Strange times

Kristin Hersh goes it alone

by Brett Milano

There's a lot of melancholy hanging over Kristin Hersh nowadays. Not that you'd necessarily hear it in her music: her new album, Strange Angels (Throwing Music/Rykodisc), may be her friendliest set of songs, high on warmth and melody. Introducing the new material at the Brattle Theatre in Cambridge last weekend, she was chatty and relaxed, sharing family-life anecdotes between songs (her middle son recently spotted Satan in his cereal bowl, she noted proudly). But to talk to her backstage, the current tour seems bittersweet at best -- in part because she was jet-lagged from a flight from London that morning, but mostly because she's still mourning the death of Throwing Muses, whom she disbanded last year.

"I feel like somebody stole my paintbox, my friends, my job, and my home," she said before the Brattle show. "It bums me out. I like acoustic music but I really miss my band." She's made it no secret that the Muses broke up only because she couldn't afford to keep them together: with three children to support, a decade of cult-hero status wasn't enough to pay the rent. So she packed up her family and moved from the East Coast to the West to start a new life. And though her solo show feels like a break with the past -- only three Muses songs were played, all at the tail end of the set -- her mind's still on ways to put the Muses back together.

One convenient excuse might be the Rykodisc reissue of the first Muses album, never officially released in America and now set for late August. The Muses might also return incognito in the guise of Lakuna, a part-time instrumental outfit started by drummer David Narcizo (now touring with ex-Muse Tanya Donelly) that includes Hersh and bassist Bernard Georges. And if nothing else works, there's always the lottery.

"What we really need is a sugar daddy," she pondered at the Brattle.

Strange Angels was written before the break-up, and she hasn't written any songs in the year since then. It's been her first extended dry spell. "Maybe I'm just not listening for them because I don't want my heart to be broken again. Maybe I'm just settling down for a while. I'll work this nice, sweet album until I get my strength back. I have a parallel life in my head, where I can move to Kansas and the kids can learn to make pottery. That gets me through most days."

It's ironic, but Strange Angels will probably win back the fans who were alienated by the final Muses album, Limbo. Released as the follow-up to 1995's University -- their most successful album, selling 75,000 copies -- Limbo was better but more challenging, lacking an obvious single to follow "Bright Yellow Gun." Hersh now blames the album's relative failure on the state of the record industry at the time.

Strange Angels is full of potential singles. If not quite the "nice, sweet album" she claims, it does let in more daylight -- the playful sexiness of "Like You" is a new wrinkle -- and tones down the ghostliness of her previous solo disc, Hips & Makers. Tracks like "Gazebo Tree" and "Aching for You" also show what a gorgeous melody she can turn. The solo-acoustic production is enhanced with light keyboard and bass overdubs, and with some cosmetic echo on the vocals. But it also makes you wonder why she resisted the temptation to bring in a band or an orchestra and make this a fuller, more commercial production.

Turns out she tried to do just that but it didn't work out. "I had big plans to give it the acoustic-combo treatment. I was going to have upright bass, have the Giant Sand guys come in to play, and D.J. Bonebrake [from X] was going to play marimba. But the songs didn't want it; they just wanted to be left alone. I wound up erasing most of my own overdubs as well."

She's aware that those decisions may have diminished the album's commercial chances. But she defends her choices: "If you build up a production, you end up being attracted by the ear candy, whatever sounds good today -- that ends up dating a record in five years' time. It also implies there are a whole load of people in the room, which alters the effect of the voice, I think. There are a lot of things you have to do if you really want to go there, and I personally get bored by those gestures. Making a record sound tight instead of loose, putting on those strings that sound like autoharps, all the pings and pongs that make you sound less lonely."

She also says she's feeling closer to her songs, which she used to think of as independent entities that come to her already written. "I have to admit that my life pictures are all over these songs. One of them ["Hope"] is so obviously about leaving your band and moving to California that it's almost embarrassing. But I still see them as filters that you can see almost anything through -- I probably see as many of my own life pictures in Vic Chesnutt songs. But I don't think that my songs should be limited by something that's only me. I hope I'm writing something that can speak for more than a straight white female."

She'll be on the road for the next few months, and she expects to be in the area in April. Hersh was never much of a scenester. During the Muses' heyday she remained in Newport while Donelly lived in Allston. (Hersh now lives in the desert in northern California.) Did coming back to Boston make her miss her old surroundings?

"No, not at all. I've always been a recluse by nature, I just never had a chance to act it out."