Throwing Muses frontwoman, solo artist and indie-rock icon Kristin Hersh returns to Aotearoa for a run of solo shows in November. She spoke to Elliott Childs about her new album Clear Pond Road and the process behind making it.
Photo: Pete Mellekas
Kristin Hersh laughs a lot.
As soon as our conversation gets underway, she is bright, self-effacing and ready to chuckle at the funny side of whatever we are talking about. It is completely disarming.
Best known for her band Throwing Muses, whose searing but beautiful indie-rock has been around since 1983, Hersh has also put out 12, more acoustic-focused solo albums - the latest of which, Clear Pond Road has just been released.
From the start, Clear Pond Road is both shimmering and earthy sounding, with Hersh mixing field recordings of wind chimes and birds in with the layered instruments recorded in the studio.
"It's so different from my last solo effort. That's my favourite term for records, effort. 'At least she tried!'" Hersh laughs when I congratulate her on the release.
"The songs wanted almost the opposite [of the last record]. It's a strange record. I don't think it hits you initially that way, but the recording process was very unusual for me."
Hersh talks a lot about what her songs want. She treats them like individual beings, separate from her. This is not all that surprising considering that up until recently she wrote music in a disassociated state where she would, as she puts it, disappear until the song was written.
The process is different now. She received EMDR treatment, where rapid, side-to-side eye movements are used to alleviate the distress associated with a trauma and as a result found she no longer disassociates whilst writing. However, Hersh still feels that the songs exist outside of her.
"The song still comes into the room and is an 'energetic'. Whatever this is, it's not a song yet. I just happen to be a songwriter. If it were in your room, you would express this energetic in a different fashion."
The songs also decide which of Hersh's musical outputs they should belong to and they assign themselves depending on the guitar she picks up.
"I write 50FOOTWAVE songs on my Les Paul or my SG, Throwing Muses songs on my Strat or my Tele and solo songs on my Collings [acoustic].
"My drummers tell me that it's a really lousy system 'cause they get jealous of each other's songs."
Yet, Hersh has faith. She allows herself to be guided by what the song wants and is committed to doing justice to these moments of inspiration when she records them.
"The closest you'll ever come is when it's in the room with you, and so I trust my hand to reach for the right guitar when I know the song best... So it's a stupid and pretentious answer!"
Inspiration's influence does not end in the moment a song is completed, however. Hersh believes that the songs themselves have guided the events of her life in order to inspire the lyrics and imagery she writes about.
"A song will make my life live these stories to make it's point. I think I need to live these stories because a song needed to be born. Not unlike the way my children needed to be born."
Those stories are not always the easiest to live through either. In our discussion of the unsettling and dark song 'Palmetto' from her new record, Hersh tells me the song is about her and her youngest son packing up their house in the early hours to escape from "a stalker landlord".
"We had to live in our truck and that's hard for a mother. I didn't want to do that to him."
But even in these dark moments, Hersh finds light. Laughing as she tells me that the song was named 'Palmetto' because as she was writing it, she accidentally squashed a cockroach (called Palmetto bugs in her adopted home of New Orleans) and felt incredibly guilty.
When I ask her how she intends to perform the layered and atmospheric songs from Clear Pond Road solo, Hersh is nothing if not honest.
"I don't know. The tour hasn't started yet!"
This is not to say she is unsure of how the songs will translate. To her, the human element of a live performance makes up for the songs sounding different from the record.
"I have this feeling that production, as obsessed as I am with it… there's something, I think, that is trying to make up for the fact that I'm not in the room with people.
"Live, with your body right there, when you really mean it, people get all the nuance. I use my breath and my muscles and my presence to make up for the fact that there is not the magical sound on the record, but the magical sound on the record is trying to make up for the fact that there is no magical body in the room."
Kristin Hersh's NZ tour dates are:
Wednesday, 15 November - Meow, Wellington
Thursday, 16 November – Meow, Wellington
Friday, 17 November – The Piano, Christchurch
Saturday, 18 November – Tuning Fork, Auckland
Sunday, 19 November - Artworks, Waiheke Island, Auckland
See Plus1 touring for more info and tickets
