Kristin Hersh: A roundup of her twenty-seven year solo recording career

She's easily as worthy of the Pantheon as Neil Young, Springsteen, Joni, or Patti

Kristin Hersh is like an old roommate or a college friend who you lost track of, who you get back in touch with now and then to exchange stories about what is happening in your lives. Hersh's songs are like letters: concise, often simple lines that take on added dimension and depth with repeated reading or further thought. Sometimes the songs seem to add up over the course of a an album side to create a kind of narrative arc, just as often they remain singular and lonesome, stranded in  the leader space between songs.

Photo credit: Peter Mellekas

In an era when artists talk about the cost of touring and playing live shows and champion the retention of their publishing rights and putting their music out directly to fans, Kristin Hersh is one of the original indie rock goddesses. She has been playing music professionally for more than forty years and she has the road wear and the archives to show for it. She has made a living, raised a family, and created a life writing, playing, recording, and performing music.

Hersh has been able to amass a striking body of recorded work that is fiercely individualistic.  Neither her often hard-rocking work with the Muses, her math rock band 50 Foot Wave, or her acoustic-forward solo recordings sound much like other alt-rock or solo-female-singer-with-guitar acts. That’s on purpose—Hersh has never wanted to make music that can be apprehended so directly that it amounts to little more than a marketing effort on behalf of the artist. Her lyrics are extremely personal, calling to mind James Joyce’s explanation that in order to understand Finnegan’s Wake the reader would have to have been everywhere he had been and seen everything he had seen. On the other hand,  Hersh’s songs take an expansive view of the universe and allow one to identify with them, perhaps precisely because of their very detailed, intimate nature. It sounds facile to say that her music has a certain Zen-ness, but in real terms it does, because she often places much more emphasis on observations than on drawing conclusions or creating stories.

“Imagine becoming a musician to get rich!” Hersh exclaimed in a 2004 profile in L.A. Weekly. “That’s not only evil, it’s stupid. You should play music because you have to, or because it’s fun to be in your garage with your friends. But you should not play music to sell it to people. That is not really playing music.”

Born in 1964, Hersh is two years younger than I, on the cusp between Boomers and Gen X. She arrived on the scene in the crossover between the old label-controlled music business and the rise of the DIY indie model. The major label days of Throwing Muses were an education for Hersh. "I really appreciated the advances we got from Warner Bros. when we got them," she says. "But as far as I’m concerned, music is not a commodity. It’s something that people have earned by being human. They have a right to hear it, and a right to share it, as they always have in churches and parties. That’s how music happens.”

That attitude is reminiscent of folk music, music that is created to share culture and stories.

Then there is Kristin’s composition and guitar work. Her songs rarely follow any conventional structure, twisting and moving with the emotions that inspired them. Though the lyrical content and volatility of many of her songs may be hard to understand on an intellectual level, they connect viscerally, hooking themselves into your nervous system like living organisms. It’s on an emotional level that one first starts to connect with any Kristin Hersh project, with intellectual understanding arriving weeks or months later, like a flash of satori. Musically, her songs are built around chord voicings that are often somewhat dissonant, though Hersh hears them more as interesting tonal colors than as clashing sounds. On her acoustic work she utilizes alternate guitar tunings, which can completely alter the palette of chords available to her as a composer. “So much rock music is based on chord progressions we've all heard a million times,” she has said. “'I've never had any interest in writing songs to chords I've heard a million times before. I honestly don't know how people do that.”

U.K. Indie label Fire Records has just released Hersh's eleventh solo album, Clear Pond Road, a record that continues the tradition of excellent solo recordings from Kristin.  I'll talk about Clear Pond Road in a minute, but  thought I'd take this opportunity to share with readers a roundup of her solo career thus far. No Muses or 50 Foot Wave--that's for another post.

I've been a fan of Kristin's since the Muses' appearance on the 4AD compilation Lonely Is an Eyesore, which takes its title from a Muses song. I worked with a guy named who had the compilation and bought the first Throwing Muses' album, then gave it to me because it didn't sound similar enough to their work on the compilation for his liking.

It wasn't love at first sight. Hersh's sometimes ungainly lyrics and choppy rhythms made it hard to grasp the structure of the songs at first, but there was more than enough there that I found interesting to pull me back for repeated listening. And that is maybe this fan's biggest tip for those interested in checking out Kristin Hersh's music: expect to listen a few times before you decide if it's for you or not.

Hips and Makers was recorded by Hersh immediately after finishing work on the Throwing Muses record University. It ended up being released in 1994, while University was held until 1995. Hips and Makers is an introduction to Hersh's acoustic work, which can be extremely sparse, as it is here. This record gives the listener a close up listen to Hersh's lyrics, her songwriting, her guitar playing, and her voice. If you don't like these, you aren't likely to become a huge Kristin Hersh fan, though you might still enjoy her more hard rocking work.

Hips and Makers was co-produced by Hersh along with Lenny Kaye, and it sounds really good. On a track like "Sun Drops" Jane Scarpentoni's cello is multi-tracked to create a percussive string section, and Hersh's voice is used to create a vocal chorus that sings unusual, close harmonies. This debut album emphasizes the folk music influence on Hersh's work, both in sound and in intimacy, and her version of the traditional "The Cuckoo" provides signposts to what Hersh took away from American folk music and incorporated into her own songwriting as well as how her entire career is precisely that of the folk artist--making music as part of daily life, part of family life, and finding ways to share it as widely as possible.

Strange Angels, probably my favorite acoustic/folkie Kristin Hersh solo record, was recorded in 1997 and released in February of 1998. Its song structures are a little more clear and easier to comprehend right away, and her voice sounds wonderful, providing a bit more texture than on Hips and Makers. Strange Angels was co-produced by Hersh and Joe Henry, and he seems like a good fit for what Hersh was working with here.

The songs are in the same semi-confessional mode as on her debut, covering topics of daily life, raising kids, enjoying nature and navigating the strangeness of life, relationships, and the passage of time. "Use me, I get stronger/I get weaker when you treat me like a queen" she sings on "Stained". "You're just like me/two spiders hanging from one tree." I listened to this record incessantly when I got it, around 2001-2002, and even now after not hearing it for a year or three I find the songs pop right back into my head and I remember more lyrics than I would have thought. Strange Angels isn't currently available on streaming services, but it is well worth seeking out a CD copy.

Released immediately after Strange Angels in 1998 was the mail order CD Murder, Misery, Then Good Night, a collection of Appalachian murder ballads and folk songs about death. According to Hersh most of these were songs her father sang to her at bedtime as a child. Some would find that objectionable, but aren't most of our fairy tales full of death and misery? It all points to folk music as the carrier of profound messages about life and death presented in a very matter of fact way.

In 1999 Hersh released Sky Motel, which is perhaps her most accessible solo record. Recorded at Kingsway Studio in New Orleans it was produced by Trina Shoemaker, who had just finished working on Sherly Crow's  Globe Sessions album. Hersh played nearly all the instruments on Sky Motel with the exception of drums on a few tracks. "I think [Sky Motel] should have been a Throwing Muses record, and I tried to honor that," Kristin told MTV News while on tour promoting the album. That comes through on some of the tracks, like "Fog" and "A Cleaner Light," where Hersh backs herself on electric guitar, bass, drums, overdubbed vocals--it's like hearing Throwing Muses one minute, then being thrust into Hersh's quieter, singer/songwriter mode the next.

Not broke? Don't fix it! So Hersh released Sunny Border Blue in 2001, and it was more of what made Sky Motel so excellent. Once again Kristin takes over the studio, producing herself and playing pretty much everything herself. The songs are accessible, but not easy. Hersh's famously inscrutable and deeply personal lyrics are at a peak here--she's the master of the couplet. You can pull so many two-line quotations from her songs, almost at random, and there's something there to consider. Hersh's arrangements on these records do a lot to make unusual song structures sound like normal rock/folk music, rendering them catchy enough in parts to ensure you'll listen to the track again, every time absorbing more about what makes the song tick.

On Sunny Border Blue Hersh multi-tracks all the instruments on pretty much every song, making it sound much more like a band record or a solo record made with other musicians. She applies this same approach to a cover of Cat Stevens' "Trouble," executed with precise emotional devastation/weariness backed initially only by her acoustic guitar and then, eventually, crashing, slightly off-the-beat drums that sound like Keith Moon in a drunken brawl. The result is a gorgeous cover that truly illuminates the original. Lyrically the song is much more simple and direct than Hersh's usual style--probably part of the song's attraction for her--but it fits well into an album of her originals. Sky Motel and Sunny Border Blue are great starting points for new listeners who want to check out Kristin Hersh's solo records.

In 2003 Hersh was back with a new Throwing Muses record and a simultaneously released new solo album, The Grotto. On this one Hersh returns to the acoustic singer/songwriter mode of her first few solo albums, accompanied at times by violinist Andrew Bird and pianist Howe Gelb. She lets the songs run a little more than usual, which may not appeal to some listeners but definitely is a plus for others. By this point in her career, the songs that many saw as full of angst and dread are more like paeans to a life that is actually very full and has many happy and transcendent moments. A full, happy life is not neat; it doesn’t fit into easy containers. It is messy and complicated, but ultimately sweet, not unlike a melting chocolate ice cream cone on a hot day.

How To Sing Like a Star, released in 2007, feels like a continuation of the working methods of Sunny Border Blue and Sky Motel. It also consolidates all of Hersh's stylistic signposts and themes, creating  record that feels like, for perhaps the first time, she is in complete control of her work. In what, for most artists, is considered their mature phase, Hersh is just as startling as ever, and her music takes on tonal qualities and textures that we're used to hearing other artists play with, but seem like a revelation for her songs.

At the same time, Hersh founded CASH Music, a subscription based direct to consumer website that artists could use to fund their music projects. By subscribing to Hersh's work, fans (dubbed 'Strange Angels') could get new albums and EPs, written work, and other perks ($5,000 earns an executive producer credit) directly from her. It also allowed Hersh to completely break from a music industry that had never really been supportive of her work or ambitions. She told a Guitar World interviewer: "Because we differ from the recording industry ethically, we had been asked to dumb down our product so many times. I have been asked to act and look like a bimbo so many times and I just decided, 'I'm not going to turn my back on my music. I'm not going to turn my back on women.' We're morally bound to not participate in the traditional recording industry because we disagree with it. So we continue to play music, which has nothing to do with the music business."

Kristin's 2010 album Crooked was crowdsourced and demo'd for her Strange Angels, then released as a downloadable album and book. Many of her subsequent projects (including with Throwing Muses) feature a book that accompanies the music--Crooked's featured essays about each song. On "Sand," a road song with a groove that reminds me of Zeppelin if Hersh were their guitarist, she comments "Road nature is a meadow behind a dumpster, road health is finding anything to eat, road highs and hangovers are mixed up to the point where you are no longer aware of the contents of your own bloodstream."

At the same time, Hersh began to publish writings, the first coming in 2010. Rat Girl is a trip through Hersh's relationship with the entity that 'wrote' her earlier songs. Misdiagnosed as schizophrenic and the bipolar after a head injury, she has discussed the fact that her earlist work, which she sometimes doesn't remember writing, were songs that forced themselves to the surface and outside of her. She named this part of herself 'rat girl,' and over the years she has been clear about the fact that she feels herself to have gained control over her creative process, no longer just a conduit at the disposal of forces she can't understand.

In 2013 Hersh was divorced from her husband and manager of 25 years, and that shows up on her next work, the book/double album Wyatt at the Coyote Place. No longer under any kind of artistic control other than her own muse, she creates music that is familiar to her longtime listeners, but which sallies forth in a lot of directions that seemed supressed before. It's a record that I, as a fan, am still absorbing and still finding so much music that is enjoyable and takes me to all kinds of places.

In 2018 Hersh released Possible Dust Clouds, a strong album on which she used a band for the first time in a while in her solo career. That the main musicians are longtime Muses drummer David Narcizo and newer Muses member, bassist Fred Abong, should raise eyebrows, and the result here is, in fact, denser than most of Hersh's solo output, and often reminiscent of Throwing Muses.

Which brings us to Clear Pond Road. If you've listened to some of Hersh's solo records from across her career, you won't be at all surprised by what you hear on this record, but that doesn't mean that it sounds the same or that you won't be delighted by it. Of current reviews I've seen, I like The Wire's summary: Hersh has "done it again, but, as ever, differently" sums it up nicely.

The only question that remains, for me, is this: When I look at the length of Kristin Hersh's career, the sustained quality of her output, her artistic vision and her commitment to keeping that vision alive and manifesting it out in the real world of the music business, her ability to build and maintain her own artistic infrastructure, her close relationship with her fans, her incredible archive of recorded work, both released and unreleased, I  wonder why is she not held in the esteem of  a Neil Young or a Bruce Springsteen?

I don't know if Kristin Hersh is a rock master—I’m not really sure what that is, but I do know that she is one fierce artist that I'll never get over--and neither should you.

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