From teenage pregnancy to her battles with mental illness and the music industry, Kristin Hersh’s life story is every bit as captivating as her music, discovers Peter Ross
ON A dark, wet afternoon in Portsmouth, Rhode Island, Kristin Hersh is discussing her alliterative preoccupations – madness, motherhood and the music business – by way of explaining what to expect from her appearance in Glasgow later this month. It is not going to be a regular gig. Yes, she will perform songs, but Hersh also plans to read, with musical accompaniment, from diaries she kept when she was a young woman and her band, Throwing Muses, were among the most original and enthralling acts in American music.
“There was a lot I was wrestling with at that time,” she says. “I was diagnosed schizophrenic. We were teenagers playing in rock clubs to adults every night in New York and Boston and Providence. We signed to two record labels. And I was pregnant by the time I was 19. There was plenty to write about, so I did.”
The diaries were lost in a flood which, in 2005, destroyed Hersh’s home, but she has rewritten them from memory as part of her forthcoming memoir which, like the show, is called Paradoxical Undressing. The name is taken from a stage of hypothermia during which sufferers feel hot and start to remove their clothes, often hastening their death. It’s an apt title. Hersh is an introvert, yet she clearly feels some need for public exposure.
She is a totemic figure within American music – a survivor of those exciting days, a little pre-Nirvana, when the underground was rising to meet the mainstream and bands such as Sonic Youth, Pixies and Throwing Muses were beginning to play to large audiences. It was a period when artistic integrity and musical experimentation were considered more valuable, and possible, than global sales and getting on the cover of glossy magazines.
As a solo artist, Hersh has retained the independent spirit of that time and, at 41, possesses a gravitas that comes from not selling out. Conversely, she still has an impish, childlike face and a light-hearted, youthful manner that never quite deserts her, even when she is talking about some of the most difficult periods in her life.
She was born in Georgia to hippy academic parents. The family moved to Rhode Island when she was a child. “My father started teaching me guitar when I was nine. It was a hobby until I was about 14 and then it took on a life of its own and got too freaky for its own good.”
What does she mean? “It’s a freaky process for me. I hear songs. I don’t really make them up. I don’t write them on purpose. I just hear them.”
The songs arrive more or less fully formed, usually at 4am, often complete with upsetting lyrics, and they remain in her head at high volume until she works out how to play them.
“It’s not a calming endeavour,” she says. “It’s intense. When it first began it was considered hallucinations, but no amount of medication would make the songs go away. I disagreed with the doctors’ diagnosis of schizophrenia and talked them down to bipolar which, if nothing else, kept me off of those scary meds that they had put me on.”
Why did she not accept that she was schizophrenic? “I believed in what I was hearing. And I still do. But that is one argument you can’t push through the medical community – that just because they don’t hear it doesn’t mean it isn’t there. The music doesn’t seem to be in me or come from me. I truly believe that it’s there and I’m just copying it down.”
Many people believe that there is a direct correlation between bipolar disorder, or manic depression as it was once known, and the artistic imagination; the rather romantic theory is that the condition actually drives creativity. But Hersh doesn’t buy this. “I have never had a good experience with mania,” she says. “It’s also hard for me to relate to the idea of depression as a waifish sadness. It was more of a shameful darkness. And I would certainly never write any songs when I was depressed. I don’t want creativity to be associated with illness in any way.”
Although it would appear to have been bad timing when Hersh, now a mother of four, became pregnant with her eldest son, Dylan, the pregnancy was positive in that it came at a point when she simply did not want to live any longer.
“That baby saved my life. I didn’t have any feelings left for myself. I was down to one day at a time. And as soon as your first baby is born there’s this epiphany; you realise: ‘Oh, I’m not the story at all. I’m not the focus. I’m not the point. I am nothing.’ So I went from nothing in a bad way to nothing in a great way – just existing for someone else. It was necessary for me to stay on this planet, and yet my focus could never be me again.
“And my bandmates were wonderful. They took care of me when I was pregnant, and so did the music community in Boston. I remember flying overseas with Throwing Muses and the Pixies and the baby playing with everyone. All my children have been brought up on tour, and have been celebrated and loved all over the world.”
Throwing Muses made eight albums, Hersh has released a further seven as a solo artist, and she also records as part of the rock group 50 Foot Wave. In 2005 that group made the ‘Free Music!’ EP available online for no money whatsoever, an innovation for which Radiohead would later get a lot of credit, and it was downloaded two million times. Late last year Hersh expanded on this idea by launching CASH Music (Coalition of Artists and Stake Holders). Each month she puts a new song online, via
throwingmusic.com. Fans can download it for free, make a financial contribution of their choice, or choose to subscribe at rates varying from $10 a quarter to $5,000. Those paying $500 and above get to visit Hersh in the studio while she is recording. The idea is to strengthen the relationship between artist and audience, cutting the record company out altogether.
“Success in music and success in the music business are mutually exclusive,” she says. “I’m happy with the music I’ve made, but this is the first time I have found a way to get it to the people without a struggle. I always had a problem with the way the music business was set up to focus on the lowest common denominator listener. Their idea is to sell dumbed-down trendy music to idiots. But people deserve better.”
Given that she doesn’t feel the songs were hers in the first place, that she is simply a conduit for music that comes to her unbidden, there’s something fitting about Hersh giving her work away. It also makes sense of another interesting aspect of CASH Music that it is possible to download the separate component parts of the songs, allowing her audience to rework the music and post the new versions online.
“I find their input moving,” says Hersh. “It comes from the old-fashioned ideal of the folk song that I’ve always found so attractive – where there was a nameless, faceless songwriter and the songs were spread to family to church to bar, picked up and changed by everyone who sang them. The songs had this life that they no longer have in an industry where ego and greed run the machine.”
It’s ironic that Hersh is so opposed to the idea of the songwriter-as-star; she is exactly the sort of musician who ought to be appearing on TV and in magazines – intelligent, complex and articulate. She is also hilarious – an amusing talker and, on the evidence of her online blog, a witty and engaging writer. But “funny” is not a word with which Hersh is often associated.
“Yeah, that’s true,” she says, “and yet that’s all I am, really. In fact, I’m wondering if there’s too much funny in the show. I don’t know how I’m going to read a lot of it without cracking up, which isn’t cool. Crying on stage isn’t my fear, it’s laughing.”v
Kristin Hersh – Paradoxical Undressing receives its world premiere at St Andrew’s In The Square, Glasgow, March 25
www.throwingmusic.com