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samedi 17 décembre 2005
 

Advice mentioned last time I take a dive into Kristin Hersh was sound indeed. In listening to four albums spanning a good decade either in bands or as a solo girl, I'm among the latest to discover some of the worlds Kristin has in herself. An occasional "look inside" at those may get us wondering how we simply manage to be ourselves at all, from one day to the next.
Hersh is striking for a rich and strong career as a singer and musician who let a bipolar disorder -- being "touched with fire" -- become a compelling force for creative accomplishment.
It's easy for people who don't experience these highs and lows to speak of such minds as "sick". Disturbing they are, if you've got one or when you know somebody who has; such people can be hard to live with, but in her search for herself, the woman who is today Throwing Music (Kristin's discography) has let us in on extraordinary beauty.
She keeps a blog there too and is sharing music -- check out the downloads -- with a generosity so characteristic of many singers it's one of this site's raisons d'être.

To write in any depth of Hersh and others is to challenge commonly voiced notions of sickness and of health, in people and in the society we have together created.
Sadly, it's a society in which after 11 years and just when I decided a subscription was essential, Rockrgrl is, with its new issue, number 57, to be no more.
This news I got from its founder, Carla A. DeSantis, just before it went up on the site, in private correspondence, but publicly too I wish the very best for the future of those who have been involved in such a remarkable and sustained project. They explain this.

"After a long career as a bass player, DeSantis was frustrated and disillusioned by magazine articles about women musicians that seemed to mention everything about the person (dating, shopping, sex) EXCEPT how they create their art. One Rolling Stone 'Women in Rock' issue, for example, asked the artists about their favorite perfumes but nothing about their music. So, to level the playing field, DeSantis created a positive alternative where music -- not perfume -- was the main issue."
That sets high standards.
Kristin HershKristin Hersh, taken on such fortuitous advice, was already among those waiting for a place here, to try to share an understanding of "how they create their art" and particularly how they change and grow.

Hersh's work is very rewarding, but can be "difficult" at first hearing since lyrically she takes a lot of getting to know in songs full of imagery. Sometimes these have the texture and hue of dreams. They can seem senseless until you catch the inner logic of dreams, however disjointed, to become, in Kristin, poems that linger a long time because her words are so closely attuned to the music.
Her prowess with a guitar enables her to structure the strangest of dreamscapes into a sense that finds the deepest resonance in the listener. It's been a good week to hear her since often I've been so tired very unlikely images have been popping up whenever I close my eyes, vivid ones to transport me worlds away in instants.
Like hallucinations, like Hersh does sometimes.
They're just flashes, but once back at the job in hand, particularly some of the toughest writing tasks of the week when editorially that task has been to find the essential news story in a huge mass of copy in front of me, those flashes somehow tell me what comes next.

"Physician, heal thyself, take care, mate!" I said on bumping into my doctor in the street. He looked awful, stricken with one of those winter bugs going around in an ideally damp and disagreeable climate. Kristin heals herself sometimes, articulating the dreamscapes people need to do this.
In so doing, she displays another aspect of what's part of music's magic, by turning to those healing powers when we feel caged. Listening to the right songs at the right time can restore our own wholeness and sense of balance and peace with ourselves, free to fly again.

"Oh no don't you put me in that box
you know what you can do with those locks
bet your life I'll come crawling out again
you'll have to deal with me then
you'll hear me in the wind."

No boxes, then. 'Houdini Blues,' Kristin has said, is one of her father's songs. She's played with it, brought it out of a box, but she scarcely knew how she did anything on Hips & Makers (1993), where she's intimate about her life and loves, her family, but mainly through inner dialogues.
In 1994, she told Wm. Ferguson about it for Spin Magazine (via Debra Rau in Zimbabwe, who collected several such interviews):

"'When songwriting hit me, a spring uncoiled in my head,' she explains matter of factly. 'The songs started pushing me around. I started hallucinating. A voice would tell me to turn off the headlights and drive to another city. Songs do that to your body if they're stuck in you.'
"Though the Muses 'spent ten years trying to keep it a secret that I wasn't always, um, seeing very clearly,' Hersh's episodes somehow never affected the band. But after the tour for 'The Real Ramona' during which she was pregnant with her second child. Tanya Donelly, Hersh's stepsister, left the band to form Belly. Hersh was ready to abandon guitar and channel her energy into being a housewife (her word). 'I tried to quit," she says, 'but the songs didn't give a shit. And they kept coming' [and hence she made that solo album]," Ferguson wrote in 'Guided By Voices'.

The purely acoustic album is not representative of Kristin's adventures in a musical life that began to take off when she was 14. Some hear it being as "mad", crazy and angry, as it is melancholy. Yet still it sells, still it's addictive listening.
It makes for a theme to pursue with Hersh and others who deliver such deeply personal music, because in another interview you could find at Debra's site, Kristin reveals that her songs help make her, "her music has taught her the most".

"'What I've learned from the songs pretty much in the last couple of years, is that you take this ride whether this ride is a record or a second, or a house, or a lifetime, you take that ride or it takes you,' she offers somewhat mystically. 'And in the end, you're just the clay you started out with, you're just a body, and you can't get higher than that, and you can't get lower than that, and what a great reason to take the ride. And that wants to make me live a very good life,'" she told Randy Dawn Cohen ('Living Every Moment,' Alternative Press, 1994).
"Somewhat mystically" it may be, a mystery it certainly is.
It's not a mystery to be analysed. That would get nowhere, but when we go on meeting musicians in this way, we're frequently set to find, I feel, that their music comes from so way deep, it's a quality that makes the person, so that the creative process is a two-way thing.
Kristin was explicit about songs that "didn't give a shit" and created her, they keep on coming and she takes the ride. To hear musicians grow is entertainment, we do it because we enjoy it, sad or happy or usually a bit of both. Could it be then that their strength helps shape our own?
Before a friend suggested Hersh, my listening was heading in a quite different direction, but the help and the pleasure Kristin had given somebody who has been healing from tough times drew my attention.
In taking a singer in with me to the Factory and returning to her hours later, often in a different mood and needing to unwind, I find the musicians essential in remodelling my own clay. The real mystery (again merely to note and leave at that) is their way of making me go on wanting to live a decent life too. 'Hips and Makers' is a one-off, but now I know why a friend finds Kristin good for her health.


2:53:53 AM  link   your views? []


nick b. 2007 do share, don't steal, please credit
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