NO ONE WAS READING during this early Saturday night show, as Kristin Hersh, perched on a stool alone on the small stage of Sydney’s Mary’s Underground, held the room despite battling jetlag, the temptations of a Mardi Gras parade not far away, and a Mardis Gras party in the room after her show.
But in the stories she weaved in – including that the song Bywater, about Freddie Mercury as a moustachioed amputee fish “heading out to sea”, is not fanciful as most people assume, but real Hersh life – her most recent book, The Future Of Songwriting, was never far from my mind.
As a new Throwing Muses album, Midnight Concessions is imminent – available almost two weeks ahead of time for those who hit the merch stand at Mary’s – and today a full band tour of Australia is announced for later this year, following this month’s solo shows (see below for band and solo dates), it occurred to me that some of the ideas raised in that book seem even more relevant. Maybe even more potent.
At its core are a couple of somewhat confronting propositions: that modern music’s wrapped-around-industry has corrupted the art, leading to a fakeness in its writers and singers and disconnect with its listeners; and that the song really does, and must, exist separate from the artist and instead belongs to us, as listeners. Which, given some of the territory of occasionally traumatic life experience and sometimes wildly vivid experience that is actually drawn from her, not merely imagined, could be a confronting matter to deal with as a listener.
So, I ask her, if we were to separate music from the industry, if we were to separate the art from the “pornography”, as she puts it, would there really be the pure response she hopes for? Do people want the purity of an artistic connection? How many people want to feel that much?
“As a music lover I don’t want to be moved all the time,” she laughs. “The more discerning you become, the more you realise there’s a lot of fake out there and they can be really sad. That’s when I get upset. That’s when I say, I don’t want to feel that. But there’s no reason to think the good music has to be heavy, and certainly I would think that good music isn’t. And there’s no reason to think that pop has to be crap. It’s a beautiful form that you can respect.
“That’s one of the great things about streaming: that we can explore through time and genre without being told, and say well, what breathes? And absolutely anything could. But when it doesn’t, don’t question yourself on your response: they are trying to manipulate you for money so where does your money belong? They are trying to manipulate you for attention, so where does your attention belong? It’s a valuable commodity.”
During an extended sidebar on The Monkees, an act once lashed as pure industry but recognised by more people this century as among the finest of pop music in music’s neolithic age, Hersh inadvertently taps into something about her own work, solo, side projects and, for decades now, with Throwing Muses.
“They didn’t have the option of snob appeal and they still went and did it. They still brought musical complexity and layers of emotionality, of dream plus life. They were very imagistic, they were very humble,” says Hersh.
“As opposed to the Beatles’ movies, The Monkees’ show was about being losers: they couldn’t get the girls to like them, they couldn’t get shows [she laughs]. And that’s how you feel. We still are sure no one is coming every night. It gets a little annoying for my boyfriend – he says ‘you say no one’s coming every goddamn night! Surely by now you’ve noticed that that they will come’.”
In defence of her boyfriend, that does sound like a forgivable, but wearying approach to the vicissitudes of making a living as a touring musician. At the Sydney show she may have faced a small audience, but their commitment was whole.
“But there’s something about this ‘what are they doing here?’ that plays well when you are trying to focus,” argues Hersh. “If you are uncomfortable as a performer, as I am in a way – meaning I am not a performer – my value proposition is to lose myself. I just sort of disappear in my focus, and that’s a strength. I know that that’s one place that I know how to create a truth and make it something that can be beautiful. Not pretty, but I know what I’m doing.”
And here again she touches on one of the principles of her book, her ambivalence about being the public-facing element of her work, and the villains of the piece, those who would mangle creativity for productivity.
“But the stage, now that it has been co-opted and it is no longer a listening venue, but facilitates the listening process, you’re supposed to tap dance up there? It’s been taken from us. So my discomfort with the stage really is because there been so many people playing dress-up and pretending to be musicians, when they are really just playing a fashion sound, that I feel uncomfortable going up there as a musician.
“But it really does serve the process because I want to disappear. I’m really into not being there,” she laughs uproariously.
Why would an artist who has created something want to not be there?
“I’m not sure everyone is comfortable with the idiosyncrasies that brought about in the strangeness of actual humanity. We have created an industry that is hellbent on removing those fingerprints.”
Idiosyncrasies is one way to put it, not least because it’s a word that some have used to damn with faint praise Hersh’s work, whether it is the sometimes awkward interactions she may have or the frankness about mental health, treatment, the way a car accident “the event that cracked open my skull also cracked open my songwriting”, and the complexities of family lives.
As she writes in this latest book, “They call me strange,” I tell him. “I’m not strange. I’ve just had some weird things happen to me.”
But her story has always been more than just the easy fallback for journalists of tragedy and overcoming it. It is a series of things that have changed her, things that have irrevocably affected her, and finding a route through that. For us to find joy in what she does, has to be part of the experience of finding joy in the hard things doesn’t it?
“The only way I can do that is to let music transmute – I don’t want to say pain – the struggle, the mud wrestling of this here-ness. It doesn’t have to be pain; I’m not sure that’s what translates,” says Hersh. “I was left with a lot. I only recently discovered that I was made of pain and I have been such a sunny, nice person my whole life, and a good mom, and a good friend and a good bandleader. It wasn’t until it was pointed out to me that I am present at disasters, I’m often present when something awful happens, [that it became clear].
“At first we just thought, we almost died a lot, like me and my bandmates were like, well this is sort of uncanny and one of my records that I released as a book goes through all of these ‘almost deaths’. It’s funny essentially: I wrote it pretty funny. But that’s the only way that it had been described to me. And then I started being drawn to the homeless and spent a lot of time with the homeless in New Orleans and California and back here in the north-east – I’m just sort of pulled to them.
“We talk a lot, I give them stuff, but they seem to know I’m coming, they seem to know who I am, and we get to know each other. There is never a moment of confusion; it’s like, ‘oh, it’s you, and here we are together’.”
What are they recognising in her?
“I really don’t know. I’m really shy and I would never talk to anybody else, but if they homeless and sucked into their sphere. I think it’s the pain that I carried and we match up there. I realise that this is an honour but I had to reverse engineer all this crap in my life – it’s not crap, it’s necessary – so much drama, not melodrama but actual drama: fires and hurricanes and shootings and stabbings and families falling apart and murders and suicides and tornadoes. It’s like if there is a disaster, I am there.”
Clearly she is a dangerous person to be around.
“Yes! My boyfriend just said I was in the LA fires, and I was just there to do press and everything started catching fire around. Everywhere I went, it blew up. He said ‘maybe don’t come home’,” she laughs.
“I asked Cheech, the acupuncturist in the book, what is up with that? Because if I have a spiritual question, she always has this grounded answer. She is like, ‘yeah, I know that about you, and I treat you for it’. She says there are pain carriers and you’ve known them.
Hersh breaks from the laughter to say “I even use the terminology, and I thought I made it up. But [the pain carriers] in my life kill themselves. I think it may be hard to tease apart your own pain. Cheech said, ‘never think that it’s all yours: you are human, you are part of a system’.”
Maybe, in a roundabout way tying this back to The Future Of Songwriting, that’s the crucial thing for artists, to understand that it’s not you, or it’s not all you; it’s not because of you, or it’s not only you.
“Right, because you can be convinced that you are bringing something that hurts people just by being here, and in fact you are taking some of it. So you can do good as a pain carrier,” Hersh says. “I used to think the songs were just beating me up, using me to create sound bodies, but there is a more graceful way to view the process, a more mature way to view the process, a less whiny one, and it would be the song is the boss, just like the baby is the boss.
“It knows what it needs to live and you need to listen to it.”
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Moonlight Concessions is out March 14 on Fire Records
Kristen Hersh plays:
March 8-9 – Port Fairy Folk Festival
March 11 – The Rosemount, Perth
March 13 – Grace Emily, Adelaide
March 15-16 – Blue Mountains Folk Festival
Throwing Muses play
December 9 – Corner Hotel, Melbourne
December 6 – Factory Theatre, Sydney
December 7 – Crowbar, Brisbane
December 12 – The Rosemount, Perth
December 13 – Lion Arts Factory, Adelaide
The Future Of Songwriting is published by Melville House
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