Kristin Hersh Goes It Alone For Sky Motel
Ex-Throwing Muses singer/songwriter says she
crafted songs, instead of channeling them, for
third solo effort.
Correspondent Matt Kelemen reports:
Kristin Hersh is nursing a throat infection.
"I don't usually sound this sultry," the singer/songwriter said
over the phone from British Columbia, where she had just
performed.
The former guitarist/vocalist for college-radio heroes Throwing
Muses is touring in support of her critically lauded third solo
album, Sky Motel, released in July.
Hersh's throat infection isn't serious enough to curtail her tour,
but she said it was aggravated by lack of sleep: She got stuck
in a traffic snarl-up caused by a school of Phish fans who had
just seen the jam-band perform nearby.
Offstage, Hersh has company on this jaunt 霠she's traveling
with her husband/manager, Billy O'Connell, and two of her three
children: Ryder, 8, and Wyatt, 2. (Dylan, 13, didn't go.)
But onstage, Hersh is alone for the first time.
She was backed on previous solo tours for Hips and Makers
(1994) and Strange Angels (1998). Her band 霠Robert Rust
(keyboards), Belly guitarist Tom Gorman (bass) and former
Muses member David Narcizo (drums) 霠played the summer
European leg of the tour for Sky Motel. But when they passed up
the six-month tour of the States, Hersh decided to go it alone.
"I'm glad to finally be able to play solo, lonely as it is
sometimes," Hersh said. "I will challenge myself more than I
will challenge other musicians."
Hersh culled the songs she's playing from a "dream setlist"
created using suggestions posted on the Throwing Muses
website (www.throwingmusic.com). The result was a 75-song
touring oeuvre that reaches back 16 years 霠when a teenage
Hersh and her stepsister Tanya Donelly decided to start a
band in their hometown, Newport, R.I.
Hersh said they used to play the Living Room 霠"the best
club in America at the time" 霠in nearby Providence.
"Everybody played there," she recalled. "R.E.M. and the
[Violent] Femmes, X, Minutemen, H榊ker Dﰬ Volcano Suns,
[Meat] Puppets. We got to play with these amazing bands
just because I bullied my way in there and wouldn't take any
sh-- from them, because I was suicidal."
Hersh's bipolar disorder, which is practically alt-rock
mythology, has been both a blessing and a curse. The songs
she heard in her head found their way onto the Muses'
recorded work, from their eponymous 1986 debut to the
band's final recording, 1996's Limbo.
"I used to hear songs as if someone was playing a Throwing
Muses record in the next room that hadn't been recorded yet,"
Hersh said. "I would get very sick if I didn't write them. I could
have seizures. And it made me feel like a crazy person. I was
always fighting the songs, thinking, 'No, no, no! Not another
song! Stay away!' And I think that act alone is what made the
songs so freaky."
After the Muses broke up and she released Strange Angels,
the songs began coming less frequently. Last year she
recorded an album of Appalachian folk music, Murder, Misery
and Then Goodnight. She decided on a different songwriting
tack for what would become Sky Motel.
This time, instead of channeling her songs, Hersh crafted
them on a guitar. She recorded the album in August 1998 at
Kingsway Studio in New Orleans with producer Trina
Shoemaker, who had just spent six months working with
Sheryl Crow on what would become the Grammy-winning The
Globe Sessions.
"I think [Sky Motel] should have been a Throwing Muses
record, and I tried to honor that," Hersh said. "Trina is a big
admirer of purity of vision, and she and I just made sure that
all of the sounds were funny ... sounds that don't ordinarily go
together. That's what I mean by funny. Psychedelia funny,
retro funny. Velvet Underground."
In Shoemaker, Hersh found a collaborator who didn't mind
working with an artist whose kids were a constant presence in
the studio.
"We have a real special working relationship," Shoemaker
said. "It was really fun for me to reinvent the way the session
was going to go for her, changing it to accommodate children
and a mom, rather than the rock 'n' roll hours all of the time.
"Kristin is a highly inventive individual," she added. "She really
knows how to make her records. Even if she doesn't know
what she wants to do or how she wants to do it, she still
really has a handle on somehow describing the scene that the
song is supposed to be in. And then I just follow her around
with microphones. We're inventive together."
The result was a mixture of earthy acoustic tracks ("White
Trash Moon" [RealAudio excerpt] and "Costa Rica") and
wah-wah-guitar-drenched pop psychedelia ("Fog" [RealAudio
excerpt], "A Cleaner Light") reminiscent of Muses material.
Spare leads snake their way through the album to the rhythm
of bongo-beat percussion loops, and lyrics graze in
surrealistic pastures that her older fans will instantly
recognize.
But on the album's opener, "Echo" (RealAudio excerpt),
Hersh still is searching for a way to balance the instability that
fires her creativity with her identity as a mother and working
musician. "I crave a midnight something/ I crave and
something hunts me down/ I'm scaring everybody/ I'm wearing
everybody down," she sings.
"It's hard to spit out something that people can call you crazy
for having created," Hersh said. "The acoustic career helps,
because people say, 'Look, she's got these kids, and she's
married and she's nice.' And that's not true either, of course.
The two personas together 霠the psycho-bitch and the sweet
housewife 霠could probably describe any human being."
--
gender is just an excuse, relationship shouldn't just be an excuse,
love is often an excuse, although sometimes these excuses are all
we have to hold onto,
death is the reason and living is the celebration
- Beth Orton
--
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