Girl on Her Own

*****Reluctantly gone solo, former Throwing Muse 
Kristin Hersh talks roots and rhythm with Jakubowski.

     In the age of accelerated culture it's a truism that traditional communities are made and destroyed with sickening ease, recreated anew in another form and another place. These are the very constituencies that folk music needs to sustain and legitimise itself. Which is why, of all musical acts burdened with symbolism, picking up an acoustic guitar is probably the most overloaded. The Acoustic Instrument comes just dripping with meaning and signification, with notions of ethnicity/authenticity, with the smug aesthetics of naturalism. Paradoxically, it's when an artist tries to fulfil that aching desire for an unmediated relationship with the muse that aspiring folk musician lands in so mush hot water, and that ensures he or she sinks, weighed down by cultural baggage.

Kristin Hersh is more aware of these pitfalls than most; as leader of her band Throwing Muses, she's had to fend off such descriptions as "folk half-measures"(made by the inimitable Joe Carducci in his fundamentalist-rock rant Rock And The Pop Narcotic), as well as lazy comparisons to Joni Mitchell. "I figured it was just 'cos i was a lady," she says witheringly. "That and Bob Dylan's kinda like my dad's music, I guess. Like pot, hahaha!"

Raised for part of her childhood on a hippy commune with her half-sister Tanya Donelly(now fronting Belly), her teenage band - inspired by the likes of X, The Clash, Meat Puppets and Husker Du - was lucky enough to be picked up on by 4AD in 1986, recording what's come to be regarded as one of the most startling debut albums of the last decade, Throwing Muses, just as she became pregnant with her first child. Both emotional and musically, it seemed to arrive from another dimension, a dense clot of counter-rhythms and lacerating time-changes. "we never have roots," Kristin explains. "I came from somewhere else. If we did have roots, they're more blues than folk. Our chard progressions are not folk chord progressions, not like G major or something. 'Cos for me, acoustic songs had been just a pencil sketch of a finished song, I put all the loud colours over it, and Billy [her husband and manager] would say, well, you love those loud colours, but for other people they obscure the original drawing."

Despite the fluid grace of what's now ended up as her first solo album for 4AD, Hips And Makers, Kristin seemed to have been uncomfortable even with this idea. It all fits. During her solo turn at last year's 4AD

residency at the ICA, the very transparency of the show suddenly began to seem oddly opaque; the idea of a singer-songwriter playing her songs through an amplified PA, with all the trappings and ritual of a polite rock gig, deep down didn't seem very folk at all, whatever the surface impression. "I wish I could have the kind of ego that allows people to think they fill up that kind of space, and I don't," she says. "And i don't have any desire to be anyone but someone on a stage with their friends being a part of something, not being something. I definitely had a bad attitude when Billy was talking to me about it. Plus then you go play these fucking country and western redneck folk bars, and people opening for you, I don't mean to be rude, but they all wear fucking biker jackets and they're so defensive about what they do, and you start to think, well, there must be something wrong with it!"

What turned out to be right with it was, quite simply for Kristin, the transparency and purity of the interacting sounds of voice, guitar and cello. Though ironically Kristin calls its 15 pieces her "bedroom" songs, Hips And Makers succeeds as almost a modern kind of chamber music, sliding between light blues inflections and a more complex baroque. In this it's not unlike Workbook, the 1989 solo album by her friend Bob Mould (of Sugar), where the same plangency was shaded in by the same cellist, Jane Scarpantone. Or REM's recent output, where one of the biggest rock bands in the world has been able to retreat into an intimate, studiobound productivity, creating a kind of pop hermeticism that's at once instantly accessible and fantastically intricate.

"Being a rhythm guitarist," she says, "I'd been so orientated towards the beat, trying to push the song by sitting on top of the beat, pull it back by sitting behind it, and here's no beat, I was allowed to swim all over the place. I didn't know what was going to happen I thought, I'm a rhythm guitarist, I have time! But there shouldn't be time; I made sure that none of the songs were in real time; even if I was counting it was like three and a third, and then two and a half, just to make sure you could only trust the songs themselves."

"But before I even let the record form in head I had to travel the country playing my guitars," she continues. "I nearly gave up on the idea because I thought I can't make the parts I want to write happen. They're all so dead. I couldn't just strum some backbeat thing, and they're either ringing or percussive. And then I found one, a Collings. I played one chard and I literally choked up. Every note had a natural sustain; there's actual compression happening in the guitar. And I thought, what is wrong with all the other guitars that this sounds so incredible? But it meant that I could actually record natural reverb happening in the room. No wonder it's supposed to be mediocre and people just use this as a platform for politics and goofy poetry."

It isn't just the baggage of folk ideology that crushes the life and worth out of so many groups, but also the sheer overabundance of what has become a devalued commodity the song. The failure of most pop/rock to deliver on the song's promise of self-invention and 'natural' autobiography has left a void in which its doggerel, home truths or 'attitude' can now gradually be superscribed by stronger, self-sufficient experimental genres ('Ardkore Techno being an obvious example). This new impulse has even been lacking in Throwing Muses' last few albums, and it had almost entirely disabled Sugar. Where's the difference, the elan in solidity?  

Kristin has long attempted to dissemble this last, most crucial element of songwriting; she'd rather her troubled adolescent and adult years were only read into the song as tracing at best; rather talk about her playing than what are, admittedly, difficult enough lyrics to talk about. But in the end, the notion of the artist as vessel or medium, through whom the music flows, is perhaps the one that chimes most with the reality of Hips And Makers it works, even if its medium is the last thing you'd expect to work, for all the above reasons.

"I hate it when people say, 'I love it when I get depressed, 'cos I can write,'" Kristin concludes. "All that means is that they're below the level of songwriting, that they think psycho garbage is songwriting. That stuff is to clean you out, so you can really start to hear the music."
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