Jeez, Kristen Hersh has been up and down, in and out and round and round over the years. After making waves with the classic US indie band Throwing Muses (once signed to 4AD alongside compatriots The Pixies) she went through what might best be called "a few problems", but picked herself up to launch a solo career. The debut Hips and Makers was (and still is) rather good indeed (and features a contribution from Michael Stipe) but the follow-ups Strange Angels and a madder-than-mad album called Murder, Mystery And Then Goodnight (which was a collection of Appalachian lullabies) fell flat.
"I'm feeling much better now, thank you," she says of her current situation, not that you would divine that from listening to the lyrics on her new album, Sky Motel - masochism, sadism, drugs, guilt, hatred and treachery are the constant themes in a beguiling collection of songs that gives the term "raw" a new and advanced meaning. Get her started on the songs and the process of writing them, and she's off: "You know, I usually hear songs rather than make them up," she says. "But for a while back there I felt like the songs were using me, chewing me up and spitting me out. Sometimes they gave me the impression that I was crazy. But now I feel like the future isn't just happening to me and I feel lucky and happy - obnoxiously so, at times. I guess what I'm saying is, I know more about the songs now." Right.
On one of the songs off the album, Clay Feet - which is about California - there's a line in there that goes "what a lovely place". A sort of Hotel California reference? "No, not at all," she says. "I really love Los Angeles. We lived there for a few years, and it's strange, but everyone seems so happy. People say that the smiles are fake, but they fool me. They look happy because they're all smiling. And it's funny, too, they all dress like movie stars and wear aerobic outfits. I don't think `you shallow idiot' - I just smile and say `you have nice teeth; they're pretty'."
Loathe to go into detail about the problems she's had over the years, she does say "I've done interviews where I was offended by how the interviewer was talking to me, implying that I was really crazy and sick. A lot of people have taken the songs and run with them, made them an expression of their own spidery sense of reality. I have to divorce myself from all of that."
What about the Kraftwerk vibe on the song Spring? "People say that song sounds like The Model and that's good, but to be honest I've never really heard Kraftwerk - I've never been that cool." Cool or not, what runs through these songs is a charming sense of oddity, if not the downright surreal. Having lived, in the last few years alone, in New England, Los Angeles, Joshua Tree and now Rhode Island, there's a certain E. Annie Proulx quality to her musings on life as it is now lived in various quarters of the US. Best of all, perhaps, is a song called White Trash Moon. "That's how we used to refer to the area around our home in California," she says. "We were living on 40 acres of high desert land, up in the mountains near Joshua Tree, which is a National Park although I guess for most people it's just a U2 album. It looked like the moon with trees and mobile homes. Our neighbours thought they should protect us because we weren't armed, and then some of them thought they saw a UFO land in our backyard . . ." Imagine Joni Mitchell scoring a David Lynch film and you've got this album in one.
Sky Motel by Kristen Hersh is on the 4AD label.
The new issue of the mad, bad, wonderful-to-read fanzine, Nosebleed, is now available. "Stupid opinionated dogma," they call it themselves - but in this issue you'll read a story headed "Why Dana must die!" and the editorial (if that's not too filthy-bourgeois-pig a term for it) will enlighten you as to why "Nick Cave should be beaten with lump hammers and not respected". Fascinating stuff. Nose- bleed is available in all the usual dark and dingy outlets around town. Next week: a Rubettes special (sort of).
