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A different Empire

Music Features

Songs of catharsis

Recording the album at Portsmouth’s Stable Sound provided a welcome respite from personal crises and brought Kristin back to her home state and back in collaboration with some of her favorite people — namely, Throwing Muses drummer David Narcizo (who also created the album’s artwork), Martin and Kim McCarrick on cello and violin, and longtime engineer Steve Rizzo.
 
Clearly Stable Sound means a lot to Kristin, as she’s recorded all her solo albums there. She calls it her “passionate hideout,” describing it as “where I last felt magic. It’s always where I last felt magic. It’s got this great vibe because you can’t imagine anyone listening to what you’re doing out in the middle of nowhere in this horse stable with these huge, beautiful windows.”
 
That sense of safety has allowed Hersh to stretch her boundaries further with each successive solo record. Miles away from the hushed, secretive The Grotto, Learn to Sing’s 14 songs are equal parts blistering and sepulchral, existing on middle ground somewhere between the jagged disquiet of Throwing Muses’ 2003 outing and the “pure, pissed-off sunshine” of 2001’s Sunny Border Blue. Lyrically, they have a pungent present-tense conversational directness. On “Wild Vanilla,” Hersh sings, deadpan: “That was one striking phone call boy/Your voice at a fever pitch/And here I thought you’d just/Full of white noise called to bitch.” Mingled amongst the confessionals are boisterous, surreal tall tales about parrot ladies and bickering with the devil. There are hints of magical realism — as when little green apples appear to cartoonishly mock the desire-stunned narrator of “In Shock” or when the faraway object of desire in “The Thin Man” rubs his hands together, “sparks fly,” a gift of fireworks “in the ozone snow.” Emotional blows are sometimes softened with wry humor (“You apply your me-repellent”) but often arrive artlessly unblunted (“I left my heart on the frozen sidewalk/Kicked around and sliding on the dirty ice”). The mood swings are tied together by the albums’s string-laden, cinematically sumptuous sound.

Ask Hersh about her inspirations, though, and she demurs. When she writes, she’s wary of her ego getting in the way. “I need to say exactly what the song wants me to say, and not erase things because I find them embarrassing or telling. Because they often are telling and yet, that’s not the point of the song. So many times I’ve thought, ‘You can’t say that! Billy will be upset or the band will be upset or my mother might hear it, or I’m going to have to talk about it . . .’ Those things are all true. And yet, the song isn’t saying it because there’s catharsis in that expression — the song is using it to make its own point. And that’s a big deal: if the song isn’t allowed to do that, [then] it’s a half-assed song and it doesn’t get a chance to be ugly and beautiful at the same time.”
 
Hersh admits that she needs to let Learn To Sing grow up in public before she can risk any kind of objectivity. It’s not until months or even years later that she begins to see what the songs have been trying to say all along. “That’s when they gain the most momentum, oddly enough, is when I’m done with them. That’s when they go out into the world and become other people’s soundtracks and then come back to me changed. And I can learn from them.”

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