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Martha Kristin Hersh (born August 7, 1966) is an American singer, guitarist, and songwriter known for her solo work and with her rock bands Throwing Muses and 50FootWave. She has released eleven solo albums. Her guitar work and composition style ranges from jaggedly dissonant to traditional folk. Hersh's lyrics have a stream-of-consciousness style, reflecting her personal experiences.
Hersh attended Salve Regina University in Newport, majoring in archetypal psychology and philosophy, but dropped out shortly before graduating to establish the band in Boston where they had been playing on weekends. While at Salve Regina, Hersh befriended film actress Betty Hutton, who was attending the school in her 60s; Hutton also attended several early Throwing Muses shows in Newport. The Throwing Muses were signed to 4AD, the first American group to be signed on the British label, and released the EP Chains Changed in 1987. Two releases followed, the mini-LP The Fat Skier and the album House Tornado. The 4AD Throwing Muses biography describes its sound at the time as "joining the dots between elliptical post-punk, harmonious folk jangle and rockabilly thunder without ever settling into standard genre patterns." Throwing Muses Biography 4AD Artists. Retrieved on October 20, 2015. For the Throwing Muses 1986 UK tour, the Boston-based Pixies, embarking on their first European tour, was the opening band. Appearances Archive 1985–1989. KristinHersh.com. Retrieved on July 6, 2016.
The band signed a U.S. deal with Sire Records/Reprise Records in 1987 and began touring the U.S. and Europe while recording albums, with Hersh writing most of the songs. The band became a trio when Donelly left the group after 1991's The Real Ramona. In 1994, Hersh began a solo career on Sire/Reprise and 4AD as an acoustic performer, beginning with Hips and Makers, an album sparsely arranged around her vocals, guitar, and a cellist, in contrast to the volatile, electric sound of her band work. Michael Stipe of R.E.M. made an appearance on this first solo album. After receiving some airplay and major media coverage for the Throwing Muses album University in 1995, Hersh moved to Rykodisc for the band's 1996 album, Limbo, and released her solo album, Strange Angels, in 1998. To better control her career and the distribution of her recorded material, she created the ThrowingMusic label with then-husband and manager Billy O'Connell in 1996. That enabled her to co-release some of her projects, including an ongoing download-subscription service called Works in Progress (WIP) for releases available through the label's website. Hersh continued to offer her solo releases online, releasing Sky Motel in 1999. Throwing Muses functions as a noncommercial musical enterprise, focusing on touring over record sales and airplay. In a 2014 interview, Hersh said, "As far as I'm concerned, music is not a commodity. It's something that people have earned by being human. They have a right to hear it, and a right to share it, as they always have in churches and parties. That's how music happens."
Throwing Muses reformed in 2013 and released Purgatory/Paradise, a 32-track album accompanied by a book designed by Narcizo, who works as a graphic designer. The book features photos, artwork and lyrics by Hersh. It was the band's first release in ten years.Pan, Arnold (November 21, 2013). "'A Keyhole View of Our Goofy World' – Kristin Hersh on Purgatory / Paradise". PopMatters. Retrieved on October 20, 2015.
At that point in her career, Hersh's output was independently released online. She expressed that she wanted a complete break with the music industry, stating, "Because we differ from the recording industry ethically, we had been asked to dumb down our product so many times. I have been asked to act and look like a bimbo so many times and I just decided, 'I'm not going to turn my back on my music. I'm not going to turn my back on women.' We're morally bound to not participate in the traditional recording industry because we disagree with it. So we continue to play music, which has nothing to do with the music business." In October 2016, she released the double album Wyatt at the Coyote Place and an accompanying book . Hersh embarked on a tour in support of the album. On June 12, 2018, Hersh announced on her website that she has signed with Fire Records. Her new record, Possible Dust Clouds, was released on October 5, 2018. She finished recording the album in May of the same year. In February 2020, it was announced that Throwing Muses would release a new album, Sun Racket, on May 22; the release was delayed to September 4.
Simon Reynolds in The New York Times pointed to Hersh's "mesmerizing" explorations of "rage, aggression and mental chaos" as evidence of female rock artists of the early 1990s pushing against gender role boundaries to express "more than simply vulnerability or defiance" in their work. Ann Powers, also in the Times, wrote of Hersh's musical style: "Her plastic, sometimes obsessively circular song structures emphasize staggered rhythms and extreme dynamic shifts, and her voice, a carnal cry that pushes through her body gathering up air, lends her often oblique lyrics an oracular veneer."
Her 2010 memoir Rat Girl (published in the UK as Paradoxical Undressing) is based on a diary she wrote when she was 18, touring with Throwing Muses, diagnosed with bipolar disorder and pregnant with her first child. Rob Sheffield in The New York Times called it an "uncommonly touching punk memoir," and named it No. 8 in Rolling Stones "25 Greatest Rock Memoirs of All Time." Her 2015 book Don't Suck, Don't Die: Giving Up Vic Chesnutt, is a rumination on her friendship with the singer-songwriter Vic Chesnutt. She cites him as being one of her songwriting influences with his "fluid timing and the grace of a melody that breaks the rules of meter."
Hersh has talked openly about her bouts with mental illness and its role in her musical process. When she was 16, she was struck by a car while riding her bicycle, suffering a double concussion that affected the way she heard sounds. She described it as hearing continuously and "the sounds would alter their sonic vocabulary until I was hearing syllables, and drums... then all these words would come". She has said that hearing "pieces of songs" in her mind compelled her to take the pieces apart and craft songs from them. She claims that she doesn't remember writing her early songs—that "they wrote her". Hersh has synesthesia; she sees musical chords in colors.
She has had more than one diagnosis (and misdiagnoses) for her condition including schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and most recently post-traumatic and dissociative disorders, which she says have been successfully treated with eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR) therapy.
Personal life
Hersh was married to her former manager Billy O'Connell for 25 years and they divorced in 2013. They have four sons. , she is engaged to former Throwing Muses bassist Fred Abong.
Solo works discography
Studio albums
With Throwing Muses
With 50FootWave
Cover songs
Books
Sources
External links
Categories: Official Website, 1966 Births, Living People, 20th-century American Women Guitarists, 20th-century American Guitarists, 20th-century American Women Singers, 20th-century American Singer-songwriters, 21st-century American Women Singers, 21st-century American Singer-songwriters, 4ad Artists, American Memoirists, American Rock Guitarists, American Rock Songwriters, American Women Memoirists, American Women Pop Singers, American Women Rock Singers, American Women Singer-songwriters, Appalachian Music, Fire Records Artists, Guitarists From Rhode Island, Musicians From Appalachia, Musicians From Atlanta, Musicians From Newport, Rhode Island, People With Bipolar Disorder, Reprise Records Artists, Rykodisc Artists, Sire Records Artists, Songwriters From Rhode Island, Throwing Muses Members, Warner Records Artists, Writers From Providence, Rhode Island, Yep Roc Records Artists, People With Post-traumatic Stress Disorder, People With Dissociative Disorders, American Writers With Disabilities
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