Songs of catharsisKristin Hersh runs the emotional gamut on Learn to Sing Like a Star February 21,
2007 1:51:46 PM
NO DAY AT THE BEACH: “I find water very, very destructive,” Hersh says.
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London’s Soho Arts Theatre is a tiny, buttoned-up venue in the heart of that city’s venerable theatre district. Inside, the sold-out crowd is reverent and hushed as Kristin Hersh takes the stage. Blinking in the spotlight, Kristin is strangely still. But as soon as she opens her mouth to sing, the air crackles with energy. And it’s not simply from the song’s rollicking, furious immediacy, or its vertiginous chorus, or even the way the strings surge dramatically against the lacerating guitar. No, it’s the way her voice evokes so many emotions at once: feral and wise, burning with both vulnerability and fearlessness — a blast of emotional intensity akin to an exorcism.
The sound is bright, messy, and beautiful, and it lights up the dark room.
That searing intensity is familiar to anyone who has followed Hersh’s work since her early days as the teenaged leader of Newport-based band Throwing Muses. Since then, her emotionally complex, allusive confessionals have earned her a well-deserved reputation as a gifted songwriter. The ensuing years have not mellowed her in any way — even if appearances are somewhat to the contrary. When I meet up with Hersh the next day at her hotel, she is curled up on an overstuffed chair, hands wrapped resolutely around a cup of hot tea.
She looks a little tired, and admits that this is the first day she hasn’t felt the effects of jet lag. “Today’s the first okay day. We went right to work. You’re supposed to take a day off, and we didn’t!” She laughs. “Not a lot of autopilot on a new record . . . .”
Make that not a lot of autopilot, period. Since the release of Hersh’s previous solo record, this generally indefatigable mother of four has been a flurry of creative activity, doing mini-tours with Throwing Muses, recording and touring with her other band, math-rock trio 50 Foot Wave, and working on the follow-up to Murder, Misery and Goodnight, her collection of Appalachian murder ballads.
And now there’s Learn To Sing Like a Star (Yep Roc). Look beyond the tongue-in-cheek title (the subject line of a spam e-mail that kept popping up in Hersh’s inbox), and you’ll find a bright, bittersweet album influenced by some tumultuous events in Hersh’s life. In 2005, Hurricane Katrina devastated her former home-away-from-home, New Orleans. Months later, a burst pipe destroyed Hersh and husband/manager Billy O’Connell’s Ohio home. It’s no wonder that Learn to Sing is rife with references to angry water.
“I grew up by a scary ocean,” Hersh explains. “I find water very, very destructive. Other people think of the beach as lying around — I think of it as frightening hurricanes! And then with all that happened — New Orleans and our house . . . Two floors flooded. The ceiling collapsed. I lost all my instruments. We lost 2000 books. Our furniture. And even stuff we couldn’t throw away, because we couldn’t bear it . . . it’s still covered in mold. We smell like mold, all of us!"
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.”
We drift toward an inevitable topic: gaudy, superficial pop. You know the kind — it comes teetering in on nosebleed-high heels, autotuned and makeup-shellacked to within an inch of its 15-minute life. Kristin laughs her hearty, mischievous laugh, and calls its practitioners “bimbo paste.”
It’s not simply that she hates the fundamental dishonesty of bad music — the valuation of style over substance, and sugar-coated junk food over nourishment — there’s also the fact that every musician who plays that game makes it that much harder for everyone else. After more than 20 years in the music business and plenty of painful, protracted music-biz unpleasantness under her belt (after all, she practically grew up in the alt-rock spotlight’s scuzzy glare), she’s all too aware of the pitfalls. But she knows, too, that there’s a place for honest music that hasn’t been dumbed-down to the lowest common denominator.
“Any intelligent person is going to not want to be continually sold to. And to reach those people you need to look for different outlets. They’re never going to be listening to the radio. They’re probably not going to be surfing the bins in music stores either — unless they have a great indie store in their town that hasn’t been killed by the chains. Corporatization is making it so that those people are barely reachable. I hate to say it, but thank god for the Internet, or we wouldn’t find each other. We wouldn’t have that community.”
Hersh has helped build that community of fans over the past 10 years, and kept herself accessible to the extent that she’s willing to — by blogging, participating in readings, and answering fan queries at the band’s website, ThrowingMusic. com. And with her new US deal with Yep Roc in place, she seems to have reached her own comfortable level of success, and — dare I say it? — a pop career on her own terms.
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