Judging from the chilly air of Kristin Hersh’s latest two
albums, the last place you’d expect to find her is in sunny
Palm Springs. As the iconic musician and Throwing Muses leader is
quick to point out, though, she hasn’t entirely enjoyed her
stay there.
“Palm Springs is a nice, smart place, but it’s just
so damn hot,” Hersh says with a laugh, after noting the
day’s 108-degree weather. “We put on the news every
day, and the weatherman looks beaten, as if to say
“˜I’ve been telling you the same thing for 20
years!'”
Despite the discomfort, Hersh’s move wasn’t exactly
irrational ““ she and her family moved down to warmer climates
in anticipation of her fourth child, born during the winter season.
She’s now in a family of six, with children ages 17, 11, 6,
and under a year.
“They’re great roommates,” she says.
“They’re much cooler than me and (my husband) Billy put
together.”
As anyone following the Muses should know, family and
musicianship has gone hand in hand in Hersh’s life, ever
since she started the band with her half-sister Tanya Donnelly at
just 14 years old. Propelled by the group’s dark, angular
sound and Hersh’s oddly unique voice which radiates equal
parts of urgency and contentment, the group has led a large and
passionate cult following ever since their supposed breakup after
1996’s “Limbo.”
For a band known for its passion during the melodrama of mid-90s
alternia, an end due to financial constraints is not only
anti-climactic, but also a bit unbelievable. But a contract with a
major label and failure to amass substantial attention outside
their underground following led to large debts from studio time and
little revenue in return. After years of financial frustration the
band was forced to quit, settling on an annual reunion show called
“Gut Pageant” for the groups’ fans to congregate
and relive their music.
Kristin Hersh, will be performing solo ““ without her Muses
““ at Largo on July 12.
“They were great, and so many fans would show up,”
Hersh said. “But each time we played the set was even older
than it was in the last show. So we started writing and playing new
music for the festival.”
Hersh wrote some new songs and sent them to bassist Bernard
Georges, who was so thrilled by the new material that it gave the
two a renewed determination to make another Muses album. The group
went into the studio under Hersh’s name and hired the rest of
the Muses as her backing band. The sessions resulted in
“Throwing Muses,” a self-titled LP that is loud,
raucous and raw ““ lacking the compositional intricacies of
previous long-players but filled with a vibrancy that undoes any
preconceptions of a throwaway reunion album.
“I guess the band has been off for five or six years
““ someone told me. But it felt so comfortable to play
together,” Hersh says. “Our version of comfort is being
explosive on stage, just sprinting. Your hands have to hurt, your
throat has to hurt. And it felt like we had no time off at
all.”
The liberating effects of this album kept her from cramming all
of her impulses onto her concurrently released solo effort,
“The Grotto.” Perhaps because of this, the music on
that album is sparse and cryptic, a labyrinth of surreal images
that are hard to shake. It’s a very strange record, Hersh
admits, recorded like a live session in the middle of the night
while she had a severe case of morning sickness. The late-night
eeriness makes it one of her most mysterious musical outings
yet.
“The sounds affect me,” Hersh says of her
songwriting process. “The lyrics have to be perfect, or
they’ll get stuck in my throat, as if I’m telling a
lie. But I’m not someone like Michael Stipe, I don’t
carry bits of poetry in my shoes.”
Hersh is well into adulthood now, but one of her most endearing
qualities is her ability to hold on to an inspired and almost
childlike approach to her art. And though the unsympathetic record
industry has always loomed over her head, she speaks of it with
concern, but not with bitterness. Bitterness, or vitriol, or angst
have rarely figured into the Muses’ passion-filled musical
vocabulary.
“We’re all in love with each other, and I think each
record is better than the other,” she says of her band.
“But I do see how the business doesn’t reward you for
not sucking.”
There’s a mark of concern in those words, but also a
resolve suggesting that her music won’t stop being made,
regardless.
Kristin Hersh performs at Largo Friday, July 12. Go to www.largo-la.com for more information.