H E A R__I T

"Gut Pageant"
Kristin Hersch
(690k)

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T A B L E__T A L K

What are the greatest B-sides of all time? Share your favorites in the Music area of Table Talk

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R E C E N T L Y

And the winner is ... SOY BOMB!
By Gavin McNett
The 1998 Grammy awards
(02/27/98)

Tommy Keene
Isolation Party
Matador
(02/26/98)

Joe Lovano and Gonzalo Rubalcaba
Flying Colors
Blue Note Records
(02/25/98)

Autour de Lucie
Immobile
Nettwerk
(02/24/98)

Star Rise
Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan and Michael Brook Remixed
Real World
(02/23/98)

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BROWSE THE
MUSIC ARCHIVES

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V O W E L L

Sound Salvation
By Sarah Vowell
Tattoo by Versace
Courtney Love shuts herself up for acceptance in the straight world of Vanity Fair
(02/20/98)

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F E A T U R E

Carl Wilson
1946 - 1998
By Mark Athitakis
A tribute to the Beach Boy who made the band rock
(02/13/98)

s trange Angel
___[_A N_I N T E R V I E W_W I T H_K R I S T I N_H E R S H_]

BY DAVID BOWMAN

A few weeks ago, Kristin Hersh, singer and leader of the now disbanded Throwing Muses, released her second solo album, "Strange Angels." It's both startling in its brilliance and touching in regard to American culture -- touching because, as product, this record is unclassifiable. You'll never hear Hersh on pop radio. The songs are completely acoustic, yet they're too austere for folk. Think Patsy Cline meets John Cage. Although Hersh is an arty, postmodern diva, Dawn Upshaw isn't going to be covering Hersh songs like "Gut Pageant" in recital anytime soon.

A guy phones this unclassifiable Hersh at her desert home and she answers by warning, "You might have to listen to some crying babies. Laughing babies." There's commotion in the background -- she's got three kids, but only baby Wyatt is still a rug-rat. Where do the babies-plural come from? Maybe the virtual ChaCha babies are visiting Hersh as well. (Not that Hersh makes a big deal about motherhood like Madonna or Courtney Love, posing with their offspring in Rolling Stone and Vanity Fair, etc., as if the kid was life's equivalent to a Grammy.)

Hersh lives in the Mojave -- Captain Beefheart's desert. Hersh herself is the feminine counterpoint to that American original, although she claims, "The good Captain seems brainier than me." Adding, "Captain Beefheart seems to do things on purpose and I do things on accident."

Hersh may be capricious, but not accidental. She only lives in a place called Pioneer Town (yes Pioneer Town -- populated by bears and roadrunners and coyotes -- "dignified, real coyotes, not L.A. ones that eat cats and garbage") because her husband, Billy, fell in love with the land when she came here on a photo shoot. "I thought he was crazy -- I've never had that reaction to a particular kind of nature before." She pauses. "But I found it's nice what it does to your brain to live in the middle of nowhere."

But then, it seems all Hersh does is live in her brain. The kids and baby keep her too busy to sit down at the piano or pick up a guitar. "I don't even have time to eat or shower. So I just keep practicing in my head. And the words are kind of an instrument that is played by syllables; that's what it sounds like," she explains. "I gradually come to realize those syllables are words and sentences." Hersh doesn't take the songs out of her brain until she's ready to cut the record. "If I don't demo the songs and freeze them in a certain stage of evolution, they keep editing themselves. And they come out real clean when I finally play them."

Indeed, the songs are so unfettered it's like they were produced by Mr. Clean. Most striking is the way her unschooled voice is captured on the album. It's pure and delicate the way only a hillbilly voice can sound perfectly pure and delicate. "I don't think I sing really well -- but I think I can tell the truth with my neck," she says, echoing her song "Pale": "Before I go to you I never wash my neck ... 'Cause when the music starts it goes straight to my head."

She cut the brain/head songs of "Strange Angels" at singer Joe Henry's Los Angeles garage studio. "I was bummed about the Muses breaking up and I just wanted to crawl into a cave to make my record. I was telling Joe this, and he said, 'Just come over every day, and I'll push the buttons.'"

So she went. Her family is close with the Henrys, and she worked "civilized hours" making the disc. "My husband took care of the baby. The 6-year-olds played together. Then we had dinner." She laughs, then says, "It was cozy and adult." Then it got even cozier -- she had to attend a family gathering in Rhode Island, so she finished the album there, recording in a studio inside a horse stable. "The horses come up behind you and look over your shoulder while you're recording."

Rhode Island was where both Hersh and the Throwing Muses were born. "When I was 14, I started the Muses out of boredom." She shared guitar and vocals with half-sister Tanya Donelly. By the time she was 15, she had become passionate about songwriting. "The songs would come at all hours of the night, and they would play me instead of me playing them. I become obsessive about songs, which works for a certain kind of fan. That carried through to our first records."

She says the group was both "stupid" and "optimistic": "We thought we were a party band playing happy music for people." What the Throwing Muses really were was insane. They sounded as if they had never heard a rock 'n' roll band up close before and had to invent the form based on what they caught from the radios of Camaros that sped by their rural homes late at night. The Muse's poppy songs are a little too dark. Their girl-group anthems are Betty Boop on crank. And when a Muse song manages to bop happily from start to finish, it sounds as if Yoko Ono and Linda McCartney had sneaked into Abbey Road Studios one night to recut the vocals on "Dear Prudence" and "Everybody's Got Something to Hide Except Me and My Monkey."

As Hersh led the Muses through the junk-bond '80s, she had the first of four sons. Then got divorced. Then divorced her band in 1991, after the Muses recorded "The Real Ramona," a breakthrough album that seemed to promise a Nirvana-like future. "I just didn't want to be in the music business anymore," Hersh reports. "I wanted a more timeless approach to creating the songs. When you are attracted to ear candy it's because it sounds cool today. But it will date your record in about five years." Then she gives another infectious laugh. "I don't know what I was thinking, imagining that anyone would be listening to the Muses in five years, but I still didn't think it was fair to make the songs trendy. It was like putting makeup on a good face."