3. Throwing MusesThrowing Muses
I really wish I’d heard it when I was 15, but I didn’t. I first heard it maybe five years ago. I found this album such a strong experience that I was taken back to myself as a 15-year-old and almost within about five seconds I’d created an alternative youth for myself as I heard it, especially the song ‘Hate My Way’. I can’t believe anybody could write something like that. That’s my favourite type of new music discovery, when you think: "I can’t believe this exists. I would never have thought that this song could ever exist. How does that happen?" And the energy of that album, and the energy of Kristin Hersh in general, I think, is something really special. I wish she was known to more people because the energy, the rawness of her writing is truly so wild and human. She’s one of my favourite energies of all art expressions. I also really loved reading her book [Rat Girl], which is about those days, before and as that album was made. I usually hate memoirs and music biographies but not this one. She actually does connect with her music rather than some kind of mythology of it, which I’ve never seen before. She does channel something that is very dangerous but it’s… it’s an energy that feels like a true risk. She’s a risk-taker.
She’s said that she hates music because "the intensity of good music is too much to bear. And bad music is so offensive that that’s also too much to bear". She’s "in heaven when it’s good, but that doesn’t happen very often".
I’m just incredibly grateful that she has dared to write and work with the music that is in her head. I sort of understand, or try to understand, why she hates music from reading the book and listening to her music as well but the most important thing is that she’s made this music that nobody in the world could have made.
