Kristin Hersh

Moan

The last CASH track, “Static”, was light shining through a crack in the door. “Moan” flung the door wide open.

This jazz-miked drum kit, warm bass and overheated tubes guitar sound set the stage for a flood of songs in keeping with this recording technique. I don’t quite understand the process, but it seems as if songs needing a certain treatment wait in the wings until I’m well-versed in that treatment. Then they come crashing into the room, bumping into me and each other…taking up space and demanding attention.

“Moan” brought to life a fistful of Throwing Muses songs. I honestly didn’t think I would ever write another Throwing Muses song. For some reason, I assumed my guitars were only capable of bringing about convenient music. Of course, music is hardly ever convenient. It imagines you have nothing better to do than serve it. It not-so-gently suggests that you refrain from eating and sleeping and paying the rent until you’ve given it everything it asks for.

Which is fair, ’cause it only asks for physicality and sociability. It needs a body (no matter how long it takes, how much it costs and how many people it takes to get that barn up off the ground!) and then it needs to walk out into the world, wearing its new clothes, so that it can start living its new life. It pays us back in dividends by telling us what it learned out there in the ether, before we met it.

And by letting us play. The other Muses are ready to work. Which is maybe a past life re-visited, but it’s also a dream come true. Songs don’t know the word “past”, anyway. Songs are forever now.

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.

Static

Rizzo and I hit on interesting sonic vocabulary with this one. Somehow, playing this song by myself, I was sounding like a jazz combo. So we played that up with sharp guitar and “room”. Room plays loudly on this track.

Which tends to make a song sound like it was recorded live, in a club. This usually helps the listener hear heaviness and sweat and import in the performance.

I find that it’s best to leave the track alone at this point, so that nobody begins picturing the fifteen musicians that’d have to be on stage in order to make all this production possible. In other words, once you begin erasing overdubs, you know you got the core presentation right and should just walk away.

Billy thinks Static is about my friend Mark who died last year. I don’t know, really, but Billy’s usually right. Mark will never seem dead to me, just…gone. I like to think of him tearing down roads in the sun and rain, still having bones and hope.

Love,
Kristin

Krait

Rizzo says this song is “big”. I agree, as it uses big imagery: Garden of Eden, primordial ooze stuff. It goes humanist biblical on your ass, with a little Raising Arizona thrown in.

Which life tends to do too, sometimes. Not a bad way to be here on this planet, really, if you can stay wide-eyed. So far, my eyes are still wi-i-i-de open.

Krait’s a happy song, I think, calling children, “the crawling milk-fed”, “ids”, and asserting their need to be strong in the face of “wasted time” and “naked shame”.

The production technique is small-to-big and the sonic vocabulary unrelated to the natural world. A lot of distorted and backwards and run through this or that. But the feel stays organic, which is part of Rizzo’s genius.

Love,
Kristin

Speedbath

I love to watch musical passages in a song diverge. When the down beat of a melodic phrase falls on a different chord each time it comes around or when listening to the drum pattern and guitar part together feels like doing two math problems in your head at once.

This song is all about half steps and rhythmic skips. It was crazy/exhilarating to play and is crazy/exhilarating to listen to — at least for me. It’s a nice little “yay!” and “f*ck you!” when music shouldn’t work but does anyway.

“Speedbath” is the title of one of my son Wyatt’s comics. It seemed to fit this song, which has the word “speed” in it (that counts, right?). Both Wyatt and the song are equally wacky, anyway.

Love,
Kristin

Morning Birds

We stopped somewhere in the south on the last tour to put my band in a motel and park our tour bus outside of it. On tour, Billy and I sleep with the dumpsters and the parking lot animals.

I like dumpsters; you can throw garbage in them. And I like parking lot animals ’cause they have a hard time but they make the best of it. They’re also fun to watch in the morning while I drink my tea and wait for the band to wake up and bring me oranges and little boxes of cereal from the breakfast bar.

Sometimes parking lot animals are excellent: giant roaches, squirrels, peregrine falcons, snakes. Sometimes, they’re just fine, like the morning birds that wake all southerners at dawn. Morning birds (there are many different kinds — all they gotta do is wake up and start singing in order to fall into this category) remind me of my childhood in Georgia. I love lying on my bus bed and listening to them, wondering where the hell I am.

Except the birds that sang to us this particular morning began singing at a time that was only technically morning, like three minutes past midnight or something. And they sounded awfully…agitated. We spent a restless night hoping they were okay and wishing they’d shut up even if they weren’t.

Somehow, they made it into a song.

I especially like the hypnotic repetition in the first part of this track. Each instrument is playing its own loop; only the rhythm guitar and bass are playing together. The resultant cacophony is not as unsettling as you might think, given that your ear learns a bit more of each part as it goes by.

The quiet part, I couldn’t make quiet enough. I just pulled instruments out, then pulled out more until I had only sweet/sad left. Something about a “purifying sin” demands a certain amount of respect and, for a musician, that usually means get out of the way.

Love,
Kristin