Kristin Hersh is the leader and frontman (woman) of the legendary American alternative rock band Throwing Muses, which together with Pixies and other bands celebrated the Boston scene in the late 80s. Their highly emotional guitar style laid the foundations for the modern understanding of how pop-rock bands should sound and look. Throwing Muses, and especially Kristin Hersh, as guitarist and singer, have played an extremely important role in affirming the female principle within rock and roll. The single “Your Ghost”, a duet with Michael Stipe (REM), is certainly one of those that marked the nineties.
There are artists who understand the intensity and recognize a female power in America, which in music was always strong. But many music critics agree that no one is like Hersh. At 16, when she fell off her bike in a car accident she had a head injury resulted in a strange auditory side-effect where ambient noises she hears in day-to-day life would swirl around her brain and often mutate into specific musical sounds and words. She described the sensation as like having musical epilepsy. This incident marked the US indie band Throwing Muses. While the most supposedly psychotic debut album remains a greatly adored piece of work, throwing a career melding 90s post-punk cult, indie, college kind of rock, pop and Boston alt-folk. Their idiosyncratic sound, it is all in Hersh’s voice, shifting of a broken-glass gargle to a feminine, tiny vocal tenderness. “Home is a rage, feels like a cage,” this is something understood in 80s and 90s among indie musicians. But even when coherence was just out of reach, the music completed an indie logic. There was in Throwing Muses an anguish and frustration within Kristin Hersh’s thin, quavering voice. But, by 1991 melodic harmonies and spiralling brought her to leave and form Belly. And Belly was and still is one of my trully all time, female wisdom, girl-power vocal favorites. The lyric of my favourite song “Gepetto” goes something like this:
“And on top again
Just like Gepetto with his doll
And he’s running around the bend
And I can’t get him out of this house
And if you bore him, you’ll lose your soul to him…“
Check it out at
www.youtube.com/watch?v=nJRluXBa4e8
Kristin Hersh once said: “My parents are from Lookout Mountain in Chattanooga, Tennessee—a Southern Baptist upbringing. I’m from Georgia, originally, and my early childhood was infused with Appalachian folk songs—music that was written by no one, which is key to understanding what music really is. I love the faceless definition of true folk, which is a song that’s probably Celtic in origin, carried across the sea, and altered by all the voices who sang it. The same with blues songs, which changed as they walked from town to town. Some songs retain their bones and some become the emperor’s new clothes.”
So here is more of the Hersh, a ticket sale
And for those living in Central and Eastern Europe, Belgrade, Serbia gig tour date of Kristin Hersh is 27th of May 2022