Throwing Muses’ Kristin Hersh: “If you fight a wave, you’re gonna wipe out”
For Kristin Hersh, songcraft is a bit like surfing. “The surfers, their approach to their boards is like my approach to my guitar,” she says of the associates of her pro-surfer son Bodhi. “Their approach to the ocean is my approach to music itself. And something about their chill vibe is not weed, but meeting the ocean halfway with the board, and I meet music halfway with the guitar, which does about half the work. Your job is then to disappear and not get in a way. If you fight a wave, you’re gonna wipe out. And if I fight the song, it’s gonna die in my hands. I’m gonna wipe out.”
Over the course of her Uncut Q&A chat with Tom Pinnock – the second of the weekend, to a rain-braving crowd at the Talking Heads stage and with Hersh arriving in her very first pair of “actual British wellies!” – many of Hersh’s quirky and unique angles on music and its mysterious making are touched upon. She discusses her synesthesia: the D minor chord is “like an ochre”, E major 7 “burnt orange”. Her practice of writing songs for Throwing Muses or 50 Foot Wave on band-specific kinds of guitar – “My drummers tell me it’s a really stupid system”. And her acceptance that she really is the “conduit” for music that she’s been considered for much of her near-fifty-year career.
“There’s no other way to write a song except to disappear,” she says, “because if it’s smaller than you, no-one needs it. As an experiential, as a body, you can spit out a song and you can hear it at the same time. But as an identity, as an ego, you’re just going to obstruct the process. So I will say ‘channel’ now, because I’m old, I earned it.”
She speaks openly of the two-year period after Throwing Muses’ 1996 album Limbo when she simply “stopped hearing music”, and of when the songs returned in a New Mexico café, courtesy of one Leonard Crowdog. “Suddenly I saw the music coming out of the speakers… I could see it. It was all over me, and I remembered what music was. I started crying, not sobbing, but there were tears all over my face. And then I turned around… and there was all this smoke coming toward us, and in the back of the cafe, it was a Native American music blessing taking place that this dude, Leonard Crowdog, had paid a lot of money for, but it missed his guitar and hit me in the back of the head.”
One thing she did have control over though, she explained, was the rise of Pixies, insisting early on that their then Boston support act sign with their management and label because Throwing Muses were “so lonely” being the “American goofy kids” on “glossy and ethereal” 4AD. “I thought Charles [Thompson, AKA Black Francis] was a woman,” she says of their first meeting. “I thought he was a wicked cool lesbian. He had a shaved head, he was really soft, he sang really high, and he was powerful in a really gender-free way. I was disappointed to find out he was a dude, to be honest.”
Revisiting the early Muses and Pixies joint tours leaves Hersh fighting back tears. “I was an alien,” she says. “And so for Charles to pull me away from alienation into enthusiasm, he was just my first musical pal to say, ‘No, your voice is what it is’. I have had to pay that forward a dozen times in my life to most of these people who are no longer living, they took their own lives because they didn’t know it was OK… We lose a lot of people who come with their own voice and don’t realise, it hurts. Those tours, as homesick as we were, as lost as we were, as confused as we were, they set the stage for a kind of safety net, which is, ‘You are as you are’.”
Many of those losses, she argues, were amongst artists crushed by the cogs of the major label machine. “The musicians who know that their work is sacred, and they keep it as such, don’t have to fight the fights that I have seen so many people lose,” she says, and recalls her own experience of cutting loose from Warner Bros in the mid-‘90s. “I said, ‘You got to let me out of this contract. I don’t belong here’. And they said, ‘Yeah, we know you don’t belong here, but that’s not how it works. We’re going to destroy you. That’s how it works’.”
As a child of communal hippie living and an infant Woodstock attendee (“This is where my grooviness originated – they took the girl out of the commune, can’t take the commune out of the girl”) independence clearly suits her. “For the most part, [the major labels] don’t want music, because music is a love endeavour, and you can’t tell people what to love,” she says. “They tell people what product to like. And with planned obsolescence they move from trend to trend. The hypocrisy is in the pretence of there being artfulness. It’s not in that realm.” Music, she says, is “souls and bodies. We can’t lose that. The music business is only a few years old, and it should die.”
Playing the money game herself has led to some of her worst live experiences, as she told an audience member keen to know about her toughest ever gigs. Such as the time Bob Mould convinced her to play a top-dollar event in Vegas. “It was essentially a bunch of white dudes and they were so completely freaked out by me that they all walked away and turned their backs to me to face the back wall,” she laughs. “They were at the snack table, and I can’t compete with snacks.”
