Lightning FayKristin Hersh March 8, 2011
Since founding seminal art-rock band Throwing Muses when she was all of 14 years old, Kristin Hersh has been a busy lady. She released eight albums with the Muses, four with her new band 50FootWave and nine solo records. In 2007, along with her husband/manager Billy O'Connell and a few others, Hersh founded CASH Music, a non-profit organization, dedicated to bringing open-source online tools to musicians to help them share their music for free or for profit.
2010 saw two big releases for Hersh. In July, she released Crooked, her latest solo album, which is accompanied by a book of essays and a wealth of online content. August saw the publication of Rat Girl, a memoir that focuses on Hersh's eighteenth year, when she scored her first record deal, became pregnant with her oldest son and began to struggle with bipolar disorder.
This interview was conducted via email.
Lightning Fay: I think Crooked is really one of the most unique releases in recent memory. How did you come up with the idea of publishing the album as a book? Once the ball was rolling, was it very difficult to pull together?
Kristin Hersh: Whereas the mainstream recording industry claims that music has been devalued by the listeners' newfound ability to obtain it for nothing, I think that in this case, it's money that's being devalued. People still need music that resonates, that has an impact and they show their appreciation for it by allowing it to resonate, to have an impact. I do, however, believe that the CD format isn't worth much. We all know that it's a piece of plastic that put a lot of money into record executives' pockets and that's about it. I couldn't get excited about releasing another piece of plastic, but books are still intrinsically valuable. The Crooked book also gave me the opportunity to write essays in the atmosphere of each song; a little esoteric maybe, but still a way to sell a song's value. My twisted version of marketing!
Fay: You play all the instruments on Crooked, an impressive feat indeed. I was particularly taken by your drumming (the chorus of "Fortune" really stands out for me). How long have you played the drums? Do drum parts ever come to you first, or are they something you always come up with after a song has started to take shape?
Hersh: Drumming is definitely the best part of being in the studio. Bass is next on the fun scale and then guitar and vocals (my real job) are way down on the list! There's just no way I was gonna let anybody wrestle the drumsticks out of my hands this time ... plus, I had no friends around, so nobody was even trying.
When I first hear a song, it seems to produce itself before my eyes (ears), but I'm sure overdubs change in the long process of rehearsal, preproduction and recording. The part that doesn't change is the skeleton of the song itself. I'm not allowed to touch that.
Fay: Did you try your hand at any instruments you'd never played before?
Hersh: Not this time ... I've played seriously stupid instruments in the past, but Crooked only wanted a jazz mic-ing approach and a simple sonic vocabulary. The resulting sound is like recording a sound check. It's funny, you never know what a record is going to ask to sound like, but I always go in with a preconceived notion that then has to be proven ridiculous.
Fay: In addition to the album itself, the Crooked release also contains two EPs, Crooked Beginnings (essentially completed demos) and Crooked Remainders (finished tracks not included on the album). How do you decide which songs to leave off the album? Songs like "Elizabeth June" and "Bliss," for example, seem so strong to me. Is it difficult to leave them behind?
Hersh: Songs on a record should work like sentences in a paragraph, so if one doesn't help move the message forward, it goes on to other things. Of course, if a song sucks, it just dies on the vine, but a real song'll turn up somewhere else sooner or later. Sometimes years later.
It can be difficult to tell if a song is playing a striking role in a piece or just not in keeping with the others. I admit to having made some mistakes in the past, given this.
Fay: You've been making available on your website links to demos you're working on for a new Throwing Muses record. How do you decide which songs belong to which project (solo/Muses/50FootWave)? Could a Kristin solo song just as easily become a Muses song, or are they very different outlets for you?
Hersh: My answer to this question is a stupid one (is that ok?). I write solo songs on my Collings guitars, 50FootWave songs on my SG's or Les Paul and Muses songs on my Tele or Strat. My drummers, in particular, think that this is an inane method of song selection.
Fay: In Rat Girl, you describe the way that sound comes to you as color, different songs or passages having dominant colors, sometimes with other colors as accents, the way that certain notes distinguish themselves from the whole of a chord. Do you actually see these colors as you're hearing the sounds?
Hersh: I sense the colors. They just are. I don't know that I'd call this "seeing" but we generally don't use other senses to experience color.
Fay: Can you tell us what led you to found CASH Music? What are some of the ways that musicians are utilizing the tools that CASH makes available?
Hersh: My problems with the mainstream recording industry were simple: they dumbed-down product and musician in order to sell that package to the lowest common denominator and money was the whole point. Not for the musicians, of course!
CASH was my response. It allows musicians to reach listeners without the involvement of an industry middleman. I allow that recording and touring cost money and ask people to support musicians directly if they can, but I give music away so that anyone, no matter what their financial standing, can participate. It's all about resonance and impact.
Fay: In my experience, growing up in the music scenes that came out of the ashes of the punk-rock movement, there was always a strong impulse not to sell out, and we endlessly debated what that meant. These days, it seems that nearly every band has a song featured in a television commercial. While the economic arguments for bands to take these deals (freedom to innovate, freedom from debt, freedom from a 40-hour workweek, etc.) are clear, there's still a part of me that winces each time a three-minute piece of art becomes a fifteen-second pitch. As a musician, how do you feel about this trend? Have you ever allowed one of your songs to be used in this way? Would you ever?
Hersh: I've never done this, but no marketer's ever been interested in my unpalatable music, either! I don't like that our ethics descended into the corporate mire, but they did so with the acceptance of grunge as pop back in the '90s.
Fay: You currently do not work with any record label and release all of your music online directly to your fans. Your recording costs are covered completely by donations from fans. Can you explain how this donation process works? Do you make your entire living by playing music, or do you have to take other kinds of work as well?
Hersh: My husband was my manager and now he has to work a day job. Our family is supported by this. I don't ask that fans pay my personal bills, only my recording costs; my survival is up to me. It's art that needs help. I may soon need a day job, but so far, my book has been my day job.
Fay: You and your family split your time between Providence, Rhode Island, and New Orleans, Louisiana. When did you move to New Orleans, and what drew you to that place?
Hersh: We live in New Orleans for the school year because my husband teaches at Loyola University there, though I do have other ties to the place. I made a few records in the French Quarter at Daniel Lanois' Kingsway studio. We actually lived in the studio for months and months every session -- it was a home away from home -- and we still have a lot of friends in the city, even post-Katrina, so there was no culture shock for me inherent in the move.
Fay: Were you in New Orleans for Katrina? What effect did the storm have on you and your family?
Hersh: No, but we had our own storm in Ohio a month after Katrina. Two floors flooded and the ceiling collapsed while I was in London playing an anniversary show for 4AD. Our family actually hid out with friends in New Orleans because we had nowhere to go. We lost not only our house and belongings, but our savings as well because the insurance company had altered their support criteria for flood victims the month before, during Katrina. Someone else had to take out a loan for us so we could shortfall sell our house, a loan we'll be paying off for years.
We had no home for ten months, while I tried to play enough shows and sell enough records to feed the kids, but this was when the music business was collapsing and both my record and the tour lost money. So we lived on credit cards and got deeper and deeper in debt, as "musician" became a job that cost rather than earned money. It's been a rough few years, but we survived, unlike some other musicians and we're now slowly chipping away at that flood debt.
Fay: I love New Orleans dearly, but it seems to me that it's known for every type of American folk music except punk/indie rock. What's it like for you down there as an artist? Is there a scene for the kind of music you play? Do you play out around town?
Hersh: I love New Orleans, too -- its romance and beauty, the sweet olive that seems always to be in bloom, the sultry air and history of the place -- but I don't play there. The only kind of music they care about is 100 years old!
Fay: Many people associate you with Providence, where you were living when you started Throwing Muses. But as you explain in Rat Girl, you lived your early childhood in Georgia "in the woods in a communal dwelling, a gigantic barn full of hippies." What can you tell us about that time in your life? Also, can you speak a little bit about being a Southerner who moved up north (and has subsequently moved back down south)?
Hersh: It was made very clear to me as a child that I was no Yankee and never would be one, no matter where we lived. My entire extended family was in the south, I was polite and gentle and the softening trees of the south gave the air the "right" scent and feel. I never really felt that I belonged up north, for these reasons. People are harsher up north, colder, though they're usually warm-hearted under that gruff exterior. And the accent is much thicker than people generally know! I had trouble understanding people.
I longed for the south to the point where I would hide out at Vic Chesnutt's to "go home." That was my south: Georgia. New Orleans is different, not so genteel. It's right next to Texas, so there's a lot of barbecue and "yee-haw!" to the place. And it's rough. Very dangerous. When I lost Vic Chesnutt last Christmas, I lost my safe house and my south.
Fay: In Rat Girl you explain that "The more you love music, the less music you love ... Bad music is angrifying and good music is so painfully intense." I'm curious about what kind of music was making it through that filter when you were a kid, starting Throwing Muses. What music was turning you on at that time? And on the flip-side, what are you listening to now?
Hersh: When I was younger, I listened to the Violent Femmes, X, the Meat Puppets ... then my friends: the Pixies, Volcano Suns, Pond, Vic Chesnutt ... now I'd say my favorite band is the Moore Brothers, out of California. They have their own musical vocabulary, but it's not willfully kooky -- just honest.
Fay: You write about the onset of bipolar disorder in Rat Girl, and the title track off Crooked is about the relief you were able to feel, years later, through acupuncture treatments. It seems from an outside perspective that, even while you suffered with this illness, you were still able to enjoy a fairly rich life (supporting yourself as a musician, regularly recording and touring, and raising four boys with your longtime husband). How badly did bipolar affect your life before you discovered acupuncture, and how different is your life now?
Hersh: I don't like to whine, as I see a lot of people with diagnoses using them as an excuse for lack of productivity, healthy relationships, financial security, etc., but my husband can illustrate the problem pretty effectively because he was there. You do what you have to do -- everybody does when pushed -- but it was an almost unbearable struggle. I do not associate mental illness with creativity; bipolar just made everything hard. Being awake for weeks at a time, hearing things that weren't there, shaking and sick with the side effects of medication, trying to get through a day, an hour, a minute, suicidal with the knowledge that suicide would take me way from my children, wondering if they'd be better off without me ... it's a terrible disease.
Acupuncture offered a cure when nothing else did. My life has been completely turned around, like a rebirth. I feel like a child again.
