kristin hersh

My good friend George Howard recently wrote about something I feel is important. For so many years, I begged people in the music business to measure emotional impact rather than units sold. For the most part, my argument fell on deaf ears, as that didn’t appear to be a way to make money. What they didn’t appreciate was the potential revenue stream of an untapped audience. Not just the music connoisseur who rejects trends, but regular people who haven’t been told that they won’t “get” it. People like music. Period.

“listeners have an overarching desire to create connections and narratives, and to place their music into their own taxonomies that have nothing to do with genre or classification, but are instead based on emotional responses to music….the greatest…call them folksonomies…come from users making their own — ostensibly random, but deeply non-random — connections based on nuance and subtlety and things not easily articulated or measured. The sound of love, for example.”

Read the rest of George’s post here.

A few months back, Billy started hankering for another Throwing Music experiment in keeping with his “Works In Progress” mp3 subscription series of 1998 (we’ve been selling mp3s for 10 years now!?!), which he followed with the on-line only release of “Murder, Misery and Then Goodnight” later that same year, and the 50FootWave “Free Music” name-your-own-price experiment which resulted in more than 2 million Ep downloads in 2005 (yeah, 3 years prior to you-know-who “inventing” the idea) . He likes to get music directly into the hands of listeners whenever possible.

This time, the Great Idea Inside Billy’s Head was this:

“We’ll offer people in our web community the chance to buy CD-R’s of Kristin playing 10 songs of their choice. They’ll pick the 10 songs from a menu of 200 — no guesswork on our part as to what anyone wants to hear — they’ll tell us. We’ll burn the CD’s ourselves and Kris can personalize and sign them: 10-4 (your name here).

We’ll charge $50 for this CD, ensuring that only a few people will partake initially. But if they like it, word’ll spread.”

Wicked, I thought. I never know what people want to hear. Some seem to only like old Throwing Muses songs, some only like the most recent release, some people only like Sunny Border Blue, some people want unreleased material, some like me to scream real loud, some like me to whisper, some just like Your Ghost over and over and over again. Now the set list can be someone else’s fault decision. And when ThrowingMusic webinatrix Tine says, “I want one!” I know it’s a good idea.

We sold 100 in record time (under 20 minutes). Of course.

“A hundred?” I asked.

“A hundred,” answered Billy.

“Literally a hundred?” I asked, hoping he was kidding.

“Get to work, he replied.

As it turns out, 200 songs is a lot. And my songs are not the easiest to play. For two months, I sat with my iPod, marveling at the disgusting complexity of a Throwing Muses song, wondering who the hell wrote all these “Kristin Hersh” solo songs, filling notebooks with lyrics, chords and time signature notations, asking questions like, is a piano instrumental even a song?

Creating an acoustic version for each song and then getting it performance-ready was like preparing for ten tours at once. I tried shifting my focus to the first few orders. Now I know what songs people want to hear: generally speaking, songs that I would never, ever choose to play live. Which sort of makes sense.

When I finally felt that I was able to tackle the first few orders, my gear wasn’t. It buzzed and clicked and ultimately choked. I wondered if I should just concede defeat and offer refunds.

Then I had an idea: offer an upgrade. I bought time at Stable Sound and started over, recording clear but still raw versions of all the songs people had asked to hear. I built personalized 10 song sets out of this session, dedicating each 10-4 to the special boy or girl who’d ordered it.

When we happily told folks that some high-quality 10-4’s would be on their way soon, they expressed great disappointment. Initially, we were taken aback; then I came to appreciate what it was they were after.  They wanted truth in real-time.  Warts and all. And they wanted it played just for them: a musical prayer. I can get behind musical prayer. Way.

So, months behind schedule, I started over again and we offered refunds in case some people didn’t want to wait. No one asked for a refund.

It takes me about an hour to learn each song on a 10-4 and get it up to speed, then maybe another hour to  record. Billy lies on the floor and listens, we appreciate each song as it goes by and reminisce about the time it was written, recorded or toured. We laugh a lot, cried once or twice. We get through 1 or 2 orders on a good day.

It’s been a real nightmare learning experience - like all great ideas. I keep telling Billy that he thinks I can do anything, when really, the opposite is true: I can’t do anything. But we’ve come to love diving headfirst into this ocean of songs and swimming around.

Note: The ThrowingMusic Store is offering some of the songs I recorded live to tape at Stable Sound in a series of 5 volumes called “10-4-All”. Here’s an mp3 of one of them, “Cathedral Heat”. And in case you’re interested, here’s an outtake from an actual 10-4 recording, “Mexican Women”.

Only a couple of generations ago, we the people sang the songs and told the stories and generated our culture from the bottom up. But now, more and more of our culture is spoon-fed to us top-down by corporations, TV networks and ad agencies. We must reclaim our culture. Start telling our own stories again. Singing our own songs. Producing our own meaning. Creating our own cool. — Adbusters

• • • • •

“So what would happen to god if all the televangelists disappeared?” we asked ourselves in the cereal aisle at Trader Joe’s, music and commerce having mixed us up pretty bad in the last year. Surely, people’ll start looking for a better passport to the spirit world than what the bloated corporate corpse** offered. Just about anything’d be better than continuing to throw money at cartoon characters.

Billy picked up a box of raisin bran and read the ingredients.

“Or else we’re all so messed up by the business of selling music that we don’t know what to look for anymore. ”

I picked up my own box of cereal to read, then put it back.

“But music just is.”

Billy tossed the raisin bran into the cart and started walking slowly down the aisle. “Most people don’t think that. Most people think music is the recording industry, just like they think religion is god.” We paused in produce to let the misters spritz us (it was a hot day). “You never belonged in the recording industry anyway; you’re a musician.” He held up a loaf of bread. “Do we need bread?”

“I’ll bake some.”

“No you won’t.”

“Then we need bread,” I said. “But good music matters.”

He thought. “To a select few, maybe. Lots of people don’t know the difference.” We lingered in frozen foods (hot day). “But it doesn’t matter who hears the music,” he said. “If it’s played at all, we win.”

• • • • •

** warner brothers rejected this video when my band, throwing muses, delivered it. they said i didn’t look pretty enough.