In an era of downloading and disposability, Kristin Hersh is bringing tangibility and aesthetics back to recorded music with her Crookedproject, a book of essays and lyrics that contains a password that lets you download 10 new songs. She has learned to live with the bipolar disorder that makes her music both a pleasure and a danger, and she's waist-deep in a new Throwing Muses record. Happy days, she tells SINÉAD GLEESON
'I LOVE Lisa Fletcher's flower photographs. They're flawed, and it's a pretty good way to back up what I'm saying about music." Kristin Hersh is enduring a Rhode Island heatwave and talking about Crooked, her new project. When Radiohead released In Rainbowsin 2007, critical reaction to the content was subsumed by talk of how the record was actually distributed. The pay-what-you-like transaction was feted as pioneering, but in the same year Hersh adopted a similar model with her Cash project, which is how Crookedis being released. A fair-trade approach to music, fans pay a subscription and Hersh uploads a song for download every month.
“The idea came about out of frustration, really. I didn’t agree with a recording industry that stated that removing the dollar sign from the music equation (ie the cost) would result in the devaluing of music. I don’t think you can devalue real music, but it was only a matter of time before the CD itself was devalued – it’s just a piece of plastic. It’s not a valuable object in itself, because music can only be measured in terms of its impact. I embraced that by giving music away, but many people want a shareable, tangible object they can hold. For me, it has to be intrinsically valuable, and a book still can be.”
Crookedis an album in book form. It's what? Well, it's a hardback notebook, filled with the lyrics to 10 songs and including essays and the aforementioned photographs. Inside is a download code to a website where owners are asked for a password that can be found in the words of the essays. It's an unusual approach, certainly, but it makes sense in the download era, and it offers something aesthetic and tangible to fans.
“I’m really bad at answering the ‘what is that song about?’ question. These essays sell the impact that the songs have on me. They trick me by taking my life stories, my pictures and moments, and putting them together in a way I wouldn’t. It also doesn’t limit my songs to one person’s interpretation, but I’m not trying to convince anyone else that this is their soundtrack.”
The project also has a huge element of collaboration about it. Hersh has been making music for 25 years, during which time she has released seven solo albums. Throwing Muses and 50 Foot Wave have always provided group outlets for her creativity, but with Crookedshe interacted directly with fans, asking for feedback and even contributions. Over the past two years she has uploaded 22 songs, which she whittled down to 10 for the album.
"Writing is very solitary – and more so for me, because I play all the instruments – but with a little bit of feedback from fans, I was able to step back and get a clear idea of what I wanted Crookedto become. I put bits of music out there and wanted people to really tear the songs apart, but mostly they interpreted 'remix' as 'add lots of techno drums'. I wanted them to take pieces and mess it up."
Does this create issues of copyright and ownership? “I don’t believe in copyright. My philosophy is that songs are in the ether, and we should all put them there. Music used to be something that was walked from town to town, and many voices would contribute to a song. It would become an amalgam of influences, and I wanted that to happen more with this.”
Hersh has worked consistently over the past 2½ decades. Much of her output has been unflinchingly honest about life, illness and motherhood. Recurring bouts of bipolar disorder haven’t stifled her, and it’s something that is inextricably bound up with her creativity.
“Being bipolar and music are all mixed up for me. I don’t know if music is therapy or disease. This year my husband suggested that I try to quit [music] because it’s so enormous to me. It’s almost dangerous. The people who are close to me have all come to me at one point and said to me ‘music is gonna kill you’. I appreciate that, and yet I’m addicted to it. It’s not going to stop, and I’m not going to stop playing it. I hear songs, and I used to believe that they were outside of me, but they get stuck in me if I don’t grab my guitar and turn them into something with a sonic body. I can have seizures, which is a little bizarre, but I haven’t run in to anything valuable in this world that isn’t a little bizarre.”
It’s not hard to see why Hersh set up Cash. She frequently mentions her unhappiness with the music industry, and the need to have a sense of both financial autonomy and psychological calm. Musicians, she says, “spend all of their time in squalor”. A peripatetic life, poor diet, no sleep, booze, and worrying about money are not good bedfellows for bipolar disorder. Her ebullience in the interview contrasts with her well-known shyness, and she admits that she finds it hard to be looked at and judged.
“Music is about sound. People should be listening, not looking. My frustrations at the industry began before I was in it, because I knew we cared more about substance than style, and ultimately broke all of the rules we set for ourselves. Throwing Muses tried to be a band that didn’t give a shit, but we ultimately disbanded because we had no more money to be on the road or in the studio. I’ve been trying to solve that equation for 25 years, and I finally did with Cash. I’m not really playing the game, and yet I’m reaching people, and they’re good people. They’re not being fooled by anyone. We had a lot of fans when Warner were paying for radio play, and people would say to us ’you fell off our radar’, which actually meant ‘I only pay attention to what people tell me to pay attention to’. I don’t need those people. I need the people for whom this is valuable to the point of necessary.”
Her musical career has been interwoven with the birth of her children. She has four sons, each five years apart, whom she home-schooled. Over the years she has brought them on tour (I remember three of them sitting on the stage at a 2001 gig in Dublin’s HQ watching her play). Her oldest son lives in Manhattan and is in a band. He has also been a roadie for her band, and won’t let her carry anything heavy. “I’ve tried to warn them all about being musicians, but they won’t listen.”
This is proving to be a busy year for her. After Crooked,she is touring and a memoir, Rat Girl/Paradoxical Undressing, is due out in the US in August. It focuses on the year 1985, and has triggered a lot of mixed emotions.
Hersh would write from 1am through the night after her children were asleep. “I would often get to the end of these stints in the morning and think: ‘I don’t want to go there tonight.’ I already went there in 1985, and that was enough.”
She is also waist-deep in a new Throwing Muses record, which she never thought would happen, and is loving it. “We’re in the studio just flipping out. We’re so in love with this record. It’s funny, it’s nuts, it’s in all these little pieces that relate to each other. It’s like Throwing Muses does Broadway, but we never imagine that anyone is going to hear what we do. We remain convinced at all times that we’re the only people who will ever hear the music, which frees us up a little.”
Despite dealing with the recent loss of her close friend and collaborator Vic Chesnutt, Hersh sounds happy and productive, as if she’s in the best place of her life. “I absolutely am, and I’ve been looking for this for a long time.”
Does she ever see herself slowing down, or, as her husband suggested, quitting? “There’s always another song, and the feeling is always so alive that I can’t imagine not doing it. I’m sure this planet is a fine place without songs, but I’ve never known it without music, and it’s so enchanting.”
Crookedis published by The Friday Project. Kristin Hersh plays Whelan's, Dublin, on Monday and Cyprus Avenue, Cork, on Tuesday
