She laughs uproariously when she’s reminded, and then Kristin Hersh sighs. It’s about one impressive statistic of her career: Hersh has released some 25 albums since the 1986 debut of her Rhode Island high school band Throwing Muses, formed when she was still a teenager wondering whether she should study medicine or sign a record contract.
That’s counting her latest solo release, Clear Pond Road. She’s also written half a dozen books, mostly intimate memoirs which have increasingly offered their own weird music since her acclaimed first, Rat Girl in 2010. The book helped win her a new generation of fans.
“In America, I have a lot of little Rat Girl fans,” she tells the Listener on Zoom from New York. “They carry the book in their backpacks, and they all look alike. They all stand in the front row. So, there’s a lot of seeing the band because you missed it the first time.”
Hersh has been a regular visitor to New Zealand in various guises over the years – with a band, solo and as a book festival guest. She has even thought about making the move permanent, according to 2021′s Seeing Sideways: A Memoir of Music and Motherhood. She is a mother of 4 boys, now young men. Her youngest, Bodhi, often the star of her social media, is now a teen surf pro and will accompany her on her November solo tour to Australia and NZ. Hersh laughs at the suggestion that calling her other band 50 Foot Wave might have inspired her youngest.
Hersh is a rarity – a figure who emerged in the alt-rock explosion of the 1990s, went through the music industry implosion of the following years, but has continued into cult stardom as a going concern, rather than a Generation X nostalgia act. Much of her recent career has been crowd-funded by fans. However, Clear Pond Road, its immediate predecessors and the next Throwing Muses album are on UK label Fire, home to quite a few other indie long-stayers, such as the Chills.
As Clear Pond Road suggests, with its otherworldly folk-rock shapes and her acoustic baritone guitar – as well as recent outings by a revived Throwing Muses and the noisier 50 Foot Wave – Hersh is still sounding strange, angry, bruised and vital. It’s the latest in a body of work that has been cathartic for quite some time.
“A lot of those records can go away now, you know, fast,” she laughs, when asked about that substantial back catalogue. “I respect people who like our earlier stuff, but I wish I didn’t sound so crazy … there are some over-produced records and periods of my life where I was being kind of gaslighted. And I was more suffering through than [having] an actual engagement with the work. So, I have regrets. But there are moments that were just so on fire. I’ll always respect them.”
She has long been candid about her life, how she has wrestled with the industry (Throwing Muses signed to American major label Sire in the 1990s and was dumped after a few albums), and her mental health – and how it has shaped her singular songwriting, and now her books.
There’s a parallel to her rock career and her time as an author. Rat Girl was published by Penguin but her more recent efforts have been on humbler academic imprints such as the University of Texas Press. UT Press initially approached her about writing about her friendship with Vic Chesnutt, the Athens, Georgia, quadriplegic singer-songwriter who became a cult figure for his dark-humoured songs. Don’t Suck, Don’t Die: Giving Up Vic Chesnutt was published in 2015, six years after his death from a self-administered overdose of muscle relaxants.
“All of our other times together had been intense or hilarious … and I almost left his death out of it. But because he chose it, I thought I should honour that.”
Her next book, she says, will be a work of fiction. Or her version of it.
“I was told I was going to be put in the non-fiction ghetto and said, ‘All my songs are non-fiction and I feel very strongly that I’m not a good liar.’
“But their point is a good one – people think it’s only real writing when it’s fiction … and so what I’m doing is writing another memoir. It’s all true but I’m telling them that it’s not, that it’s fiction and what I’m finding is, I can say anything I want because nobody’s going to call me on it. I’m not really baring my soul or telling secrets, because it’s fiction.” l
Clear Pond Road is out now. Kristin Hersh tours New Zealand from November 15-19. Purchase tickets here.
