NO DAY AT THE BEACH: “I find water very, very destructive,” Hersh says. |
London’s Soho Arts Theatre is a tiny, buttoned-up venue in the heart of that city’s venerable theatre district. Inside, the sold-out crowd is reverent and hushed as Kristin Hersh takes the stage. Blinking in the spotlight, Kristin is strangely still. But as soon as she opens her mouth to sing, the air crackles with energy. And it’s not simply from the song’s rollicking, furious immediacy, or its vertiginous chorus, or even the way the strings surge dramatically against the lacerating guitar. No, it’s the way her voice evokes so many emotions at once: feral and wise, burning with both vulnerability and fearlessness — a blast of emotional intensity akin to an exorcism.
The sound is bright, messy, and beautiful, and it lights up the dark room.
That searing intensity is familiar to anyone who has followed Hersh’s work since her early days as the teenaged leader of Newport-based band Throwing Muses. Since then, her emotionally complex, allusive confessionals have earned her a well-deserved reputation as a gifted songwriter. The ensuing years have not mellowed her in any way — even if appearances are somewhat to the contrary. When I meet up with Hersh the next day at her hotel, she is curled up on an overstuffed chair, hands wrapped resolutely around a cup of hot tea.
She looks a little tired, and admits that this is the first day she hasn’t felt the effects of jet lag. “Today’s the first okay day. We went right to work. You’re supposed to take a day off, and we didn’t!” She laughs. “Not a lot of autopilot on a new record . . . .”
Make that not a lot of autopilot, period. Since the release of Hersh’s previous solo record, this generally indefatigable mother of four has been a flurry of creative activity, doing mini-tours with Throwing Muses, recording and touring with her other band, math-rock trio 50 Foot Wave, and working on the follow-up to Murder, Misery and Goodnight, her collection of Appalachian murder ballads.
And now there’s Learn To Sing Like a Star (Yep Roc). Look beyond the tongue-in-cheek title (the subject line of a spam e-mail that kept popping up in Hersh’s inbox), and you’ll find a bright, bittersweet album influenced by some tumultuous events in Hersh’s life. In 2005, Hurricane Katrina devastated her former home-away-from-home, New Orleans. Months later, a burst pipe destroyed Hersh and husband/manager Billy O’Connell’s Ohio home. It’s no wonder that Learn to Sing is rife with references to angry water.
“I grew up by a scary ocean,” Hersh explains. “I find water very, very destructive. Other people think of the beach as lying around — I think of it as frightening hurricanes! And then with all that happened — New Orleans and our house . . . Two floors flooded. The ceiling collapsed. I lost all my instruments. We lost 2000 books. Our furniture. And even stuff we couldn’t throw away, because we couldn’t bear it . . . it’s still covered in mold. We smell like mold, all of us!"
