She also became pregnant with her first child (she's now a mother of four) and her bipolar disorder began to take hold. Hersh was homeless at the time, squatting with would-be musicians and actual junkies. Throwing Muses were signed four years later, to influential London label 4AD. The condition was serious enough for Hersh to be initially diagnosed as schizophrenic. Hersh formed Throwing Muses, whose original line-up included her stepsister Tanya Donnelly, at high school, around the same time her bipolar disorder became apparent. Much of her early life was spent on a commune in Georgia. She was born Martha Kristin Hersh in Atlanta, Georgia, to hippie academic parents who went by the names Dude and Crane. It flashes back too, not only to that car accident, but also to her unconventional upbringing. Paradoxical Undressing is based on the diary Hersh began when she was 18 and covers a pivotal 12-month period of her life. "I watched and listened…," she writes, "bewildered and enthralled as sound and colour filled my empty hospital room." In her forthcoming memoir, Paradoxical Undressing, she describes the sound in her head as, "a metallic whining, like industrial noise… layered with humming tones and wind chimes". Hersh first started to hear her own songs when she was 16, marooned in hospital with double concussion after being knocked off her bike by a car. Each performance is like that, if it's a good one. The songs move into my spine, and they make me frantic. "I haven't been able to convince people that it's not me," she says. "When I have conversations with some fans, they think they know my psychology," she says, "and they share it."įor her, the songs have always been very real, although she considers "alive" a more appropriate word. Then there's the occupational hazard common to any artist attempting to render personal experience in a more universal way. I thought it would be more comfortable than that." And yet, whenever one of us was standing in the room, a line of people with CDs and posters would form, and we'd be asked to sign them. "I sort of had this idea that we were all pals. "I wanted it be like the company picnic," she says. Take the Gut Pageant, a series of mini-festivals for Hersh aficionados that included lunch and opportunities to meet the singer. She's finding the barrier between artist and fan more tricky, however. Nevertheless she's a definite presence, pale blue eyes never afraid of holding direct contact. Perhaps it's not surprising that the medium suits Hersh, who says several times during the course of our conversation that she's shy. "It's easy to be honest when everyone is faceless." Her blog entries are often poignant, detailing a teenage seizure, or the time she lost custody of her first child. She tweets and blogs, describing Twitter as like having "40,000 smart friends". The cathartic nature of her output also seems to chime with the confessional side of social networking. For veteran artists who achieve modest rather than megabucks success, her approach offers a road map to making a living long term. She gave away her work a year before Radiohead and has been self-sufficient for a while, operating a fan-funded business model via the Cash Music organisation she helped set up in 2007. Hersh has never been shy of trying different ways to engage with her audience. It's a first in that it's being released as a book by a publisher, an imprint of HarperCollins, not a record label, which allows online access to 10 finished tracks, plus demos and a variety of extras. The treatment inspired the title track of Hersh's new album project, Crooked. That's all I know, except that the energy – there's no other word for it – feels like race cars driving around your outline." I had a woman treat me on tour for months, and eventually that body moved into this one and I no longer had any bipolar symptoms. And when I opened them I could see the meat bag that I was used to being over here. "When I shut my eyes I knew that my body was in a different position to me, over here. "This is going to make me sound even crazier than I was," she says of her first recent acupuncture session. Now 43, Hersh has since outlasted any trend, amassing 18 albums, nine of them solo.įierce, apparently confessional early songs with titles such as "Mania" and "Hook in Her Head" meant critics discussed Hersh's illness and creative output as if they were irrevocably intertwined, although she has long dismissed such notions as too pat. Throwing Muses' sound was primal, so it it was no surprise that they shared a label with the equally ferocious Pixies, another east coast American band who helped prepare the ground for Nirvana and the alt-rock explosion that followed during the 90s. Hersh formed her first band, Throwing Muses, around the time she became ill, and within a few years she was a significant voice in American indie rock.
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