kristin

Got a minute to say something to you all, ’cause Billy’s playing drums, of all things. And, seriously, all talk of cuteness aside, he is so adorable when he plays drums: he goes cross-eyed, his tongue sticks out really far, and he grips the sticks with a very sweet white knuckled kind of panic. He’s going to delete this, I can tell already.

So now we’re in Stage 3 of studio life. The first thing that happens when you make a record is: you play songs very politely and professionally because that’s all you can think of doing and, after all, you are a professional musician. This is Stage 1, the “Boring Stage”. Next, though you continue to play and record music, your hair begins to reflect the realities of unusual hours, unusual sleeping positions and the fact that nobody around you cares what you look like. This is Stage 2, also known as “Ocean Madness”. In Stage 3, though, you begin to hand instruments to other people in the room, be they husbands, Fed Ex guys or dogs, mostly just to hear what happens, but also so you can sneak off and eat pie. This is also known as, “Sucking”.

Also? “Thunder Snow” can happen! Did you know this? Did you know there even WAS such a thing? Yesterday, the sky just lost it for a few hours — all of a sudden, it was snowing sideways and there was thunder and lightning and 75 mph winds and the horses in the stable where I record were yelling and running around and then there was white out snow and then power outages and then it cleared a little and there was a crazy golden light on the black and white landscape. It was absolutely amazing. We had to stop working while Rizzo ran around taking movies and opening doors so we could smell the ozone scented snowy air. And oddly enough, the song we had on a loop was “The Thin Man” which repeats the words, ” in the ozone snow” over and over and over. Not as creepy as it sounds, but it was still cool.

Meanwhile in hell: Bernie was pushing his thunderous thigh muscles to their limit. The US National Cyclocross Championships are being held at Roger Williams Park in Providence, RI this weekend and Bernie’s here riding in 2 races, one on Friday (yesterday in the “Snowicane” and one on Sunday, tomorrow). Last week he finished half a wheel length out of first place in the California “class B” championship. Yesterday, he finished, like 63rd, in a race chock-full of guys getting paid to mostly cyclocross. His hands and feet and even eyelids (yes, eyeLIDS, not eyelashes) froze. He had to physically look at his hands to see if they were even moving when he wanted them to shift gears or something. If you’re around Providence tomorrow, come watch a rested and defrosted Bernie race more!

We’re so proud of him. If he actually lives through this weekend, maybe he’ll play bass for 50FOOTWAVE again.

Love,
Kristin

Three days ago, we returned home from tour to the screaming, jet engine-like sound of many large machines running at top volume in our busted house, as if cyber-creatures had colonized it in our absence. There’s this very impressive pulmonary system of sorts in place, running tubes full of dry air from the giant robot king into our damp walls and floors and what is left of the ceiling. There are lesser, but still impressive, cyber creatures positioned around the house, all screaming in different tones, most of them clustered in the basement. The basement, from the way it sounds, is a place into which I will never venture again. Something like having your very own 747 in a basement hangar. Neato!

We have been instructed to keep the heat at 75 degrees in order to help the drying process along (we usually keep it at 55…We don’t thrive in temperatures higher than that). Factoring in the heat that the screaming robots and the stressed out humans are generating, I figure it’s about 85 or 90 in here. We wear shorts and t-shirts in the house, then drape ourselves in winter gear to go outside where it’s like…20. Then we pelt each other with snowballs ’til we feel better.

I briefly entertained the idea of keeping my sense of humor about this: covering the beast machines in Christmas lights and pine boughs, maybe having the kids draw faces on them. As it turns out, that’s not very funny. Or maybe it is; I just can’t THINK with all this NOISE!

So a few hours ago, Billy and I looked at each other in the shimmering heat of the kitchen and something in my expression made him mouth instructions to dress the kids in their outside gear and put them in the car. He then drove us to a civilized restaurant where we shared civilized conversation over a civilized dinner and decided to make a run for it.

The upshot being, I get to go back to Rizzo’s and go back to work on my record! Score! That’s a million for Kristin, ZERO for the dumb ass home invading cyber-creeps! Now I won’t forget the new song I wrote at the beach (it’s called “The Thin Man”, in case I do forget it — then you tell me), now I won’t forget the piano and guitar overdubs I wrote on tour, now I can point at Elizabethan gourds hanging on Rizzo’s wall and say, “Steve! Tune it, I think I can play it!”.

Just like old times…

Love,
Kristin

Lately, B and I have been wondering if money, in fact, could buy happiness. Mostly because the acute lack of it seems to cause so much UNhappiness.

The general consensus among our friends seems to be that if you’re happy, then money can make you happier, but if you don’t have a clue about what’s really important in life and you try to use money to fill your holes, well, then, you’ll be unsuccessful.

I buy that — but what about when your furnace dies and your ceiling collapses and your house floods and your floors are wrecked and there are holes in the walls, ceilings and floors and water drips all over your instruments and old photos and books and you aren’t even there? You’re out on tour playing music, of all things, and drinking beer, enjoying yourself and laughing like an idiot, thinking everything back at the homestead’s all locked up tight. And it’s all gotta be fixed and Santa’s gotta come — along with the furnace guy and the plumber and the floor guy and the painter and the electrician and the bills and the groceries and…and…and!?

You know what happened? Great people happened. Our neighbors bailed all the water out of our house, rolled up our carpets, moved our furniture, dried our walls and called a Disaster Mitigation company (!!). Then they called us on tour and told us not to freak out, that everything was under control. And then you know what they did? They asked us if there was anything ELSE they could do!

Tonight at the club here in D.C., I had an “honor box” of homemade CD’s at my feet while I played; you put $10 bucks in and take a CD. This is low key to the point of pathetic as far as enterprises go, but out-of-the-blue (and contrary to our previous agreement) the club demanded 20% of our proceeds, an unusually greedy thing for a club to do to an opening act selling only CDs, in our experience. Billy made a point of letting the crowd overhear what was going on and immediately, people began crowding in, stuffing money into the box, some not even bothering to wait for change or take a CD. More (embarrassingly) great people.

Like almost everybody, we have more than a lot of people, less than others. Owning a house at all is pretty f*cking fancy in this world (hell, having a house is getting to be fancy in too many places lately) and we are happy, so we don’t have any holes we wanna try and fill in, either. We’re grateful for the broken furnaces and shitty clubs that allow us the chance to witness the genuine kindness that happens when people are given the opportunity to show they care.

Money is a good tool in that respect, but so is time. And emotional investment. Thank you for buying records and going to shows, but more importantly, thank you for making my songs a part of your own soundtrack; it means everything to me.

You great people, you.

Love,
Kristin

I want to take this particular minute and address the shared concern some of you have expressed to me — that I seem to hate my old songs, particularly Throwing Muses songs. I’m in London this morning, having played an entire set of Throwing Muses songs at the Scala last night and I want you to know that I truly enjoyed every song I played, though I was close to tears for a few dangerous moments.

These old songs are difficult, prickly and angry and I can handle that. The problem, I believe, is one of relevance, and not in the way you might think: it’s that they are STILL relevant. If I could leave these feelings and stories behind me, I could fly through the material like a cover band: wheeeeeeeeeeee! But those same goddamn feelings are ongoing and so is that same goddamned story. I’m ashamed of this, to be honest. I had big plans that did not include being the same person who wrote those songs 20 years after the fact.

Solo acoustic and 50FootWave songs move me just as hard, tear me the hell apart, in fact, but in a GOOD way. And I don’t have to remember anything but the music when I play them. To be in the middle of an old Throwing Muses song is to be living in my car again, pregnant, diagnosed schizophrenic and subsequently drugged, cutting myself, sleeping on floors, hiding from stalkers I wasn’t famous enough to deserve, getting felt up at the bar, fighting for the $50 in gas money the band earned per show (club people regularly pulled guns on me), each new song a Sheherazade story keeping me alive only to hear how it ends.

So, I’m not whining, I’m just saying that life was unpleasant back then and was actually about to get much, much worse. Life is real hard…duh-uh.

And now, I gotta say, life isn’t easy: I work harder, I care more and if I was ever crazy, well, then, I feel the same as I always did, so I guess I’ve got that going for me, too. But life is amazing. Really amazing.

I appreciate your concern, but I’m nobody to worry about.

Love,
Kristin

I played with Bob Mould the other night at the Grog Shop in Cleveland; a precursor to our DC show later on this month. I haven’t seen Bob in at least a year and he looked totally different: Husker Du-lovely. He seemed happy and appeared to be in soft focus, all flannel shirted and casual. It was beautiful. My kids baked him whole wheat chocolate chip cookies to take with him on the road. They’re a little worried because “Uncle Bob” seems to live in his car — Where do you think WE live? we asked them.

But now I’m back in my beloved Rhode Island — what the rich folks all bought up and won’t let the rest of us live in anymore. But today, I don’t care ‘cause I’m at Steve Rizzo’s Stable Sound studio: my favorite place in the world. When I walked in today and smelled the horses and the cinnamon coffee, I thought, “When I die, I’m gonna haunt this place”. Which may be true because Billy has instructions to scatter my ashes at Sachuest Beach, down the road from here — Billy has refused on the grounds that he’ll be dead then…we’re in a sort of race.

I’m recording my next solo record here with Steve and then mixing it with good ol’ Trina Shoemaker, late of New Orleans. I have yet to determine the character of this record; the first day in the studio is a day of extremes: nerves, boredom, excitement, confusion…always a bit of “how do we do this again?”. Soon the songs’ll take over and start bossing us around. That’s when it gets good.

But already I don’t want to go home.

Love,
Kristin