It’s the haunted and mysterious side of her work that everybody notices. Less gets said about the romance and sexiness of it all. But starting roughly with 2001’s Sunny Border Blue, she’s mastered a particular kind of torch song, one that celebrates the messy and obsessive sides of a grown-up relationship. This continues on the new disc, and if a better come-on is going to be written this year than “You make the gypsy in me horny for a flower garden,” I look forward to hearing it. (The same track, “Wild Vanilla” has a chorus — “You messing with my head is a terrible noise” — that proves the perfect cue for a backwards guitar solo.) Hersh’s current raspier singing voice is just right for these tales: though her love songs have always been on the fragile side, they’ve gotten more guttural.
“You can find my whole life in the songs, and good luck with that,” she cautions. “For one thing, you’d get lost in the pronouns — especially the word ‘you.’ People come and go in my songs, so whoever ‘you’ is always changes. It’s probably better not to listen to the words at all.”
What she hears in these lyrics, however, is something less romantic. In the middle of last year, the house in Ohio where she and husband/manager Billy O’Connell were living flooded while they were on the road. A burst waterpipe destroyed everything they owned. Insurance covered only half the expenses, and they wound up selling the house at a loss after rebuilding. (They had also lived in New Orleans for a time but had relocated before Katrina.) Although the couple and their four children have always lived a nomadic life, they’ve been truly homeless for the past year. “I feel like I took off from my life, and I’m just now getting back to work. At times like this you come to realize it’s only stuff, and you can’t get too upset about losing stuff.”
Still, there is the matter of the water references that are all over the new album — which, of course, was all written before the disaster — and the fact that she’s led a band called 50 Foot Wave for the past few years. “Some of those [songs] were written after Billy and I were in Los Angeles. I jumped into the ocean and was immediately swept away by the current and almost drowned. So that’s where some of the waves and water come from, but there are also lines about losing your home in there. [Singer-songwriter] Mary Margaret O’Hara once told me that songs don’t care about linear time; you write a song and then it happens to you. So I hope it matters that the songs on this album are mostly pretty happy — or at least as happy as I ever get.”
Hersh’s tour in support of the album comes to the Regent Theatre April 21 with drummer and bassist Bernard Georges and drummer Rob Ahlers — in other words, the raucous 50 Foot Wave line-up playing somewhat more restrained material: “We call it Pussy Foot Wave.” A noisy album with that band is planned next, followed by a new album with Throwing Muses — this one likely to include Muses co-founder Tanya Donelly (who sang some back-up on the last reunion album in 2002) as a full band member. Where Hersh will be living at that point is anyone’s guess.
KRISTIN HERSH | Regent Theatre, 7 Medford St, Arlington | April 21 | on sale Saturday, 10 am | 617.931.2000
