kristin hersh

I’m fighting more robots than I used to, it seems. And robots fight dirty.

Both my cell phone and my computer insist that I am a cretin. Not a “christine” or a “kirsten”, which I could understand. At least those are names. The robots have taught me to avoid ever writing my name except on pieces of paper, but it does come up every now and then in robot world. “Kristin?” they ask snidely. “Are you sure? We’re thinking ‘cretin.’ Yeah, that’s definitely it. Try cretin.” And they snicker.

The phone robot also has a more insidious weapon it uses against me: predictive text. Like most introverts, I love the idea of texting, as there is no human voice or face attached to the communication and no tension associated with hanging up or not being able to. Texting is like passing notes in class, which is a terribly under-appreciated art form, in my opinion. My phone, however, doesn’t let me use some of the basic words that I have long considered it my right to use.

For instance, the word “back.” Instead of “I will get back to you…love, kristin” it makes me say, “I will get back baby bad balls to you…love cretin”. Once, it made me say, “merry merry meat meat on the phone phone”. I don’t even remember what I was trying to say. The word “television” is always followed by the word “gonads.” If I type the letter “A”, it is followed by “NOW chlorinated!” The letter “I” is followed by “Still SUCK.”

The self-checkout robot at the grocery store only speaks to me in Spanish. Which made me feel sexy at first (I’m rarely mistaken for swarthy), but…I don’t speak Spanish and I’m easily confused even in my own language. I’m working on my Spanish; after all, I live in California. I’m not advancing quickly enough for the self-checkout robot, though, who repeats herself over and over again, calmly but loudly enough for the other (smirking) grocery store patrons to hear. I never know what she wants me to do, so I just stand there, frowning, balancing bags of salad and cartons of eggs, waiting for rescue. I want the self-checkout robot to like me, but I don’t think she ever will.

My TV doesn’t even like me, and really, a TV is an ancient, “Lost in Space” version of a robot. Its thought patterns are still more complex than mine, however. It uses its army of remotes to mock me and my Luddite sensibilities. Together, the television and its remote minions have convinced Tivo to record documentaries on “a man eating animals” rather than “man-eating animals” and instead of “mammal babies,” “mammals making babies.” The latter made for a rather uncomfortable evening gathered around the television with my children, all of us avoiding eye contact with anything but the floor.

I’m seriously thinking about engaging in human contact, of all things, which is traditionally where my Luddite tendencies let me down. I’m an asocial Luddite which is a non-starter. It’s hard to raise a barn without talking to somebody about it first, you know? I really thought the robots could help me out with this problem of mine, but they don’t wanna hang out with me anymore. They’re too cool and they know it.

So the next time I’m at the grocery store, I’ll take a deep breath and then wait in line with the human beings, the walking, talking, meat meat robots and when they ask me a question, I’ll be ready to say something back baby bad balls. If I feel like texting someone, I’m gonna call them on the phone phone and I’ll be ready with a NOW chlorinated! way to end the conversation. I will not watch animal porn with my children unless it is absolutely necessary, because I am the boss of my television gonads. And I’m brushing up on my terrible Spanish, though I Still SUCK.

Love,
Cretin

The following is a Paradoxical Undressing “outtake” about an Art Therapy class. Like the rest of Paradoxical Undressing, it is an excerpt from my diary. It takes place in 1986 when I was trying to finish my college degree before Throwing Muses’ record came out and my baby was born.

I wanna go back to the ocean. The buzzing fluorescents are making me feel sick and the other students don’t look particularly promising.

The first thing the teacher asks us to do is lie on the floor and relax. I’m not me anymore, though, I’m pregnant, so I don’t relax, I just pass out and then wake up as the other students are shuffling around, grabbing art supplies and moving desks into groups. Oh, crap, I think. I slept through the assignment.

I follow a woman with blond pony tails and glasses over to the art supply cabinet and copy everything she does, taking a gigantic piece of paper, some colored pencils, charcoal and a drawing pen from the cabinet, then scoot my desk over to her group. Peeking over some shoulders to see what “art” we’re supposed to do, I see that the other students are all drawing animals. Okay…I can draw an animal.

The paper is enormous and difficult to manage. I try spreading it out on the desk, but it spills over the side, so I put it down on the carpeted floor. Then the pen I’m using tears a hole in it. Goddamn it. I grab a small book off a nearby shelf, place it underneath the paper and, stretching my arms out past my protruding stomach, draw a tiny blowfish in the middle of the paper. Read the rest of this entry »

The guitar that love built will be in my hands in a few days. It’s the end of the week as we know it and everything’s different now.

Last month, I did a mini-tour of the southwest with Robert Fisher from the Willard Grant Conspiracy, a normal tour: club dates, club promoters, club crowds. Fine, fine and fine again, nothing out of the ordinary, really. The only problem was that I was playing these old Shady Circle songs; songs written in houses for friends, family and interested onlookers. In clubs, hey come off as art pieces: interesting old paintings, but nothing a twenty-first century individual would ever think to crawl into.

Billy and I flew around the country, thinking, talking, then scooped up the kids and shoved ‘em back into the truck, still thinking and talking, Shady Circle songs in our ears. We gazed off into the distance, wondering what the New Old World’ll be like, when songs written in houses for friends, family and interested onlookers can be played in houses for friends, family and interested onlookers.

Crackpot Theory meets Wild Hare: Billy books Shady Circle house shows with fan promoters on the drive back to California. Kids, dogs, snakes, guitars, amps, groceries, suitcases and schoolbooks tumbling out of the truck and into the loving embrace of smart people, backyards, laughter and potluck freakin’ dinners! Allow me to repeat: everything’s different now.

Here’s why:

1. All real songs are written in houses (and garages and motels and the back seats of cars) for friends, family and interested onlookers. This is music to crawl into. Music played just for commerce is, in my snooty opinion, not real music. If we have to go back in musical time to before there was a music industry in order to learn this lesson, then that’s what we should do, ’cause it’s an important one.
2. Normal people like music. Not just people who look like the rock bands they listen to; all kinds of people are moved by sound. They don’t need big corporations to tell them what music they like and they also don’t need to jeopardize tomorrow’s work day to drink expensive-cheap beer in the middle of the night in a rock club if that isn’t their thing. They still like music.
3. People are giving. When they aren’t being taken advantage of, they know it. They deserve respect and when they get it, they share: ideas, jokes, opinions, money, food, stories, music and beer.

At Michelle’s house concert, like all the house concerts, I laughed and talked through my set and everyone else in the room laughed and talked with me. We were together in the room, not separated by a wall of performer vs. audience. Afterwards, I watched in envy as bandmates scheduled rehearsals with each other. It seemed like everyone there was in a band with everyone else who was there.

I told them I’d give anything to be able to play with one of my bands on a Tuesday night in a basement (or anywhere, for that matter). “Why can’t you play with your bands?” Michelle’s drummer asked.

“Well…because…of the music business,” I answered, well aware of how stupid that sounds.

I bought into the conventional music business a long time ago. Shame on me. Michelle’s world is the New Old World (bring it on!). Someday soon, there will be such a thing as a musician who does not suck and does not starve. Imagine: local bands again. Playing in one’s own city for friends, family and interested onlookers. No more begging, for tours, radio, publicity, T.V. and movie placement, etc. No more rich rock stars, just passing the hat and working hard to support your music habit. There is no shame in that, but there should be shame associated with playing lousy music just to make money and get famous. That’s failure.

I had given up on ever seeing the guitar I asked Collings to build for me almost 3 years ago, before money got really tight.  Collings builds their beautiful guitars to my specifications. Bill Collings watched me play and chose the wood, while I chose the bodyshape.  It was gonna be perfect. My old Collings C-10, the reason I ever had a solo acoustic career, was beaten to shit, barely playable any longer; I really needed a new guitar. But I simply couldn’t take food out of the kids’ mouths to buy a guitar, even if it was built for me.

The people at Collings sympathized and apologized for having to replace the “KH” headstock with a generic one in order to sell it to someone else. Billy was heartbroken, having spent the last few Christmases and birthdays struggling to find a way to surprise me with the guitar, but ultimately giving up.

Friday morning, out of desperation, we decided to share our frustration with this community. We were overwhelmed by the response we got. Billy received (and answered!) almost 600 emails from people wanting to help me buy the guitar. Hundreds of contributions came into “The Hat”, my online tip-jar, mostly small ones between one and five dollars, sometimes ridiculously generous ones. “The Hat” runneth over. By Friday afternoon, we had enough to buy the guitar. We laughed and cried, awe-struck, and begged people to stop contributing.

When the guys at Collings heard what happened, they shared our shock and glee, blown away that any musician could have such a loving following. “They’re buying it for you?” Today, they’re happily boxing up and shipping off my beautiful New Old Guitar.

You people continue to amaze me.

A special “Thank you” to the first Shady Circle house concert promoters: Echo (Brooklyn, NY), Tine (Franklin, MA), Michele (Buffalo, NY) and Tom (Lee’s Summit, MO)

Me, playing “Deep Wilson”, fireside, in Tom’s Backyard.

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.

This is PDX Hans’ new tattoo he brought all the way to Phoenix to show us - with my favorite lyrics from Teller.

Here’s Tine’s new one with the cool swirl from Dave Narcizo’s Sunny Border Blue cover art.

** Today is Oct 7th. We’d like to announce the winning number in the “Marked-Up Scriptstakes”. No one claimed the winning number, 14, so we are re-drawing. The new number, drawn at random is 79. Number 79. If you are holding the Paradoxical Undressing program numbered “079″, please add a comment to that effect here, on this posting. Thank you to all who participated — the “Scriptstakes” was a great success! **

They sound human, these crazy birds. Their cries are maniacal laughter, shrieking guffaws. Billy and I freeze, staring into each other’s eyes, unable to find a category for this sound. I’m holding my guitar on the stage at St. Cecilia’s, he’s plugging in my effects. Well, he was plugging in my effects, now we’re both confused and still.

Until we look up. St. Cecilia’s is the oldest venue in Scotland (second oldest in the whole UK). It has an intricately constructed skylight which, in the summertime, lets light in about twenty hours a day. Right now, the tireless Scottish sun is blotted out by hundreds of laughing, screaming birds flying overhead.

Soon, it will be hidden by torrential rain, but we’re familiar with that sound. During the day, we tear around Edinburgh on foot, rain or shine, like it’s going away, like we’re gonna miss something.

It’s really us that’s going away. This is not enough time to be in Scotland. Not enough time to love everyone we meet, not enough time to watch gorgeous dogs run on the green, not enough time to drink tea as strong as whisky and whisky as strong as god, not enough time to breathe clean meadow air, not enough time to gawk at real-actual-gazillion-year-old-no-fucking-kidding castles, not enough time to soak up pub culture (and make ‘em dance!).

I’m going to miss all this plus black rosehips and rhubarb yoghurt. The Scots sure made it easy for me to show up at work every day and be a goddamn play, of all things. I’m gonna miss that, too.

The Fringe Festival is fringe, alright. Everywhere we go is strangeness. The High street looks like a Fellini movie; weird clowns and street performers dance down the sidewalk, surrounded by thick crowds of cheering onlookers. Club kids, dance troupes and musicians line the streets, bumping into each other, smoking, yelling, laughing and drinking.

Of course, Edinburgh is beautiful in August, the Fringe events take place under a canopy of racing clouds. The resulting sunbreaks add a sweetness, a group high. It is a festival after all.

Billy and I lack the let’s-do-what-everybody-else-is-doing-that-looks-fun gene, however, so we escape to our flat with the mountain view. Maybe they aren’t mountains; I bet there’s a Scottish word for what they are. They look like tilted mesas…green, ascending meadows.

To set up house, we walk to Sainsbury’s (pronounced “Sains-breeze”). I think our new landlord gave us directions, but we haven’t been able to understand a single word he’s said so far. Which is unfortunate, ’cause he seems to have a lot to say; we’ve been nodding and smiling for a couple days now. So we find Sainsbury’s on our own and even discover a short-cut through the park so we can stop and feed ducks on the way (ducks are important).

We feel weird…more than jet lag, which only feels like a knife in the eyeballs. This is different, like we’re shaken dice tossed and left to land where they will. We figure it’s because we never just go to a place and know where we are, like most people. Instead, we bounce around a whole lot first (Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, Oklahoma, Missouri, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York, Connecticut, Rhode Island), we stay in motels, we visit friends and family, places we used to love, places we used to live, we see rain, sun, heat and cold, fly, drive, drive, fly, sleep, don’t sleep, eat, go hungry, place children and snakes here, a dog there, another dog there, music playing the entire time…when it all stops, we aren’t quite sure where we ended up. We look around for clues–we’ve gotta learn to go native quickly in order to survive. That’s it: we feel like aliens.

It doesn’t matter, of course, ’cause we have work to do. I’ve lost my second Mudrock guitar to airline screw-ups, but this one is (thankfully) delivered in time for the show. The venue for Paradoxical Undressing’s Fringe debut is, as Billy puts it, “a dungeon of a basement of a dive”; the perfect setting for the stories I’m telling.

I decide that I’ll be brave and I won’t drink, even though I’m nervous; a decision made less impressive by the fact that no one offers me a drink and I don’t have any money to buy one. But I find it relatively easy to stay focused, given that the crowd is right there with me, laughing (and crying) and taking pictures and sending warm waves in my direction. Really warm ones; it’s about a thousand degrees in there by the end of the show.

We are all thoroughly wrung out.

Leon, Guanajuato is a city of bright colors and happy children. We spent three inspiring days there with some right-minded people who believe in making art with a lowercase “a”. Simply put: beauty for people. The FIAC festival is one that celebrates many different mediums and invites the whole city to attend.

Placed in the hands of three young men who laughed often, spoke freely of “magic” and sang at the top of their lungs, we let Mexico wash over us. Food, people, land, architecture, language..all of it astonishingly beautiful.

With 50Foot Rob on drums and my oldest son, Doony playing bass, we created a patchwork set list of Throwing Muses and solo songs as well as some 50FootWave and Appalachian folk songs, of all things. It sounded interesting: atmospheric tremolo guitar sections erupting into pounding instrumentals. It’d be a cool band except that it isn’t a band. We needed a name.

Since we make up band names all the time, we set some parameters: a band name suggestion must be something you’ve actually seen and it must be something you’ve seen in Mexico. We narrowed the ever-lengthening list down to these contenders:

“Iron Cobra” (a foot pedal)

“Wax Jesus” (a wax Jesus)

“Hover Jesus” (I don’t know how they did this)

“Commando” (Rob swears he saw one)

“Canary Room” (Billy asked for a canary to be put in our room, but they smiled and said no)

We never officially settled on a name, though Wax Jesus sort of stuck. It could be a working title, I don’t know; but speaking of working, my little baby Doony busted his little baby ass and rocked everyone’s world. After the show, he signed his first autographs and posed for pictures with entire families. Then he hosted an almost all-night tequila party in his hotel room (I’m so proud!).

We hated leaving Mexico. There’s something they have figured out there that one rarely sees elsewhere and it’s hard to put your finger on. Humanity maybe?

We left Los Angeles in an earthquake, flew through electrical storms and into a hurricane to end up in a particular kind of paradise; one in which people of all ages participate in a shared aesthetic experience. Children danced while we played, rads pumped their fists, parents and grandparents clapped and cheered. It was humbling.

This may never happen again, but during the set, I looked at my smiling drummer and beautiful son and felt honored to have done this in my life.

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”.

…happened in L.A. last night. First show - I had no idea what to expect. I’d never heard these songs out loud before.  After the 5th song, Billy walked up and whispered, “This is great!” and I knew I was gonna be ok.

I was so grateful for the careful listening that was going on in that room - it made it easy for me to get the work done. Thanks to all of you who were there. Here’s a photo of Christopher (one of the careful listeners) and me.