playing with Hersh; and the band name was a source of serious debate. "Dave and I were all set to start over ourselves," says Hersh, "and had decided to call our band 'Khuli Loach'"-- a name they borrowed from a small, worm-like fish -- "and then one day we were looking through this Oregon Music Directory and there was an ad for a band named Khuli Loach! You'd think there'd be another Throwing Muses somewhere, but Khuli Loach?!"

Narcizo and a bassist to be decided on later will go on as Throwing Muses. "Besides," says Hersh, "it seemed rather self-indulgent to be changing our name at this point. And since we already have our own bin in most record stores, it really wasn't that smart of a move to begin with."

The name Throwing Muses, according to Hersh, who was a philosophy major in college, had come from a passage written by the late German phenomenologist Martin Heidegger. At the end of their final tour together last spring, Donelly and Hersh said they had recently been bothered by the Heidegger association. Lately, bookshop philosophy shelves have been crowded with a dozen or so taking the philosopher to task for his apparently active support of the Nazis. Hersh and Donelly are resolutely intolerant of bigotry. "T.S. Eliot was anti-Semitic," Donelly said, "and that breaks my heart because I just can't deal with that at all. I just won't deal with racism of any kind. How can you be that talented and that blind at the same time? Sometimes you'll meet these incredibly beautiful, intelligent and otherwise wonderful people, but on this one subject it's literally like they've had same part of their brain die."

Bad politics aside, the Heidegger connection is appropriate. Whatever else he may have written or said, the man did spread the not-so-good news that human beings are thrown unmercifully into existence at birth; that each one of us spends his or her entire life in mourning over the certainty of our deaths, whether we choose to admit it or not, and that the best and truest thing a person can do is to let himself or herself be an instrument on which "being" (however you choose to define it) can play. Peel away a layer or two of jargon and pretension and you get to the core of Kristin Hersh and Throwing Muses. (Besides, even if the Heidegger-as-soulmate theory is stretching things a bit, the association with a loud, grungy American rock 'n' roll band would have irritated the hell out of the arrogant, elitist philosopher - a fact that should have given Donelly and Hersh at least some satisfaction.)

Donelly, Hersh, Narcizo, and original bass player Leslie Langston all grew up together in Newport, Rhode Island. The three women had been friends since they were about eight years old, and began playing music together at 15. At first inspired by groups like the Beatles, they later discovered the Velvet Underground, Violent Femmes, X, and Husker Du -- their more obvious rock 'n' roll antecedents. Narcizo joined a couple of years later, and Throwing Muses stayed with that original line-up until Langston's departure two years ago. The band made its initial mark in Providence as part of the same scene that had given the world Talking Heads.

Donnelly's departure isn't all that surprising. Always limited basically to two cuts per album, her writing and singing had grown stronger and more confident with each new album, reaching a peak with "Not Too Soon," the highlight of Throwing Muses' latest album, The Real Ramona, and the band's most recent video. And her involvement with Pixie Kim Deal in the Breeders suggested she was aching to branch out. Hersh insists, however, that the parting was amicable and carefully considered. "We had decided to dissolve the band last year when we were recording The Real Ramona," she says. "The Throwing Muses Co. - the business part of things- had gotten a lot bigger than any of us wanted it to be, and it just wasn't fun for any of us anymore. Donnelly has not yet settled on either a name for her new band or a label (although the Muses' label, Sire, is still a possibility), but she may be joined by the Muses' most recent bassist, Fred Abong, who hasn't yet decided whether, he will keep playing or go back to college. Hersh has been working on new material since the tour ended, and she and Narcizo start recording their latest project in October. Joining them will be Throwing Muses' original bassist Langston, who, according to Hersh, probably won't be coming back to the band full time. "Dave and I have been the core of the band for ten years now," Hersh says, "and as things stand now, it's just the two of us. We'll hire a new bass when we need one."

I first spoke with Hersh and Donelly in New York last May, on the day of what would have been their last performance together as Throwing Muses. Neither talked openly about the move they were privately planning, though the conversation, in retrospect, seemed somehow laden with the suggestion. Asked later why they hadn't been more forthcoming, Hersh puts it bluntly, "Basically, we lied." At the time, Hersh & Donelly attributed their undisguised musical frustrations to their exhaustion with being on the road for six months. Hersh, who was seven months pregnant at the time, obviously had more than her share of reasons for complaining.

Touring pregnant in a rock 'n' roll band is a less-than-enviable accomplishment, one that only a handful of women have cared to match. Chrissie Hynde, Exene Cervenka and Tina Weymouth (who toured all the way into her eighth month) come immediately to mind. "But Patti Smith didn't do it," Hersh said. "She decided not to release her record. We were talking to Arista at the time, and Clive Davis' only real pitch to us was, 'Hey, if you get pregnant, I won't make you tour.'"

Hersh and Donnelly had just arrived in Manhattan for the last date on a virtually non-stop, six-month tour of Europe and the U.S., much of it spent crammed in the back of their new tour bus and barreling across the country with the other members of the band, drummer Narcizo and bassist Abong. The two women were the kind of tired that takes the seriousness out of even the most pressing concerns. Propped dutifully on opposite ends of Hersh's hotel bed, the two unofficial Throwing Muses spokespersons ("Sometimes we make the boys do the interviews," Hersh admitted) were trying their best to bemoan the terrors of touring, but their hearts just weren't in it. Even their most chronic complaints were punctuated by joking and laughter.

"We wanted an airbrush painting on the side of our bus," Hersh sighed in mock despair. "You know, one of those great scenes with a sunset or surfers or something like that. But ours is brown; it's this fucking brown bus!"

"We'd probably just get sick of the design anyway," Donelly conceded. "What we really need is one of those changeable, rolling signs on the side, so we could have a different airbrush image every day."

Hersh, normally as petite as Donelly, was majestically swollen with what would be her second child (5-year-old Dylan was mercifully conceived and born during an extended homestand for the band), and the long days and nights were beginning to take their toll. "It's a good thing I was born thin," she laughed, "because I haven't slept in weeks. I'm too fat to sleep. It takes me an hour just to roll over."

Collapsed against her pillow, she recalled a recent and particularly harrowing predicament on the road. "The other day was this really pregnant day and it was 100 million degrees outside and our bus has no windows. It was so hot and I wanted to go home so badly." After the band's performance that night, "I finally found my way offstage and found a couch to lie down on backstage. I had shut my eyes and was just drifting off. And people kept coming over and poking me, saying, 'Can you sign this? I don't have a pen.' I was really woozy and thinking to myself, 'Who are you people? Why would you do this? I would never do this to anyone! Why can't everyone just leave me alone?'"

The complaint would sound pathetic coming from your average jaded rocker, but Hersh's condition invited tolerance. As miserable as the traveling and other day-to-day demands of touring had been, however, Hersh insisted that it had little effect on her stage performance, other then the occasional inadvertent stylistic adjustment. "The guitar neck is at a weird angle. That's a little hard to get used to, because I can't really look at my hands while I play." She glanced nostalgically toward her lap. "Sometimes I find that I've just done an entirely new phrase down there.

"The first time I was pregnant I was really, really sick," she continued. "I had to quit school, and I was just nauseous all the time. But then we would play, and for that time we were on stage, I would just feel nothing; everything would just go away. And it's been the same way this time. There were a lot more things to feel this time, but playing has been fine.

Anyone who saw Throwing Muses on the last tour, or has listened to their latest album, The Real Ramona, knows that the musical changes were much broader and more substantial than Hersh's occasionally errant guitar licks. Compared to the band's other Sire releases, House Tornado (1988) and Hunkpapa (1989), the latest songs are simpler and less fragmented (if no less cryptic lyrically: 'Pour dimes in diamond jim. two months to fill him in'), and the production is more ambient, even pretty. Many of the songs rely further on the swelling, overlapping arpeggios, two-string vibratos, and other dual guitar techniques for which Hersh and Donelly were already known.

That new sound, Hersh said, was not so much a departure as it was a deliberate return to the simpler, more basic sound of the Muses' earliest live material. "I think the production reflects an earlier attitude that we had somehow lost," she said. "It sounds live and it sounds raw. But the songs are very solid and open, and a lot of our other songs hadn't really asked to be treated that way. They hadn't really asked for solidity or space. But these do. So they're a lot easier to listen to."

Throwing Muses had reached something of an impasse with the strained, complex compositions of their most recent pre-Ramona efforts; the sudden stops and starts, and the often convoluted counter-tonal arrangements of that material had peaked on 1988's brilliant, but at times gratuitously difficult, House Tornado. "Much of our earlier music was a lot more mathematical," Donelly recalled, "and very, very busy. We just played a lot of notes very, very fast. The new stuff is a lot more traditional guitar-wise."

"And a lot easier to play than the math stuff," Hersh agreed. "Before the new material, we had just been trying to push the limits of each of our parts on every measure of every song, which to us was fascinating, but to the listener, I think, began to sound like we were all playing a different song. And if each performance isn't exactly right in time - if you haven't written the perfect counterline to everybody else's parts - it all sounded" - she laughed - "you know, just too complex to be groovy."

Another apparent reason for the new sound was the addition of bass player Fred Abong, who-replaced former bassist Leslie Langston after Langston moved to San Francisco two years ago and got married. (Langston got together with her former bandmates during one of the Muses' West Coast dates and, according to Hersh, was doing well and looking forward to working on her own material soon.) Abong, a former drummer, brought a much more linear and percussive feel to the band's rhythms. "Fred's playing is so appropriate to the new material that I wouldn't really know how much affect it's had on our music," said Hersh. "I think Leslie was a very flowery player, where Fred is a very punchy player, having been a drummer. But he was also a fan before he joined the band, so I think he understood what kind of parts we needed."

All the changes had brought Narcizo's drumming more to the front. An amazingly vertical, almost wristless drummer, on stage Narcizo looks like he's trying to hammer his kit into the floor. His jagged, explosive attack always kept even the band's darkest and densest numbers on the verge of frenzied danceability. "David had never played a set before he joined the band," Hersh explained of the origins of Narcizo's style. "He was in a marching band and was this very talented snare drummer, which really has worked well for us, although David and I kind of ended up playing the same part on different instruments for almost all the early songs. He had worked without cymbals for a long time, so he was forced to develop interesting patterns and not lean on just the same old backbeat."

Before their split, Donelly and Hersh had begun to reflect on the impact of gender on their music; after all, they'd added a second male member to balance what was originally a female-majority lineup, and it had altered their sound significantly. Hersh attributed the earlier music's difficulty to its distinctly feminine sound. "House Tornado especially is very intense, in a small, enmeshed way," she said. "It's a very female record. The parts fly off in all different directions; they don't follow any straight line. The strength of it - and I think it's a very strong record - comes from detail and solidity."

"It was scatterbrained," countered Donelly.

But Hersh and Donelly never set out to make a female record, any more than they had ever tried disguising the fact that they are women. "We don't sit around thinking about what gender we are and what gender we're not - and two of us are men, of course," Hersh said. "But I'm gradually coming to think that there is probably a lot of stuff that comes naturally to Tanya and myself that is literally feminine - and our guitar lines are part of that, and our vocal lines are part of that, and our song structure is part of that."

Over the years, apart from their normal fans, Throwing Muses had attracted a rabid, almost frightening cult, which had become a major worry for them. The responses of some of these fans were troubling and often intrusive, particularly to Hersh. With lines like "my hands are cupped and full of blood" and the rumors of her Delphic approach to her dark, brooding monologues, more than a few fans have turned to Hersh and the rest of the band as mentors in the arts of suicidal angst and romantic self-pity. Hersh is disturbed and bewildered by what she insists is a complete misunderstanding of her work.

"We just have a lot of fans that I can't connect with, who completely misread our music," she complained. "And I wonder why that is. Lately, I've come to hate myself - at least, that image of me obsessed with poetry and suicide - as much as people who hate this band hate me. I think that a lot of the people who do this - who come up to me, expecting this angst-ridden poet - are really self-involved, and they project that onto a lot of things, including our music. Sometimes that's necessary, I know," she admitted, "sometimes you just have to do that. But encountering it all the time makes me very, very tired."

Some Throwing Muses fans have gone to pretty desperate lengths to seek an audience with the band, including posing as music journalists wanting an interview. "Most of our fans are great," Donelly insisted, "it's just the ones who approach you like that. I, for one, would never do that to a band- you know, walk backstage, introduce myself and just start up the way they do. But the people who approach us are kind of desperate sometimes- the ones who approach Kristin anyway. It's really a small fraction of the people who listen to us, of course, but they're the ones who are always in your face." Both women were guardedly optimistic that The Real Ramona would discourage the more morose misconceptions of their music. "Maybe everything will change," Hersh said. "Maybe we now have this whole slew of fans who are happy, wonderful people, and not self-involved at all."

Hersh has undergone her own periods of mental struggle between herself and her work. At first, she was guarded and reluctant to speak about it. "The one thing I don't want to talk about," she said, "is poetry and suicide." But soon she become quietly reflective and then surprisingly candid. Hersh and Donelly, who are half-sisters, began writing songs together when they were about 15 and, according to Hersh, "you just learn the craft the best that you can. As that process went on, and we become better songwriters, it started to kind of happen by itself. Songs would write themselves without me having anything to do with it, or having any say in it. And they started to be about these fucked-up things. They'd have these images, and I couldn't figure out what they were... just these scary images. I just became this kind of empty vessel for the songs."

By the time Hersh reached her late teens, things started to get out of hand. "The songs would make my life do these things I didn't want to do," she said. "And it made me feel crazy, actually. I just thought, 'I'm only existing for the songs and they're killing me in the process. If this is what Art is, I don't want anything to do with it.' But it wouldn't stop. I just kept writing songs and the songs were beautiful. So I thought, 'If this is sublimation, then I should just be writing songs and not let it kill me, because I couldn't stop the process anyway."

Hersh isn't sure how, finally, to define her experience with the music. In an interview early this year, she matter-of-factly identified her condition as "bipolarity". It's a self-diagnosis that could be taken as a euphemistic acknowledgement of manic-depression (which is sometimes referred to as "bipolar disorder"). More likely, the comment was an attempt to identify herself with the wacky, often irresistible psychology of Julian Jaynes (author of The Origins of Consciousness and the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind), who pleads for each of us to listen patiently to the voices in our own head.

Either way, Hersh seems either unwilling or unable to let go of her inner voices, with which she insisted she had learned to live more comfortably. "I'm not sure it's inspiration," she concedes. "I'm not sure what it is. And it's taken me up until the last few years to say, 'I'm gonna live my life next to this. I'm not thinking that it's gonna come and kill me, and that everytime I sing it's gonna kill me a little more.' Now I just say, 'I'll give you this space in my brain; I'll give you this time in my life. but you can't touch my body, you can't touch my family, you can't touch my mind.' My songs write themselves still, but now it makes me happy instead of crazy."

Whatever it all means, some level of belief in the possibility of "inspiration" - of drawing from outside of her personality and point of view for the material - remains crucial to Hersh. "The songs seem like the truth to me," she says, "but not the truth that I'm going to live out in my life. I mean, I wouldn't presume to write about just myself and ask anybody to care about it. But there's something that I share with other people that's beneath my personality and my life, hopefully."

Having gone through such a difficult period of adjustment together, the members of Throwing Muses are understandably offended by anyone, including well-intentioned fans, attempting to romanticize misery and emotional distress. "I'm really, really anti-craziness," insists Hersh. "I have no idea why anyone would find that attractive." "It's insulting to people who really are disturbed," adds Donelly. "And it's insulting to life," concludes Hersh. "You're asked a lot just by being alive. You're asked to be a lot and make a lot of yourself. And to sit there wallowing in misery and poetry just seems backwards to me."

As the first American band signed to the English cult label 4AD, success come suddenly and intensely for Throwing Muses. It wasn't a financial success, but success in terms of their being able to play the kind of music they truly wanted to play for a relatively sizable audience. It has been only recently that the members of Throwing Muses have begun to question what they're doing at a quarter of a century old and still "playing" in a band. "It a11 happened really quickly at first," says Donelly. "We've had a long progression because none of us has had to work since we were 18 or 19." Says Hersh, "In the beginning, we didn't have any long-range goals or plans; we were just very driven by the moment. And the music itself was just very important to us. And the music is still important to us, although it gets more and more watered down."

Watered down? "The music's fine, it's just that it doesn't have the some hold on our lives anymore. It's not that the music has lost its focus, it's that we're less focused on the music."

This 'watering down' process - fueled in part by the departure of Langston, the pregnancies and childbirth, the growing hassles of touring, and the unceasing birthdays - had led the individual Muses to begin defining themselves outside of Throwing Muses, to think of the band as either a less permanent or more part-time project. "This is the first time we've all said 'So then you make another record, and then you tour, and then you make another record and then you tour, and then you make another record..." says Hersh. "I mean, how old can you get? So maybe we'll have to find another way to do this." Donelly agrees. "I would always want to do this in some capacity," she says, "but this is the first time that I'm feeling maybe I want to be a mother and an archaeologist instead." Donelly majored in archaeology. "Can't you just see me digging in my go-go boots?"

While Donelly contemplates parenting, and desert ruins, bassist Fred Abong has taken up carpentry. For Hersh, however, the door to philosophy and 'high art' seems soundly shut, as she illustrates with a story about the end of her college career. Shortly before her scheduled graduation, concurrent with the end of her first pregnancy and the Muses' first recording sessions, Hersh enrolled in an art therapy seminar on relaxation. "I thought, 'Great, I need to relax all right.' And they were all drawing these animals to help them relax. So I drew this little blue blowfish with a horn on it. Everyone else had drawn these unicorns in these beautiful lush forests. We were supposed to be drawing an animal that represented us, and I had this ridiculous-looking little thing lost in the middle of this huge page.

"Everyone was going, 'Kristin, that makes me feel so sad. It's like you have no environment. Don't you feel grounded in any way?' And I thought, 'Yeah, I feel like an abandoned blowfish.' So I didn't graduate. It's the last thing I ever did in college."

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