Friday Music: Kristen Hersh

Kristen Hersh began performing in the college-radio band Throwing Muses at age 14. She's been writing music, performing and touring her whole life, with the Muses, as a solo act, and with her other band 50 Foot Wave. (Throwing Muses included Hersh's half-sister, Tanya Donnelly, who went on to form the Breeders, Belly, and have a solo career herself.)

Photo description: The photo shows Hersh, standing with arms crossed in front of her, looking to the camera. She's wearing a black sweater and her hair is blonde here. She has startling blue eyes.

Hersh has been public about her troubles with mental illness, both difficulty with diagnosis and how her mental processes relate to her music. From a March 2008 interview with Scotland on Sunday, Hersh explains how she writes songs:

“It’s not a calming endeavour,” she says. “It’s intense. When it first began it was considered hallucinations, but no amount of medication would make the songs go away. I disagreed with the doctors’ diagnosis of schizophrenia and talked them down to bipolar which, if nothing else, kept me off of those scary meds that they had put me on.”

Why did she not accept that she was schizophrenic? “I believed in what I was hearing. And I still do. But that is one argument you can’t push through the medical community – that just because they don’t hear it doesn’t mean it isn’t there. The music doesn’t seem to be in me or come from me. I truly believe that it’s there and I’m just copying it down.”

Many people believe that there is a direct correlation between bipolar disorder, or manic depression as it was once known, and the artistic imagination; the rather romantic theory is that the condition actually drives creativity. But Hersh doesn’t buy this. “I have never had a good experience with mania,” she says. “It’s also hard for me to relate to the idea of depression as a waifish sadness. It was more of a shameful darkness. And I would certainly never write any songs when I was depressed. I don’t want creativity to be associated with illness in any way.”

And from a 1988 interview in Big City Redneck, Hersh says:

Personally I don’t want to think that you could make art from mental illness, you should only make art or science from health. At the same time I have to admit I did turn out bi-polar. But I think they get it backwards, I don’t think I play music because I’m bi-polar. Music needs to be played and in order to do it I have to be bi-polar. If that makes sense. It doesn’t does it? I don’t know if I’m expressing mental illness in my music.

Hersh is part of CASH (Coalition of Artists and Stake Holders), which, as I understand it, is an endeavor to remove the middle men of the music business from the equation so that artists and their audiences can interact more freely. One example of how this works is that tracks of Hersh's latest music are available at the CASH site, and fans can download them for free (if you're a cheapskate), but easily donate what they believe the music is worth directly to the artists using PayPal.

YouTube videos:

A favorite of mine, from Hersh's first solo album Hips and Makers, "Your Ghost" with Michael Stipe of R.E.M. Here's Hersh's latest band, 50 Foot Wave, playing an updated version of the song. And here's an acoustic live performance by Hersh alone in Athens earlier this year.

"Gazebo Tree" -- I saw Hersh sing this on a Lilith Fair tour back in the '90s. This is a 2007 live performance in London.

"A Loon" -- From Hips and Makers, this is a 1994 video filmed in Amsterdam. Beautiful cello played by Martin McCarrick. The lyrics for "A Loon":

Some store
I'm not going back there anymore
Wandered in
Don't think I'll do that again
No I don't think I'll do that again

I swear
Look at me cross-eyed and I don't know what to do
No I don't know what to do
Crazy loon

There's a room in his pallet
There's a pillow for his head
Sees an offshoot in his bottle
When he wants to see me dead
Heirlooms A loon
Never thought I'd see that silly grin
Never thought I'd see that fool again
Never thought I'd love that lunatic

Nothing left to dance around
What a hero
What a black and blue bird
What a loon, A loon
What a loon, A loon

"Me and My Charms" -- Another of my personal favorites, again from Hips and Makers. This is a 2007 live performance from Pittsburgh.

"Sundrops" -- Another Hips and Makers song. A live TV performance from 1994, and also a great example of Hersh's guitar skills and style.

"In Shock" -- From Hersh's solo album, Learn to Sing Like a Star.

"Dizzy" -- A Throwing Muses tune from their Hunkpapa LP. A 1989 live performance.

"Bright Yellow Gun" -- The video for the Throwing Muses song from University.

"Clara Bow" -- The video from her band 50 Foot Wave's album Golden Ocean.

"Pneuma" -- The video from the Golden Ocean song. The video is really a bunch of blurs, but the audio is worth hearing to see how 50 Foot Wave differs from her solo work.

Other links:

Hersh's blog.

An NPR World Cafe interview in audio where Hersh also sings. The interviewer gets the name of her album "Learn to Sing Like a Star" wrong twice (he says "Learn to Sing Like the Stars" and "Learn to Sing Like a Girl" -- ack!), even as he's asking about the origin of the title, but Hersh is interesting to hear talk about her life and creative process.

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Last June, Liz Spikol at The Trouble with Spikol compiled a list of famous people with mental health issues. It's an interesting list of successful artists and actors that I'll probably mine for other Friday Music posts here in the future.