Mysterious Muses

Kristin Hersh has little control over her creative destiny, writes Dan Rule.

IT IS still three hours before dawn when Kristin Hersh awakes. Still thoroughly dark, still quiet.

It is like a shock, at first; like a jolt of electricity, an inescapable impulse. So sudden, so intense, so utterly enveloping. Her body is tense, her hair stands on end. She closes her eyes again, reopens them. She rises from bed without switching on the light. A song has come.

"Its at four oclock in the morning every single time," she says with an exasperated laugh. "It crosses time zones, you know, and if I cant write it, itll last all day and play louder and louder and louder in my head."

For Hersh, who is speaking from her current residence, "a tiny little beach house" in Rhode Island, the creative process isnt necessarily an enjoyable or consensual one. Despite ranking as one of the most prolific songwriters of recent decades - she has released a collective total of 18 solo and band albums since first forming the legendary Throwing Muses in 1981 - Hersh claims that her material is as much mystery to her as the rest of us.

"I wish that I could say that I sit at the piano with a rhyming dictionary and make up a song," she offers laughingly. "But I really, really dont do anything like that."

Rather, the surprisingly jovial 41-year-old says her songwriting process functions on a purely automatic plane.

"I dont like it when a song comes," she says. "My husband knows immediately. I liken it to a seizure; my skin crawls and images become either confused with meaning, almost like some parts of the world are in colour and some are in black and white, and the parts the song needs are glowing and they leap in and out of the song.

"Im just taken over by this sound-experience thats just full of colour and action. Its like human experiences that are not sound become sound, you know. I can actually see the music."

For those familiar with Hershs genre-less musical history and densely surrealist wordplay, her assertions appear all the more authentic. Since Throwing Muses released their untitled debut in 1986, Hersh has traversed vocal and lyrical landscapes as immediate as they are opaque and psychological, as radiant as they are dirge-riddled, as gentle as they are guttural. Her instrumental directions, too, have proven remarkably amorphous.

While the Muses largely trod a line between shimmering indie pop and wiry rock negotiations, her post-millennium outfit 50 Foot Wave have skirted a far more abrasive, hardcore-esque sound, epitomised by their burning 2005 debut Golden Ocean. Hershs solo work, on the other hand, has delved into an array of rasping, impressionistic blues and gently divergent folk.

On Hershs most recent record - this Januarys visceral Learn to Sing Like a Star - her impulsive song writing began to take an eerily prophetic turn. While writing the material for the album in LA in 2005, the recurrent theme of water and its destructive power began to arise. Indeed, on album cut Day Glo she wailed of losing everything to "angry water", while on Ice she sung of being "damp and sour skulled", on Under the Gun of "our puny savings blown".

Within a couple of months, Cyclone Katrina had submerged a former stomping ground in New Orleans and a burst pipe had flooded their home while they were on tour. It effectively destroyed their house to the point where they had to sell what was left, just to stay afloat financially.

But while her own song writing seemed to foresee such terrible events, Hersh has come out the other side anything but embittered by the experience.

"Its funny, most of my fans kind of want me to be like my music, you know, sad and kind of dark. But Im so not - Im just such a goofy dork.

"I keep telling them that they dont want to meet me, you know, because when they come up and get their CD signed, Im just such a disappointment.

"They all say I thought youd be taller," she pauses, laughing. "I think what they mean is I thought youd be sadder."

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