NO DAY AT THE BEACH: “I find water very, very destructive,” Hersh says. |
London’s Soho Arts Theatre is a tiny, buttoned-up venue in the heart of that city’s venerable theatre district. Inside, the sold-out crowd is reverent and hushed as Kristin Hersh takes the stage. Blinking in the spotlight, Kristin is strangely still. But as soon as she opens her mouth to sing, the air crackles with energy. And it’s not simply from the song’s rollicking, furious immediacy, or its vertiginous chorus, or even the way the strings surge dramatically against the lacerating guitar. No, it’s the way her voice evokes so many emotions at once: feral and wise, burning with both vulnerability and fearlessness — a blast of emotional intensity akin to an exorcism.
The sound is bright, messy, and beautiful, and it lights up the dark room.
That searing intensity is familiar to anyone who has followed Hersh’s work since her early days as the teenaged leader of Newport-based band Throwing Muses. Since then, her emotionally complex, allusive confessionals have earned her a well-deserved reputation as a gifted songwriter. The ensuing years have not mellowed her in any way — even if appearances are somewhat to the contrary. When I meet up with Hersh the next day at her hotel, she is curled up on an overstuffed chair, hands wrapped resolutely around a cup of hot tea.
She looks a little tired, and admits that this is the first day she hasn’t felt the effects of jet lag. “Today’s the first okay day. We went right to work. You’re supposed to take a day off, and we didn’t!” She laughs. “Not a lot of autopilot on a new record . . . .”
Make that not a lot of autopilot, period. Since the release of Hersh’s previous solo record, this generally indefatigable mother of four has been a flurry of creative activity, doing mini-tours with Throwing Muses, recording and touring with her other band, math-rock trio 50 Foot Wave, and working on the follow-up to Murder, Misery and Goodnight, her collection of Appalachian murder ballads.
And now there’s Learn To Sing Like a Star (Yep Roc). Look beyond the tongue-in-cheek title (the subject line of a spam e-mail that kept popping up in Hersh’s inbox), and you’ll find a bright, bittersweet album influenced by some tumultuous events in Hersh’s life. In 2005, Hurricane Katrina devastated her former home-away-from-home, New Orleans. Months later, a burst pipe destroyed Hersh and husband/manager Billy O’Connell’s Ohio home. It’s no wonder that Learn to Sing is rife with references to angry water.
“I grew up by a scary ocean,” Hersh explains. “I find water very, very destructive. Other people think of the beach as lying around — I think of it as frightening hurricanes! And then with all that happened — New Orleans and our house . . . Two floors flooded. The ceiling collapsed. I lost all my instruments. We lost 2000 books. Our furniture. And even stuff we couldn’t throw away, because we couldn’t bear it . . . it’s still covered in mold. We smell like mold, all of us!"
Recording the album at Portsmouth’s Stable Sound provided a welcome respite from personal crises and brought Kristin back to her home state and back in collaboration with some of her favorite people — namely, Throwing Muses drummer David Narcizo (who also created the album’s artwork), Martin and Kim McCarrick on cello and violin, and longtime engineer Steve Rizzo.
Clearly Stable Sound means a lot to Kristin, as she’s recorded all her solo albums there. She calls it her “passionate hideout,” describing it as “where I last felt magic. It’s always where I last felt magic. It’s got this great vibe because you can’t imagine anyone listening to what you’re doing out in the middle of nowhere in this horse stable with these huge, beautiful windows.”
That sense of safety has allowed Hersh to stretch her boundaries further with each successive solo record. Miles away from the hushed, secretive The Grotto, Learn to Sing’s 14 songs are equal parts blistering and sepulchral, existing on middle ground somewhere between the jagged disquiet of Throwing Muses’ 2003 outing and the “pure, pissed-off sunshine” of 2001’s Sunny Border Blue. Lyrically, they have a pungent present-tense conversational directness. On “Wild Vanilla,” Hersh sings, deadpan: “That was one striking phone call boy/Your voice at a fever pitch/And here I thought you’d just/Full of white noise called to bitch.” Mingled amongst the confessionals are boisterous, surreal tall tales about parrot ladies and bickering with the devil. There are hints of magical realism — as when little green apples appear to cartoonishly mock the desire-stunned narrator of “In Shock” or when the faraway object of desire in “The Thin Man” rubs his hands together, “sparks fly,” a gift of fireworks “in the ozone snow.” Emotional blows are sometimes softened with wry humor (“You apply your me-repellent”) but often arrive artlessly unblunted (“I left my heart on the frozen sidewalk/Kicked around and sliding on the dirty ice”). The mood swings are tied together by the albums’s string-laden, cinematically sumptuous sound.
