Interview: Kristin Hersh (Throwing Muses) - Touring Aotearoa NZ This Week

Kristin Hersh’s first band Throwing Muses began playing when she was just 14 years old, and they haven’t stopped yet, with a new album (Moonlight Concessions) out and a tour to follow. But Hersh isn’t one to sit still, so the multi-talented US artist is back for more solo shows in Australasia first. Mitch Marks and Kristin battled dodgy trans-Tasman Wi-Fi and a lot of disappearances from the screen to talk connection, middle-of-the-night inspiration and what it is to be a mammal on a stage.

UnderTheRadar proudly presents...

Kristin Hersh (USA)

Thursday 20th March – The Vic Theatre, Devonport
Friday 21st March – The Tuning Fork, Auckland
Saturday 22nd March – The Piano, Christchurch
Sunday 23rd March – Old St Pauls, Wellington w/ Jon Muq*

Tickets on sale now via plus1.co.nz
*Wellington tickets on sale HERE via UTR

Kristin Hersh suddenly snaps into view on-screen, mid-sentence: “It could be me, I think the internet's funky here – the Wi-Fi…”

Mitch Marks: You’re back, excellent! I was just troubleshooting by looking at all the buttons on-screen, which really didn't do anything at all.

Anyway. I'm Mitch, and I'm in Wellington, New Zealand, and talking to you for UnderTheRadar, which is a local music site…

Kristin Hersh: I love UnderTheRadar!

Oh, cool! Because you've been here recently, haven't you? Like, two years ago?

Not even two years ago. It's just a little over a year — two tours down here on one record. I would just stay, if you guys didn't keep kicking me out…

I think you should be careful what you say, because we like to keep people, so…

Not in a bad way! In a very inclusive, welcoming way — obviously.

Good! It’s our favourite place in the world. I brought my son Bodhi on the last tour. Now I have my son Ryder on [this tour] and, you know, I have four sons, so – I'm bringing my son, Doony, he’s playing bass for Throwing Muses on the next tour. One more son, and we’re all in.

So we're guaranteed at least the next tour and one more from you just to complete the set! On that note, there's a new Throwing Muses album out, you've been touring lots, and you've written many books as well — how do you fit this all in? Where do you write? Is it on the road?

I always think it should be. It seems like there would be some downtime, but if I write on an airplane everything I wrote disappears when I get back out of the cloud. And, you know, the tour van is similarly not conducive to focus.

I feel like anything that happens on an airplane should just stay there. Like watching a movie. You'll cry when you don't mean to, up there, and all of those emotions should stay in the air.

That’s true. It's like Las Vegas that way! Plus I'm always flying with a bunch of other bands, you know? And so it's not a quiet thing. But I learned from raising these four sons — I’ve had kids since I was a teenager, so I really haven't slept in about 30 years, which is a skill set. And around, I would say, three in the morning, it stops being night or day, and people stop doing stuff.

It's just that in the middle of the night you have access to these often very sensuous, tactile impressions. Like the way your old car smelled, and the way a person who is now dead used to speak in funnier moments, and quieter moments. The nuances of effect on your senses are available to you then. So because I write memoir, that's when I write my books.

But it’s so strange, right, when it's so removed from oneself, like inspiration is what makes it breathe, and that's what's outside of you.

So while you're on the road, you're experiencing it, you're collecting all of these anecdotes and feelings and experiences of people, and then you go away and you distil it into a book or an album or song. So maybe where you're touring really affects your albums? Is what you're writing about now different to when you were younger? Is it affected more by all of the places that you go?

Yeah, although when you're young, everywhere you go is foreign. You know, you’re not used to Planet Earth yet. And then when you're older, you realise you're never gonna get used to it. It's just weird! And that can be fascinating and that can be terrifying, and somewhere in between fascinating and terrifying. The work will make its own point.

If I were writing the songs or writing the books [on the road], they'd be both clever and boring. They'd be like something I hate. So while I live, I wait for them to show up and tell me what they think of all this, and then I listen. And that's why I have to do it in the middle of the night when nothing else is happening, because, you know – you can hear [right now] there are people laughing, there’s sirens going. There's a very cool bird right over there, and my son just walked past with a friend, and that's so important, that stuff is just so vivid that I would jump on it, and I would try to capture it all, and you would see how annoying I really am.

I know this because the first time I tried to write a book, it wasn't my idea. I was being sort of forced to write a book, and then I had a deal with Penguin, and for two years, I had this ‘clever thing’. And I hate ‘clever’ so much, I knew that I was just gonna say, “No, you're gonna let me out of this contract — I will not participate in more cleverness on Earth!”

And then in the next two years, the book found its voice — which it already had, I sort of cheated by having a teenage diary in craziness, and I followed that voice. So now I know that prose can be as inspired as music. It just comes across in a different manner. It comes across as prose poetry and it uses the cheats of melody and rhythm, whereas music is embedded in that.

How does performance come into that? What's the feeling for you?

I've been confused about performance for most of my life. Because I don't want to be looked at — I'm a mammal! If any of us were honest, we would admit that this is inappropriate. You want to be gazed at by a loved one, and that's it. There is no love that will be for sale.

So when they put you in a spotlight, it's mimicking the entertainment industry's idea of attention as fake love, and the fact that I disappear when I play means that that was never a problem for me. I was a little confused that anyone showed up. I still am. I'm confused that they think I'm one of the people that is a perform-er.

But the venue is there to facilitate the listening process. It's for the audience. If anything, the spotlight should be on them, and the musicians are conduits. Why else would you be playing music? If you're playing it, it's not music anymore. A real musician has already lost themselves on Planet Music. They know what that is. To recreate it is always a degradation of sorts.

So if you don't make an effort to disappear, you're not going to have music, you're going to have product. And this is what everyone is familiar with. After fighting my way out of the music industry because of its sexism (I don't mean that as an anti-male thing, obviously the patriarchy isn't men, that's a sexist thing to imply — it's an anti-human perspective, so all the women knocking each other down to objectify themselves, that's the patriarchy too… and the machine) I thought, you know what? Fuck you! I'm gonna fight this, and I'm gonna do it on this landscape as it is. So my efforts to disappear out there have increased 100-fold now that I have it in my skill set.

Disappearing is a very important thing to do – in my life they’ve called it dissociating. But at the same time, that's where inspiration is… ‘re-created’, I want to say.

You're somewhere in between yourself and the audience, when you’re performing…

There’s something happening between us. But not all audiences are capable of this, and not all Kristins are capable of it. I'll walk out and think, fuck! Like, Where is it? Why am I still here? And the audience, they want to hear what they've heard before, maybe, or they're egoic in their self-definition of ‘listener’, and “Who am I going to fall in love with? Oh, it's where the spotlight is,” and all this misapprehension of the equation can really mess things up. But when it works, and it usually does work, because people are cool and oddly social and willing to lose themselves in that, then it's this other-body that we hold up between us, and we both go home feeling better about stuff. We maybe show up with some garbage and some pain, and that's allowed, but the process is a real self-erasing one. Music — it’s bringing the stuff that we hate and making it seem cool.

I love the way you're speaking about it, because it makes it seem very much the two-way street that it is.

It has to be, right? Because there's spiritual responsibility on both sides. And I know it sounds petty, but I want to pull it down from the snooty art-world and up from the lowest common denominator-world and say, look, none of us is here to do anything but disappear and let music be.

I'm sorry to let you go so soon, but that feels like quite a good note to end on…

Oh, I disappeared so often!

In the end, that was kind of perfect – it was part of the whole theme of the conversation! Thank you for being so generous with your answers.

Thank you for knowing what the hell I’m doing!

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.