Kristin Hersh

“Bliss” happened a couple years ago, in Portland Oregon. It’s one of those songs that tells the future. I mean, it told the future, but I still didn’t see the future coming; I hardly ever do. One of the pitfalls of being more concerned about a guitar part or a production technique than what a song is attempting to [Read more…] about Bliss

Having heard “Flooding” every night on the last tour (I kept opening with it, inexplicably, ’cause I didn’t know it yet), Billy wanted to hear it again, but he wanted to hear it the way it was bouncing around inside his head. I did too, ’cause I’d only heard the version that bounced around inside my head.

So I gave Billy the wheel and he steered “Flooding” in an impressionistic, [Read more…] about Flooding

To see or not to see? I don’t know anybody who wants to see everything all the time. A whole lot of crap out there is unsettling, so we shut our eyes and turn off lights and peer through opaque “Glass”, hoping our brains make up something better than what’s really out there. If a nearby personality begins to disintegrate and show us its component parts, we hope it grows quiet and wanders away–soon!–before things get uncomfortable.

In the dark, though, we find ourselves in the dark. There’s gotta be more than this, we think, turning on the light, and soon find ourselves looking out the window and asking questions until we come across some piece of information, visual or otherwise, that’ll help us make it through another day.

Should glass people be clear or cloudy? I don’t know. Warily, I let them sleep on the couch in the sunshine and sooner or later, flies are waking up, another spring is here, and it’s time to open the windows again.

Love,
Kristin

Find this song and all my recent work, in multiple formats – including lossless, free for download on my CASH Music pages. Information on how you can support the creation and distribution of this music by becoming a subscriber is here.

“Quick” wore a bunch of different outfits before it settled on a look. It tried sad and lumpy, waifish and thunky, strident and pleading. And it wound up sounding like an amalgam of all of these, like someone locked in a closet with nothing better to do than wear all the clothes in the closet at once.

I think “Quick” is actually in the closet on purpose, though, hiding. It’s a very sad song, in my opinion. I enjoyed playing it, but not singing it. The music is almost anthemic, the vocals…well, sorta pathetic. Which has its place. I do what songs tell me to do and I’m actually pretty good at pathetic; it comes naturally to me. But “Quick” is a stomach ache.

The first time I played it in the studio, it belted itself out, so I responded with pounding piano and loose drums. Then it got so fragile, I thought it would break if I added so much as a quiet cello bed. I remixed it, then re-recorded it, tried it solo acoustic, full on electric with countless overdubs, but it never really settled in.

I was confounded by its inability to settle. Then I stopped to make a pot of coffee and think. “Quick” is many stories rolled into one. It never slammed on the brakes and rejected my advances like most songs do (they tend to get fed up with my butting in and yell “Stop!”), but it never really shone when left completely alone, bare bones acoustic, either. So I figured “Quick” probably knew what it was doing, and I let it be an “unsettled” kind of song. Which works, oddly enough.

After all, some of the best people I know are unsettled; they try this and take up that, shift over here for a while and then ping-pong back to where they started. They try roles and voices and attitudes but never with the intent to adopt them permanently. And they never accept or reject anything outright;  they just move on, vague and distracted. They’re vines and flowers. “Quick” is for them.

Love,
Kristin

Find this song and all my recent work, in multiple formats – including lossless, free for download on my CASH Music pages. Information on how you can support the creation and distribution of this music by becoming a subscriber is here.