Kristin Hersh's Personal Best

KRISTIN HERSH: I remember I wrote this song in a similar position to now, on the floor, in the corner of a weird-ass bedroom with wall-to-wall carpet and no air, just like this. It flew out, like my favourite songs do, in a very bossy fashion. But like most things that fly out with their muscles already flexed, it needed to be balanced, so the second half of the song has a sweetness to it. That part is actually about baby Ryder, the kid over there [points to her son].

It’s actually really hard to put your children in a song and still be able to perform it, so I don’t play this one too often. I’m honest about all my life stories and I do relive them on stage, but when it comes to your children you’re truly pulled into the physical plane. You cannot live in the metaphysical when it comes to your children, so it’s sort of an unusual cheat code to put things like dreams and children in a song, and it’s not exactly the end game.

So, for me, “A Loon” sits in a very uncomfortable place of honesty, but a very human honesty. It doesn’t achieve genuine spirituality, like some of the other songs that are truly not of this world. This one is absolutely, utterly embedded in the world, as are we, so I figure it plays an interesting role in not being metaphysical, in saying “No, you’re here right now and it feels like this, and you’re sitting on the floor of a room with wall-to-wall carpet and there’s no air in here.”

BEST FIT: Is that Ryder on your lap in the video for the Strings EP version of “A Loon”?

Yes. It’s a tough song for me. That video was actually shot live, so I was actually performing the song in that moment as opposed to in the video for “Your Ghost” where I was lip syncing. I’m present when the song is playing, but when I’m performing it’s not attractive. My eyes are rolling back in my head and I’m practically drooling. That’s the contrast with “A Loon”, because Ryder was actually there and I had to deal with that.

It’s really scary to be able to create life and then be responsible for it, and I think that’s why it sounds strident and sad. It’s very difficult for me to watch that video or listen to that song, and I feel like that’s why I chose it, because you can’t deny the broken aspect of who you are. If you’re going to have the balls to write a song and let anybody hear it, you gotta be humble about it. You gotta hurt yourself. You gotta crucify yourself. And this was my way of doing it, to put my kid on the line. It’s so wrong and it’s so right at the same time.

I remember you saying that the songs for Hips & Makers were written without really intending them to be heard by anyone other than your husband at the time.

Oh yeah. But I feel like every album is made with a similar thought. To be honest, that album was just my way of getting the Muses out of our Warner Brothers contract. I had already said to them, “Look, I’m never going to give you bimbo product. Let us go and I’m out of here,” and their response was “No, it doesn’t work like that. We’re going to destroy you instead.” So I offered them a solo record, thinking that they were never going to allow it. I mean, they didn’t like my band so why would they like one-third of my band?

When they said okay, I thought they were just being nice or feeling sorry for me or something. I didn’t honestly think they were going to release it. Why would they? I mean, if you listen to it, it doesn’t make any sense. They actually made a song [“Your Ghost”] with no drums and long silences a single, I guess because Michael Stipe was on it. But they did let the Muses go, after University.

I guess you were the most surprised of all when the album ended up doing quite well.

Well, it's not like the public votes for fame or success. It's all bought. So as soon as Warner Brothers thought that Michael Stipe was on it, they bought promotion which buys success. That’s just how it works. There's no one in the music industry who hasn't had their fame bought for them. I was just one of the few who’ve said, “No, you can stop doing this for me. This is so wrong, and this is not music.”

The industry will let you in with idiosyncrasy. That's how you stand out from the crowd of everyone who's trying to suck to succeed. But once you’re in, you're immediately supposed to drain yourself of musical blood and shave off your idiosyncrasy. They call that a crossover hit, which to me just means that you get more and more middle of the road. Crossing over also means dying, essentially. Your music dies. You get money and fame because they buy it for you. It’s just a machine. There’s no music left in it.

Even though the solo album was your idea, it was still a shock to you that they used your actual name instead of Throwing Muses, right?

Oh yeah. That was awful! [laughs]

The thing with 4AD is that the art director Vaughan Oliver and I would argue all the time, in a respectful way. I just had no patience for the glossy, British, painterly beauty that he liked. I was always like, “Could you listen to the record please? It’s American. It’s goofy, it’s raw, it’s fucked up. You gotta give us a fucked up cover.” His response was something like, “Why would you fuck up art?” which I suppose is a good point.

But I remember one day he called me from Japan, in the middle of the night, and he said, “Kristin, I’ve found where we agree and it’s Shinro Ohtake, the Japanese painter.” So from that point on Vaughan and I used Shinro’s paintings for the album covers, and Hips & Makers was lucky enough to have one of his paintings. I was really happy, but when they sent me the finished artwork and I saw that they had written my name on it I laughed and said, “Oh no, no, we’re not doing that,” and they were like, “Whose name did you want on it?” I was like, “Ah, shit.”

It worked out pretty well in the end…

Yeah, the only problem is, as Dave Narcizo says, Throwing Muses isn’t anyone in particular. It’s the name of a kind of music, a kind of sound, and Kristin Hersh isn’t. I’ve had people talk to me and refer to me as if I wasn’t standing right in front of them and I think it’s an important line to draw. If the music’s good, then it’s not me. It’s not my name. But if it’s bad then, yeah, definitely blame me for it. But a song should belong to the listener. If I’ve done my job right, I should have been able to channel something for them. If I haven’t, well, go find somebody who’s able to do that.

When we had folk songs that travelled across oceans and down through generations, there was no name attached, and I think that’s important. So I think the name thing is not real smart. In this case, if I say, “Hi, I’m Kristin Hersh and I’d like to share this with you,” then you’re not fully taking it in, are you? It’s not really yours.

BEST FIT: Speaking of Purgatory/Paradise, you’ve chosen “Sunray Venus” next.

KRISTIN HERSH: Oh, did I? How perfect a segue. You're welcome!

You’ve said in the past that this is your favourite Throwing Muses record, partly because it was the first one made all on your own terms, without a label breathing down your necks.

Yeah, we had freed ourselves from Warner Brothers many years earlier, but what that meant was running out of money. Obviously, a tour costs money. A record costs money. So suddenly we were just abandoned, in theory, and we had to make that work. So Purgatory/Paradise was actually self-released and funded by Strange Angels, so it was the first listener-supported release. We listed all of their names in the cover art, and it was very touching to do that.

It was a long time coming, too. I didn't know there was such a thing as being listener supported. It seemed like a lot to ask of people, because sometimes just going to a show is so hard, you know? You gotta get out of work. You gotta find parking. Maybe you skip dinner because you gotta buy a beer for, like, 10 bucks when you could be drinking at home instead, listening to the record that you bought. I felt like I was asking so much of them, but they said, “We saw you die, and we don't want you to die again. We want these songs.”

So the listeners facilitated it, and that meant that I didn't have anyone looking over my shoulder saying, “This doesn't suck enough to succeed,” which is the only message you get: suck, suck, suck, suck, and you'll get famous because we'll buy it for you. All that was gone. It was just us and the listeners, and they don’t want us to suck. It’s like I used to tell the record label, “If you want sexist imagery and you want bad, so-called radio songs, you’re convincing my people to not buy the record. You’re losing sales.” But they didn’t care. They were like, “Yeah, but we get different sales. We get these dumbass sales over here.”

Purgatory/Paradise was the first time where there were no dumbass sales. I didn’t have to lie even a little bit. Not that I was ever really good at that, but there was always this voice in my ear saying “Fail! Fail! Fail!” As long as you’re good, you fail. It’s like asking a firefighter to not put out fires. You’re supposed to put out fires, which is what I was doing. But they were like, “Oh no, no, we don’t do that here. We’re playing dress up. We just wear the fucking firefighter hats.”

Anyway, “Sunray Venus” was clearly, in my opinion, a radio song. Why insult any listener and say that pop as a format exists only in the sphere of marketing? It doesn’t. It's a beautiful format, and “Sunray Venus” was a great radio song. I don't know if it did well or anything like that, and I don't really care, but I like the idea of taking pop back and making it not an insult, not a fashion item. The song chugs along and it says its piece. Okay, it might be a little strange for some radio, but for every dumbass music business job there's a subculture where quality is applied. There are great labels, great radio stations, great record stores, great everything. Humans are substantive, you know? And we should be encouraged to not suck, not discouraged.

The video for “Sunray Venus” is brilliant, because it’s essentially a lyric video but not the actual lyrics of the song. Only Throwing Muses would do that.

It's funny you mention that, because on the first show here in Australia I was bonkers with sleep deprivation and forgot the second verse to one of my newer songs where I didn't have a lot of autopilot going on. Afterwards I ran off stage and checked Spotify to see what the second verse was, and it was just like the “Sunray Venus” video with totally nonsensical lyrics. I still don't know what the second verse is!

And maybe you never will.

Yeah, exactly! I'm pretty sure it was okay, but who knows? It's gone forever. It was a moment.

Another reason I chose this song is because it's the first song that I ever played while being aware, when I was no longer dissociating. When I agreed to do the press tour for Purgatory/Paradise, I explained to people that I don’t play music anymore because I can’t disappear and that’s where the music had always been, in the disappearing. But then I was on the BBC, on the radio, talking about the record and the woman interviewing me knew the story. She knew that I couldn’t play anymore, but she said, live on the air, “Play the single for us.”

I looked at her as if to say, “You can’t do this,” and there was dead air for a minute after they handed me a guitar. I didn’t know what was going to happen. I was formulating a response in my head, thinking ‘Alright, I’m going to have to be honest about what’s been going on all this time,’ but instead I just played the first few chords of the song. It was the first time I had ever looked down and seen my hands playing. Usually I would just be staring straight ahead, picturing the fretboard in my mind, because that’s how I knew where my hands were, but it would mean that I couldn’t stop focusing and couldn’t even blink. This time, when I looked down, I could blink, my hands knew the chords, and I sort of knew what the song was about.

I can’t tell you what it’s about right now, but while I’m playing it I know the stories in my life that it came from. In that moment I knew all of it, and it was really kind of… I want to say fun. It was nice. It wasn’t the devil at work. It wasn’t bad Kristin or anything like that. It was just a song, and I was fascinated by that. It wasn’t evil, it was just a wonderful song.

Afterwards, when I’d finished playing it, I looked at this woman like ‘Yay!’ and she was over there sobbing. Tears were pouring out of her and there was more dead air. Nobody was clapping or anything. It was just silent. I saw the engineer behind her making this sign like, “Talk more,” but I didn’t have anything else to say. Now every time I play this song I remember, ‘Oh, this is a song that taught me it's better to be here than to disappear.’

KRISTIN HERSH: This song is so cute. I finished this one on Moonlight Beach in California, near the concession stand, but it was started in New Orleans. I remember thinking, ‘What the hell are you doing, song?’ because I was all by myself and the only guitar around was a classical guitar that had been tuned to DADGAD. I mean, I don’t really care which instrument I play. The songs just use what’s there. Like, if there’s only a piano around, I can make it happen, or I just hold it in my head.

With “Summer of Love”, I just grabbed this classical guitar in DADGAD and did my best with that. When it was done, I called Dave and played the song for him. He didn’t know what was happening. Like, this is just not how my songs sound. But it was resonating in a way that I found a little bit disturbing for something that sounds so sweet. Then I realised it was the kind of song I wrote as a teenager, before Throwing Muses released our first record. I think the band started when were about 12 years old. We started playing out when we were 14, and by the time I was 15 I was writing songs like this. They were always very acoustic, very American, but almost spoken.

Not very much of that ended up on that first record, maybe none of it actually. We were sort of a party band in our world. People would come to our practices and nobody knew we were weird. We were on an island, you know? We were just one of the bands. We would play on these hardcore bills and everything was so distorted that nobody knew what we were doing. They just thought it was hardcore, but it was kind of country-punk, which was an American thing then. I’m from the South, you know, so there’s a lot of country, folk, and Appalachian stuff in my blood, and that sounded just crazy enough with the punk for the people in Boston to like it. So it would be really fun. We’d play in these garage-rock bars in Boston where they’d flip over the pool table, we’d get set up, and people would sing along.

I want to say it was fun, and yet I was clearly out of my mind [laughs]. As well as being fun, it kinda screamed complexity and strangeness and alien nature, and that played really well around there. And yet, when we were signed by my beloved Ivo, he didn’t get any of that. He was like, “No, no, that’s the stupid stuff so we’re taking that off. No more American stuff. No more acoustic guitar, no more fun. We’re going to make you only sound like an insane alien.” So the first record not only has this kind of glossy British production that didn’t suit us, but it was only the stuff that was counterpoint to songs like “Summer of Love”. It was unbalanced, I think, because that’s not who we were. We had this other side to us that, and I guess you can hear it a little bit on “Rabbits Dying” and “America (She Can’t Say No”). That’s who we really were.

Besides “Summer of Love”, there are two other songs on this record – “Drugstore Drastic” and “Libretto” – that I could have written when I was 15, and it was so nice to hear them again. There are three production techniques on the record, which has nine songs, and those are the three that harken back to our high school days. It was really sweet to revisit that sound from our, but with the added depth of a bunch of years in between. It’s funny, because when we play a good show these days what comes back from the audience isn’t adulation or even exuberance. It’s relief, I swear. If I do talk to the people there, they express something like “I knew you could do it” instead of, like, “Yayyy!”

It's a relief to me as well, and I feel like that’s what I have earned over the years: all the relief I feel being able to transmute pain through songs and to live all these stories and see that they’re not anything to be embarrassed by. Like, all we have as a band is humanity. We don’t have anything else that would impress people in any other way. And there’s no sheen to it. There’s actually something as nice as a song that’s very simple. With “Summer of Love”, “Drugstore Drastic”, and “Libretto”, I wanted them to be simple. I was like, “You’re going to transmute pain but it’s going to be with so much colour.

BEST FIT: There was a bit of a story in the press release for “Summer of Love” about the song starting as a bet with a guy around the idea that the seasons don’t change us, and how we respond to love like octopuses moving across the ocean floor. I love that idea.

It’s funny because I actually said cuttlefish, which change their coloration really fast, but the record label changed it to octopus because nobody knows what a cuttlefish is.

Fair. I’ve never seen a live cuttlefish, only what you find left of them on the beach.

Yeah, those ones don’t change colour too readily!

Actually I think the quote was a little bit squished up because we weren’t talking about seasons like winter. Seasons like that don’t change us. It was more a question about the seasons of our lives, and all the chapters and the weather that happens to us. Are they a fundamental reality? Do they shift us? It was more about that kind of coloration.

Maybe it sounds like a pointless conversation to have but what we meant was, can we live through time, subject to the elements, and still have a happy ending? If you are living according to your essence, how traumatised will you actually be by elements that shift on your timeline? Your essence knows that time is an illusion but your body knows it isn't, so what kind of cuttlefish are you? What are your colours? And is it okay that they change this much? How are you gonna die well if you don't know how to change colour subject to the elements?

And yeah, I still owe that guy a buck.

What colour are you right now?

Aquamarine and yellow with a little bit of burnt orange. The aquamarine is the sky in all its freedom and, at the same time, its terrifying exposure, and the yellow is the hearth. It's where you might be safe, but you gotta shove yourself out into aquamarine. And the burnt orange is sort of the opposite of both. I should stop talking, it's really early here and I'm really jetlagged but that's the truth. If you don’t have synaesthesia, it won’t make any sense [laughs].

We’ve actually been working with similar colours for a while. If you look at Purgatory/Paradise, it’s all very turquoise and yellow. As you know, it was also a book, but that’s only because my drummer and bass player made me write it. I was like, “No, you don’t get to just tell me to write a book. It likely takes fucking years and it’s really hard.” They said, “No, you can do it. We’ve seen you write books before,” and then Dave said he would do the artwork and that would be hard too. I was like, “Dave, that’s just pictures, that’s not hard!”

But actually we had to work together to tease apart the thematic elements of these sonic structures that made no sense. He had to apply those visually and I had to apply them according to prose and storylines, and what we released was that there was so much turquoise and yellow, which goes back to Palm Springs, that place on Mars where we lived.

I remember Dave saying something like, “It's our lifestyle. We have this little island where our hearth is always burning, but we have to go all over the world. We have to escape this island, and then we fucking die of exposure every time we do, but we’ve got to bounce back.” It’s like there’s a rubberband that pulls us back home, and in between is this crazy ass, burnt orange. It's like, whoa, where's your cuttlefish? I really should stop talking! [laughs]

It's funny, because I don’t think it’s the same with books – at least not for me – but putting a song out is the most ‘yikes’ thing you can do. It’s like the first line of “Summer of Love”, a “streak of yikes.” Looking at all the songs we’ve published, it’s so wrong. It’s like, ‘Oh, here’s my soul. You want lipstick on it?’ and I have no capacity for that. I don’t have any interest in anyone hearing any songs. I have zero ambition in any way.

I wanted to be a housewife, but nobody would pay my bills, so I’m always confused about what I do and yet that's where my crucifixion lies. That's where my humility lies. I gotta show up, I gotta shame myself, and I realise it's not even my song, it's theirs – if you find the right person. You know, you can have your hearth and hide there, and that’ll kill you. You can have your blue sky and your exposure, and that'll kill you. But the burnt orange in between? That’s where your itchy body, your humanity, your personhood, your stuck-in-time-ness, your oh-god-I’m-gonna-die-ness is.