IN HER WORK AND INTERVIEWS, and certainly in her autobiographical and non-fiction writing up to and including her new book, The Future Of Songwriting – yes, she’s hardly aiming low – singer/songwriter and founder of the band Throwing Muses, Kristin Hersh, has explored what an artist is and what an artist should be, and particularly what an artist should want to be and think.
One strand of that, as articulated in the book, is the concept that the most important thing for an artist is to show up, not show off, that the business around music is the most obvious example of the corruption of what might be pure exchange, but not the only one.
At one point she uses the blue-ringed octopus as a metaphor for art and the humility of the artist – it’s worth noting here that the book is mostly made up of almost fevered dream “conversations” she has with an unnamed comedian during down times on their respective Australian tours – asserting that performance, on disc or stage, is "not about us and our shiny blueness; it’s about the venom and who might need it”.
Indeed, she goes further in The Future…, arguing that removing the songwriter as some kind of genius font and avatar for what the rest of us can’t be or have, is essential. “As a songwriter, I have to believe that in the future, we will celebrate songwriters who disappear; songwriters who transcend self-expression and self; songwriters who evade the spotlight by turning it on the listener,” she writes. “Even when no one is listening.”
But that is one side of the coin. As she is days away from a solo Australian tour (with a Throwing Muses album imminent) and beaming at me from her home’s music room, here is a chance to ask – beyond the idea of what the artist should be or do – what is appropriate for us as an audience, as the listener, as someone standing before her performing, to think about and expect?
Should we be thinking differently as well? Or is it something that will come to us as more artists follow her line of thinking?
“When my first band, Throwing Muses started, we were 12 years old and we weren’t legally allowed in the clubs forever, like a decade,” Hersh says with a chuckle that is an early sign of how charmingly friendly and accommodating (of stupid questions especially) she is. “So if I got off the stage it was unusual to be in the crowd for very long. It was illegal. So I didn’t talk to many people who listen to us. Which was good for me, because I was confused by the whole process. To be honest, I still am. There is a bit of me always thinking ‘why would you want to hear this, it’s personal? I’m sure you have your own songs.”
Our own songs? It turns she doesn’t just mean ones we might write, but ones we “take”, or are given, from songwriters like Hersh.
“My relationship to the listener is so pure and unadulterated by the business that I can seem a little cold because I feel like it’s yours. That’s mostly because when we were kids and playing in these clubs there would only be like a few people and one of the people who was always there was this Hells Angel dude who was huge and covered in tattoos and piercings,” she explains. “In my memory he looks kinda like the guy in Raising Arizona, but he’s good, this superhero, and he would say about this song that I hated so much, ‘that song, that is for me’. I would say, thank God, I don’t want it.
“But I think he was right, I think it was his; it’s not mine. I had a hard time playing because I had already given it to him. It was gone. But he taught me that you do have to crucify yourself. It’s not about you. It’s like being a parent almost. Imagine trying to with your kid to put words in his mouth or clothes on him that don’t suit his selfhood. It’s that kind of invisibility [artists should strive for], with a lot of care, and a lot of love, and a lot of investment. It is for them.”
If they’re our songs, it our listening to, connecting with and personalising her songs shifts not just explanations for their meaning, but some kind of ownership, where does that leave the song’s writer?
“In my dream world I would just be able to play music and somehow pay my rent without anyone hearing it,” she laughs, well aware of the absurdity of the thought, but not resiling from it. ”Record companies don’t love that idea. I want one person to listen to my record a million times; so I don’t want a million people to listen once. They don’t like that either.”
Mind you, these days with streaming, one person listening a million times would be just as effective for the labels. Though, as Hersh points out, “I never made any money off of any of my records. Even when we rereleased them ourselves. So I don’t mind streaming at all. Anything that gets music into people’s ears without it being top-down …”
Are we – an audience, listeners – ready to take a more active role, to claim ownership and be part of the process? And do we want to? For some of us, music is everything, the way we learn about the world, the way we learn about ourselves and how to be. For more people, music matters as pleasure and salve and diversion. But it seems to me that most people don’t listen to music in any of those ways, if they listen at all. So are they, we, ready to be as active participant in this process as Hersh wants?
“I think some of us are, and it’s not always who you would think. If you look at a population that has only eaten McDonald’s they will get very confused by an organic apple: this bumpy thing with worms,” she says. And it’s probably useful to divert here to something Hersh says in The Future Of Songwriting to expand on this apple metaphor.
“Everyone is born with a visceral response to music; the ability to recognize an apple growing on a tree. We lose this connection, this ability to feed ourselves, when marketing tells us what food is: it’s packaged, it’s for sale, it’s industrial. It has no personal relationship to you, to your nature, as it has been de-natured,” she writes. “The land apple trees grew on? Is “owned” now, the trees gone; songs and food come from buildings now and it all costs and makes money. Those aren’t songs, of course, any more than fast food is apples. They make sounds, like fast food has calories, but Nature is not selling, so she looks gone, and we don’t remember a time when she grew apples for us.”
Can there be hope then or is this wishful thinking, more of the fever in that dream, when people – and by people here I mean artists just as much as audiences – maybe deep down don’t want that apple, or are scared of what it might ask of them?
"But if we pull them away in this attention economy and say this thing with the spotlight on it, that's what you love, we are all so social that we will respond," Hersh insists. "It is possible to say, you can have an opinion, you could be idiosyncratic in your musical response, and you won't be alone. You will still be loved. I promise."
NEXT WEEK: in part two of this interview, Kristin Hersh goes further into songwriting and collaborating, and has some news to share.
Kristin Hersh plays:
February 28 - Live At The Polo, Canberra
March 1 - Mary’s Underground, Sydney
March 2 – The Corner, Melbourne
March 5 – The Old Museum, Brisbane
March 8-9 – Porty Fairy Folk Festival
March 11 – The Rosemount, Perth
March 13 – Grace Emily, Adelaide
March 15-16 – Blue Mountains Folk Festival
The Future Of Songwriting is published by Melville House
Kristin’s Hersh’s Clear Pond Road, is out through Fire Records
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