Return of the 50 Foot Woman

Kristin Hersh on stardom, skin and her new muses.

by M.J. Fine

HOT MAIL: Hersh got the title of her new CD, Learn to Sing Like a Star, from a spam subject line. "I can't really say there's anything inspiring about titling a record," she says. "So spam works." (CLICK IMAGE FOR LARGER VERSION)

Anybody can be a star these days. Put a few songs on MySpace, post a video on YouTube, stick your band bio on Wikipedia and — voila! — you've potentially got the eyes and ears of everyone on the Internet. Problem is, so does everybody else, and no one has time to wade through all the crap to get to your nuggets of genius. Oh, one more thing: Your songs are ready, but are you?

Stardom wasn't quite so accessible in the early '80s, when Throwing Muses were starting out, but Kristin Hersh says the attention still came too fast for her.

"We started when we were 14, and because three of us were female, we were allowed in the clubs, because apparently girls don't start fights. ... Because we were playing out in Providence, which is a big college town and a smarty-arty college town, immediately we could fill a club with 500 to 800 people. Which doesn't make any sense."

Talking at Borders' coffee shop on a cold January night, Hersh is open, thoughtful and wickedly funny. She laughs hard and often, and she keeps talking even as her husband/manager leads her gently but firmly away to the crowd that's gathered for her in-store performance.

"So we flew to the U.K., where we were huge," she continues, "and we had to talk to journalists who had a window into my psyche in the form of our record, and I was absolutely unprepared for any human involvement in what I did. In fact, it was a big mistake to release records, to be playing out that whole time. I wish I'd waited till I was 25."

Intense songs like "Delicate Cutters" and "Hate My Way" appealed to art-school kids and other harmless misfits, but they also drew some scary fans. "I didn't realize I sounded crazy," Hersh says. "I thought it was a celebration of maybe ugliness, maybe violent impulses, but at least it was something positive, you know. Music! But they took it very literally and they felt like we were crazy together."

Kristin Hersh

Learn to Sing Like a Star

(Yep Roc)

Anyone who tells you acoustic guitars don't rock is a filthy liar. Kristin Hersh makes a glorious mess with little more than a Collings Acoustic and her cat's tongue howl. For her seventh solo album, she gets some help; Throwing Muses bandmate David Narcizo plays drums, Martin and Kimberlee McCarrick add strings, and her oldest son, Doonie, plays backpack sitar on the spooky interlude "Christian Hearse," but Hersh herself brings the noise. And what woozy, spiky, tender noise it is. The words are good, too: A Disney-looking lizard breaks the tension on "Under the Gun"; the wistful "Peggy Lee" finds perspective in spilled Froot Loops. Play it loud.

—M.J.F.

She's weeded out the weirdos by putting a couple dozen releases between herself and her most unhinged work, first with the Muses and later on her own and with noise-rock trio 50 Foot Wave. Her new solo disc, Learn to Sing Like a Star (Yep Roc), seems less elliptical than usual — glam, even — but Hersh says it was unintentional. She didn't mean to be quite so come-hither in the album art, she says. It's just that she was touring with a liver infection, and when she wasn't on stage, all she could do was lie down. And the title came from the spam that accompanied the dozens of MP3s that mixer Trina Shoemaker e-mailed.

"Really, I just have no excuse to title a record. Nobody does. It's an artificial collection of music based on the long-play format," Hersh says with a laugh. "And we still use it, which is sweet. But to come up with a name, it seems goofy. ... I can't really say there's anything inspiring about titling a record. So spam works."

No one would mistake "Wild Vanilla" or "Nerve Endings" for American Idol fare, but Hersh says Star's songs came out like anthems. "Some of the songs sound like Broadway to me, I didn't know what to make of it," she says. "But they're like kids. You just have to go, 'All right. That's what you want to do, go and do it. I'll love you anyway.'"

In a typically tender blog entry last fall, Hersh took umbrage at her Wikipedia definition, which mentioned that she writes songs about marriage and motherhood. "I got a little mad that they would imply that what I write is for one gender and that's because I'm so bored of people thinking that men are people and women are women," she explains. Naturally, her life informs her songs, and her life right now involves living on the road with her husband, Billy O'Connell, and sons Ryder, Wyatt and Bodhi. Her male peers' fatherhood surely shapes their songs, but they're usually cheated out of discussing their domestic lives with journalists.

Hersh has started to see the double standard apply in a way she didn't expect. "It happens to me, too," she says. "I have 50 Foot Wave songs, choruses, B sections, about my children, and people think they're about sex. Because it's 50 Foot Wave, because it's loud."

In other words, people think acoustic songs are about raising babies, and rawk is about making them.

"Yeah! And because I say 'skin.' Which is probably what they keep doing to men. You know, like, 'Oh, another dirty love song.'"

Hersh describes how 50 Foot Wave's "Golden Ocean" came out of living in Los Angeles and Wyatt's different view of the city. "He would look out at the city lights at night and called it 'golden ocean' because it would shimmer, and I would think, 'You fuckers, you idiots, you fake lips and cowboy boots,' and he just thought, 'It's beautiful, so it's good.' And that song is all about trying to adopt his good attitude and how healthy and lovely their skin is because they're congruent people, what's on the inside is on the outside, and all the fakers, they've got sweetness on the outside and bitterness on the inside." But Hersh's monster riffs and screams about sweat and sugar skin lead some listeners astray. "I can't tell you the number of people who've sat me down and decided it's all about sex," she says.

The little ones inform her music, but Hersh tries to shield them from it. "It would be like letting them watch the news or introducing them to complex emotions before they were ready, or having religion in their face," she says. She's never far from the boys, but she keeps them out of the way during the most emotional stages of recording. "Guitar solos, if you're not jerking off, are really intense," she says. "I let the kids in when I'm doing some stupid piano overdub." They aren't necessarily ready for what she does, as she learned with her first son.

"Doonie came home from school when he was little and slammed his backpack down on the counter and said, 'Are you a rock star?' I just happened to be in Rolling Stone," Hersh says with a laugh. "But just a little thing! It was just 'cause I was standing next to, like, Milla, or something somewhere. And kids were making fun of him. And I had never told him that I was a musician even. Just, I thought he'd catch on eventually. He was so mad! It was like saying to your dad, 'Are you a fireman?' What's wrong with being a rock star? You wish you were a rock star! That's when I realized it doesn't really matter what you do, they're gonna hate you for it anyway."

But that doesn't last, especially if your mom is as cool as Kristin Hersh. Doonie puts in an appearance on Star, and you can find him on MySpace; he hit the three-band mark by 20. "He's showing me up, I guess," Hersh says with pride. "I was really happy to hear that he could scream in tune, though. Yeah, chip off the old block."

(m_fine@citypaper.net)