words

Ugly couches’re like ugly dogs: they’re everywhere and they have a certain quirky charm. Maybe you’d prefer a pretty dog or a clean, lovely couch…you don’t know; it hasn’t come up. You feel lucky to rest your head on something – in a dressing room, an apartment, a hotel lobby. You tame squalor by allowing it to suit you.

Musicians know that, like tamed dogs, a tamed couch will follow you around. “I coulda sworn I saw that couch in Milwaukee,” I think, staring down at a stained hunting scene stretched over a seat cushion in Denver. And then again in Santa Fe. This particular couch followed me all the way to Nottingham, England. I squinted at it suspiciously. So it can swim, I thought, placing my backpack strategically over an ancient, gray wad of gum.

The filthy couch that doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, of course. Not true of the bottomless coffee cup you try to fill up the next morning. Not with coffee necessarily. You’re hoping that the big waitress in the sky’ll deem you worthy enough to pour a hunk o’ liquid love into your fragile, china cup. Which she often does. However this fragile china, like I said, is bottomless. You may have tamed a gum-encrusted seat cushion, but it is unlikely you will ever tame the draining vessel that is your heart. It is voracious. “How many sugars you want with that?” she asks, refilling your empty cup. “How many you got??” you ask her, panicking.

She does her best to keep you full of sweetness, because the waitress is good at her job when you can catch her eye. So you begin to feel a little stronger, a little less panicky. Skating along on this temporary lift of enough, you begin to notice the fragile china hearts gripped by white knuckles all around you. My god, they’re everywhere! Then you remember the packets of sugar you carry around in your pockets with other people’s names on them and count them, hoping you have enough to ease their pain. You do, of course. This love, the kind that fills draining, fragile vessels, is, of course, bottomless.

Love,

Kristin

This month’s Throwing Muses demo, Curtains / Triangle Quantico is here. 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 my work by becoming a subscriber is here.

I had a seizure one night, when I was a teenager, on the front step of Store 24 on Thayer Street in Providence. I was talking to my friend Mark and drinking a Coke, watching cars drive by, and then I was looking up at Mark’s face in the glaring fluorescent light and Thayer Street was sideways. “What happened?” he asked me. I didn’t say anything, ’cause I didn’t know exactly and ’cause I was busy feeling the sticky fluid on my face and in my hair. I hoped that I’d cracked my head on the cement step and that the sticky fluid was nice, dramatic blood, but my Coke can was empty and Mark wasn’t looking at me as if I was covered in blood, so I figured I’d not only embarrassed myself by having a seizure in public but also poured an entire can of soda on my own face. Swell.

“Lazy Eye” thinks this is a pertinent moment. It then goes on to describe ways in which our brains spend time in other places and the embarrassing frustrations that can cause us. Another eye in another place, out of this world, can set off our balance and poke little holes in the beautiful masks we wear in public. We make these masks out of psychological glitter and glue, ’cause we think we can fool people, or maybe we got our feelings hurt one too many times, and a thoughtfully constructed persona starts to seem important. They’ll think I’m so cool! But friends, lovers and well-wishers whose hearts are not made of stone always seem to be around when our weirdnesses shine through the eye holes like so much bright light.

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 my work by becoming a subscriber is here.

Swollen is Marilyn Munster; the last “normal” Throwing Muses song. This is, of course, just a demo, but you can tell she wears trim blouses and pumps, smiles politely and probably only eats animals that don’t have two heads. It appears, though, that when Swollen left the building, she left the door open. Her sweet shuffle and actual chorus (of all things) was followed immediately by songs made of fractured instrumentals, unattached bridges and free-floating verses who tap dance for a minute then run away, only to reappear in a different outfit, a different song, later on in the program.

It is not un-beautiful to be in pieces, as long as those pieces are fully realized, so I’m happy to let these strangenesses be as they are. But after living in this fractured world lately, hearing Swollen again was like a gentle lady sitting down next to me on a park bench, Frisbees whipping by. I like Throwing Muses Frisbees, but the gentle ladies are comforting, especially after taking a bunch of Frisbees to the face.

I want to thank you Strange Angels again for allowing both the ladies and the Frisbees a chance to come to fruition in the studio. The NPR-ish model we emulate is a valuable one. Sure, forty bucks is a lot to pay for a coffee mug, but if you want no corporate involvement in your radio, then you pay the forty bucks and take or leave the mug. I’m thrilled to be sending you the new CD that we made together, I love it when you visit me in the studio or take me up on my offer of free admission to shows, but I find that, for the most part, you all are interested only in having the music continue. I will always write new songs, but without the ability to fund recording sessions, you probably wouldn’t hear them. Thank you for wanting to hear 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 my work by becoming a subscriber is here.

A New York song, “Freesia” took elements from a walk back to our apartment in 1990 and a middle-of-the-night phone call with a friend this year. One image bright and hot and bendy; the other cold, haunting and rigid. Our New York was one of old movies, picturesque garbage strikes and trains. My friend’s 2010 New York is spooky and unkind. It didn’t matter that we were broke back then, New York lifted us up from underneath, but my friend is starving, pushed down by a city that doesn’t seem to care.

If you carry flowers down the street, you can’t smell the garbage; it’s just something you walk past. But wherewithal is hard to come by. It’s an elusive strength, like luck, and it doesn’t always bend down to kiss you on a cold night. After all, that’s what cold nights are for: cold. You can rise up to meet that spirit in your own way, by freezing your goddamn ass off. Then you’ll know what it’s like inside the next cold person you see. Maybe on a bright, bendy day when your luck has improved and you have a few spare flowers.

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 my work by becoming a subscriber is here.

Our big, fat tour bus was sitting in highway traffic somewhere in the South. The kind of traffic jam where people get so bored and hot that they spill out of the cars to share cigarettes, conversation and thermoses full of Kool-Aid. We spilled out of our bus and parked ourselves on a guard rail to talk about endings. “We live in our future, so do we have a future?” etc.

You never know. A death doesn’t often announce itself, especially not the death of a band. When the Muses died, it was after a series of small moments: symptoms of impending doom, a closing door. Music didn’t care if nobody showed up at an in-store, but we did. Music didn’t notice a half-full club or a pathetic record company meeting, but we did. Music didn’t bother to show up for interviews anyway, so when there were no longer any interviews, music didn’t care. But we did. Like many people, entities, movements and energies, we had to go away before we were done. The music kept playing even after we’d stopped playing it.

Nothing’s ever perfect anyway; it never was and it never will be. How many eggs did you put in that basket? Well, who’s fault is that?

This song used to make me teary ’cause at one time, I had all my eggs in the Muses’ basket. Today, it makes me happy because I know the Muses will make it their own.

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 my work by becoming a subscriber is here.