{"id":4866,"date":"2025-08-30T18:49:20","date_gmt":"2025-08-30T18:49:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/throwing-muses-kristin-hersh-if-you-fight-a-wave-youre-gonna-wipe-out-151075\/"},"modified":"2025-08-30T18:49:20","modified_gmt":"2025-08-30T18:49:20","slug":"throwing-muses-kristin-hersh-if-you-fight-a-wave-youre-gonna-wipe-out-151075","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/throwing-muses-kristin-hersh-if-you-fight-a-wave-youre-gonna-wipe-out-151075\/","title":{"rendered":"Throwing Muses\u2019 Kristin Hersh: \u201cIf you fight a wave, you\u2019re gonna wipe out\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"
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For Kristin Hersh<\/strong>, songcraft is a bit like surfing. \u201cThe surfers, their approach to their boards is like my approach to my guitar,\u201d she says of the associates of her pro-surfer son Bodhi. \u201cTheir 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\u2019re gonna wipe out. And if I fight the song, it\u2019s gonna die in my hands. I\u2019m gonna wipe out.\u201d<\/p>\n

Over the course of her Uncut Q&A chat with Tom Pinnock \u2013 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 \u201cactual British wellies!\u201d \u2013 many of Hersh\u2019s quirky and unique angles on music and its mysterious making are touched upon. She discusses her synesthesia: the D minor chord is \u201clike an ochre\u201d, E major 7 \u201cburnt orange\u201d. Her practice of writing songs for Throwing Muses or 50 Foot Wave on band-specific kinds of guitar \u2013 \u201cMy drummers tell me it\u2019s a really stupid system\u201d. And her acceptance that she really is the \u201cconduit\u201d for music that she\u2019s been considered for much of her near-fifty-year career.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere\u2019s no other way to write a song except to disappear,\u201d she says, \u201cbecause if it\u2019s 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\u2019re just going to obstruct the process. So I will say \u2018channel\u2019 now, because I\u2019m old, I earned it.\u201d<\/p>\n

She speaks openly of the two-year period after Throwing Muses\u2019 1996 album Limbo when she simply \u201cstopped hearing music\u201d, and of when the songs returned in a New Mexico caf\u00e9, courtesy of one Leonard Crowdog. \u201cSuddenly I saw the music coming out of the speakers\u2026 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\u2026 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

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 \u201cso lonely\u201d being the \u201cAmerican goofy kids\u201d on \u201cglossy and ethereal\u201d 4AD. \u201cI thought Charles [Thompson, AKA Black Francis] was a woman,\u201d she says of their first meeting. \u201cI 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

Revisiting the early Muses and Pixies joint tours leaves Hersh fighting back tears. \u201cI was an alien,\u201d she says. \u201cAnd so for Charles to pull me away from alienation into enthusiasm, he was just my first musical pal to say, \u2018No, your voice is what it is\u2019. 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\u2019t know it was OK\u2026 We lose a lot of people who come with their own voice and don\u2019t 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, \u2018You are as you are\u2019.\u201d<\/p>\n

Many of those losses, she argues, were amongst artists crushed by the cogs of the major label machine. \u201cThe musicians who know that their work is sacred, and they keep it as such, don\u2019t have to fight the fights that I have seen so many people lose,\u201d she says, and recalls her own experience of cutting loose from Warner Bros in the mid-\u201890s. \u201cI said, \u2018You got to let me out of this contract. I don\u2019t belong here\u2019. And they said, \u2018Yeah, we know you don\u2019t belong here, but that\u2019s not how it works. We\u2019re going to destroy you. That\u2019s how it works\u2019.\u201d<\/p>\n

As a child of communal hippie living and an infant Woodstock attendee (\u201cThis is where my grooviness originated \u2013 they took the girl out of the commune, can\u2019t take the commune out of the girl\u201d) independence clearly suits her. \u201cFor the most part, [the major labels] don\u2019t want music, because music is a love endeavour, and you can\u2019t tell people what to love,\u201d she says. \u201cThey 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\u2019s not in that realm.\u201d Music, she says, is \u201csouls and bodies. We can\u2019t lose that. The music business is only a few years old, and it should die.\u201d<\/p>\n

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. \u201cIt 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,\u201d she laughs. \u201cThey were at the snack table, and I can\u2019t compete with snacks.\u201d<\/p>\n

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