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| PHOTO CREDIT: Steve Gullick |
2013 promises more of the same.
I don't deny having a certain affection for Hersh and nearly everything she's ever done: 50FootWave, Paradoxical Undressing, Throwing Muses, Rat Girl. I've been fairly blown away by it all.
Even with the hectic nature of her schedule, she sat down to answer our questions about life, music, and the weight of the world.
I follow your artistic endeavors with a fair amount of regularity and even with constant output over the years, it seems as if the creative explosion is rapidly progressing at a furious pace in the last year or so with the music, books, readings, etc. Has it always been so bountiful for you or is it all just a coincidence that it's being put out into the world at this particular time? Has there ever been a lull for you?
Lulls have been arbitrarily imposed by record companies who don't like to release more than one record every two years. I stepped it up to one a year (or two if I could convince them to release a solo and Muses record at the same time), but got a lot of shit for it. Warner Brothers would either get really whiny about all the work they had to do to promote it or else (and this was more common) just not promote it at all, calling the resultant lack of response proof that listeners don't care.
Now that my audience IS my record company, I get to write books and record solo and with my 3 bands - Throwing Muses, 50FootWave, and Outros - along with any other projects I feel like taking on and my audience actually appreciates it.
The new Throwing Muses album is something longtime fans have been waiting for like hungry lions watching for a herd of collapsing antelopes. They will be pouncing on it with quite a bit of vigor. Do you feel the pressure of that or do you wall yourself off from the hopes and expectations of fans while you do the work?
That's a very good question. The 32 songs on this record are accompanied by 32 essays as Purgatory/Paradise is being published as a book rather than being released as a record, and I found myself addressing that question regularly over the course of all that writing.
Ultimately, we view music as a gift: with non-attachment, as groovy as that sounds. The listening experience is very social as is the giving-music-away experience, but if you let your ego get tied up in that quagmire of sociability, you'll get your heart broken. Because the work itself requires musicians to hide in a cave and merely "respond" to what the songs tell us to do. If we let the impression of anyone else ever hearing this stuff interfere with that process, we begin to feel self-conscious and the music suffers.
