Kristin Hersh: From New Orleans To New Zealand (Interview)

Kristin Hersh has been making music for almost 30 years…as a solo artist and as a member of Throwing Muses and her noise-pop band 50 Foot Wave. After touring with Throwing Muses in support of their latest album, Purgatory/Paradise (their first in a decade), Kristin is touring New Zealand at the end of August as a solo performer, combining music and spoken word. The 13th Floor’s Marty Duda was in New Orleans recently which is where Kristin Hersh now calls home. They met up a Kristin’s neighbourhood coffee shop for a chat about touring, songwriting and living in New Orleans.

Click here to listen to the interview with Kristin Hersh:

Or, you can read a transcription of the interview here:

MD: So we’re in New Orleans. You’ve been in New Orleans for 6 years, I’ve just got here. I’m completely blown away with the place, I’ve been having an amazing time. So maybe you can tell me, to start with, what brought you here, cause you’re originally from Boston in the North East. It’s a very different vibe down here.

KH: I was actually born in Georgia, so I’m Southern and I still have enough of an accent to get beat up in New England and Throwing Muses ended up making a bunch of records down here at Daniel Lanois’ Studios Kingsway in the French Quarter and I made some solo records in that studio and we fell in love with the place in a way that you do when it doesn’t feel strange but it’s still striking, it feels like home but there’s plenty to look at.

MD: There certainly is, I mean I keep running into musicians and celebrities and all sorts of people everywhere I go and there’s just music everywhere. So that must influence your own music that you’re making and how you go about doing it.

KH: it influences me personally because I like to feel that there are other musicians around. I would hope that it doesn’t influence my music because for me that would be interference and I don’t mean that in a snotty way, I just mean it’s not my place to start adopting trumpets or something, you know. So I love that the air is infused with music, sometimes literally, sometimes metaphorically, and it’s always spoken to me for that reason, I’m much more able to hear music in the air in this place than I am in some others and that’s a goofy, groovy thing to say that I absolutely mean it. I had some homeless guy in the park tell me that there’s this siren song in the humidity that each water droplet carries music! I was like you know what, I would believe that, here I would believe that.

MD: Yeah, I mean there is a difference obviously from where I, other places I’ve been you get the feeling that things are happening here you know. So..

KH: It’s also its own country, I mean like even America isn’t its own country but New Orleans is.

MD: Well I found that having moved away from The States and coming back, I enjoy the places in The States that are least like America like New York City and now New Orleans, you know, I mean it’s a whole, very different thing than say going to the middle of Ohio someplace.

KH: Well we went through that, there’s a regionalism effect that filters down in through cuisine and architecture and accents in music that we experienced in our first tours especially when we were teenagers, that was gradually dissipated as influences became similar, each place became watered down, populated by the same people who talked the same, ate the same food, lived in the same houses. But eventually it turned a corner and then came back around to these regionalisms where people think ‘I am like Portland so I will be Portland, I am like Chicago, I will become Chicago’ and now It’s sort of, I’m not sure if its real anymore but it’s definitely back.

MD: So the most recent music that you’ve put out is the most recent Throwing Muses album which was last year and there were a lot of songs in that record and they were all written by you so that must have taken quite a bit out of you I assume as far as creativity. Whereabouts are you these days?

KH: Songs don’t stop for me. We had 10 years off so I had 10 years of material that just built up kinda banging on my closet door so it’s not like there’s an element of wear and tear that goes along with writing songs, it’s more like how do I serve them. It’s sort of like children, you have children, you know it’s not work, it’s a biological imperative. So I was sort of moving forward with these songs as best I could and failing trying to make them a 50 Foot Wave or solo songs and I finally called the Throwing Muses rhythm section from the desert and said ‘if I told you I have a 115 songs, would you make a record’ and they both sort of said ‘of course’ and a little P.S of ‘really, 115?’. So we started, I started by myself because I wanted it to be, I wanted the production to be human feel, meaning I’m gonna make it hard on the rhythm section, I’m gonna play everything, all the overdubs first and let the rocky waves underneath it create that watery feel and I recorded all 115 songs, knocked it down to 75, recorded 50 with the band and then edited those down to the 35 that remain. So really what we do in the studio is just erase, we pay so much money to erase while we play. If they had given us anymore time we would have erased the whole record.

MD: Usually people start out with about 35 songs and then wittle it down to about 12 or 14. So I mean these guys must have been blown away when they saw what you had.

KH: The band?

MD: Yeah.

KH: No they were not surprised at all. They were surprised that it wasn’t 500 cause’ they know my work ethic, which is…never, never stop.

MD: And so what made you realize, what about the songs made you realize that they were for the band rather than for a solo or Fifty Foot?

KH: All that failure. Trying to make them work for other projects and just being lame. But mostly because I write through and use the songs on my Strat or my telecaster and 50 Foot Wave songs on my SGs and then solo songs on my callings and it’s hard for me to break from that rule though my drummers tell me its flawed.

MD: Drummers are like that. So when you’re coming down to New Zealand… are you doing several shows or is it a tour, I don’t know, I can’t remember but yeah…when you do come down to New Zealand, what are you going to be performing? I assume it’s just gonna be you on your own.

KH: Yeah it’s solo but I haven’t looked at what I’m supposed to do yet. Sometimes there are readings because I have some books, the Throwing Muses record is a book and sometimes it’s just plain… I like the words in music lately because I’ve confused people with music for so many years, you can’t count on people being literate that way or at least fluent in that language and really it’s the only language I’m fluent in, so when I speak English it doesn’t always make sense and people speak English to me it doesn’t always make sense. So I thought music is to rise above that but people get left behind and when I combine them they don’t, the text will inform a song, a song will inform the next text and it allows me to do whatever I want. To get lost in music is also valuable in a different way, I sort of, you know, bring down the cone of silence and get lost in my cloud and that’s valuable in its own way, it’s just a little less forth coming.

MD: You mentioned the fact the Throwing Muses album was kind of in book form as well and I think you did that on your previous solo album as well, read the book and you can download the thing.

KH: Yes.

MD: Is that your way of kind of dealing with the way music is consumed these days and technology and the fact that nobody wants to pay for music anymore. Is that a work around for you?

KH: It’s a work around in a celebration of the value of a gift. We don’t value CDs because we shouldn’t, they’re little pieces of plastic. There is a CD in the Muses book but I think what we do should be construed as less an effort than a gift. We’re not really gonna make money, we don’t have egos cause we’re dorks. We’re in a different sort of business, the sub-species of musicians, sub-music business and I could prance around and call it art if I wanted but I’m gonna let other people do that for us, it’s just what we usually do and just say, we’re lost in our own language. So really our only option is to sit it down at the table and tip toe away and hope somebody needs it and then if they find someone else who needs it, it’s something of value they can give them. Nobody wants your soundtrack pushed on them, it’s like telling someone about your religion and hoping they adopt it but they will accept you handing them a book. It’s valuable and the stories in the book, I guess it lapses a little into pretence when it gets into prose poetry but I think there’s so much goofiness, on the road stories and crap like that, you get a better keyhole view into our island world.

MD: You mentioned pretence and pretentiousness as if it’s a bad thing but possibly…I just got through seeing the Nick Cave film, the documentary called 20,000 Days On Earth, I mean if theres anybody who can be accused of being pretentious is possibly Nick Cave but at the same time it really works for him and that’s how he kind of channels his creativity I think and he seems to be very aware of it. So maybe there’s like a, you know, it’s like the new creativity is pretentiousness, I don’t know.

KH: I suppose if you are aware of honesty and you can buy into even someone’s style, then style and substance are not necessarily opposed. I’ve always gone to this substantive and held white knuckle to it as if someone was going to take it away and they try, they try to put lame, you know, Warner Brothers are trying to put lame production on what I gave them and yet I have to admit what was wrong with that is that the substance of the style was missing, so I imagine there was substance to some pretence. I’ve tried not to engage in it but if I came off that way then I have to forgive myself. My friend Gary says it’s how you crucify yourself, like this is proof of your honesty, if you let someone actually think you’re pretentious is the worst thing in the world and you’re crucified, good for you. He’s the one who produced the first few Throwing Muses records. (laughing) He knows of whence he speaks.

MD: So, Throwing Muses themselves are they, did you tour with them when the record came out or is…

KH: Yeah.

MD: Oh okay, so…

KH: It’s been like, I guess 6 months we’ve been out or so. I just got back a week ago and then in September we begin the UK and I guess Europe, stuff like that.

MD: And you were just in Australia on your own and now you’re back in New Orleans and then you’re coming back to New Zealand and I assume that travelling around on your own is a very different thing than cruising around with the band.

KH: It’s less fun, it’s a lot less fun. I adore my bandmates, I’m deeply in love with my bandmates, I know that’s not always the case with bands but I have not had a single day go by in the last 25 years where I haven’t felt honoured to be with them and having missed them when they weren’t there, they are uncles to my children, you know there are only 3 of us so it’s a little tiny cult and when we play it’s a triangle of strength and I think if I didn’t respect them so much, I wouldn’t ask so much of myself, I wouldn’t take so many chances. What we do is, I’m gonna say, wicked hard cause it, and that’s why we don’t look like rock stars up there, we’re working and working really hard. I think the last show was Atlanta and we finally got this set perfect, it’s just sad but you know, not as sad as the last show sucking.

MD: Throwing Muses is a trio and has been a trio for quite a while but is that what you think, and I know there’s kind of a magic to three people working together and originally the band was not a trio so did the dynamics change dramatically when it got to that point?

KH: Yeah only the dynamics though that’s a good point. You remove the wall of sound approach and you suddenly have an inherent room quality which in the studio would mean you bring the mic up that’s is in the corner and you add atmosphere, that’s a given in a trio, live and in the studio and what it means is you can play less and you can play more and you create your own dynamics. I can’t tell you how difficult that is, with compression on everything, trying to even it all out. All you want is to be able to whisper and scream with every single instrument and every single moment to make sure that the impact is appropriate to the measure that you’re playing in. I have only really been able to pull that off with a trio, sorry.

(Kristin’s phone goes off)

MD: it’s 4 o’clock.

KH: I’m supposed to pick my son up, it’s okay, I don’t have to.

MD: We’re almost done, he’ll be fine.

KH: My favourite is when that sound hits for garbage day like ‘garbage, it’s your garbage, Tinkerbelle says garbage time’.

MD: The world we live in these days. Okay, so when you get ready to, you’re packing up and you got a trip, like you’re heading off to New Zealand. How do you prepare yourself for such an excursion?

KH: I don’t, you can’t.

MD: Really?

KH: Yeah, I pack the morning I leave. I don’t rehearse but I have sort of ongoing rehearsal schedule so I’m addicted to the guitar in a way a jogger would be addicted to jogging. In fact this is my running path right here along neutral ground which is probably really dangerous in the 90 degree heat but then when I go home I’m just chilled enough to be able to face the guitar which can be a little jagged and intense and erratic as any emotional response. So I have to run until my heart is pounding and I’m exhausted and then I can face the intensity of my guitar. I’m generally well-rehearsed because of that addiction but no I do not prepare in any way whatsoever.

MD: I assume you don’t jog before the gig.

KH: No, the gig is its own kind of jogging, then I have the face the intensity, I have no choice. I’m not gonna say that’s easy but I’m not gonna whine and say it’s hard either, I’m just gonna say for a shy person, I wasn’t cut out for it. (laughs)

Click here for more details about Kristin Hersh’s NZ tour.