In the last decade, Kristin Hersh has churned out five albums with Throwing Muses and three solo efforts. Yet the way she tells it, she's just now learning how to make albums.

"I didn't think I had any business making a solo record unless it was very different from the band," said Hersh, who has just issued her latest album, Sky Motel. "But with Sky Motel I didn't have any band, so it was liberating to find that I still had my musical vocabulary -- even without them to help me play it."

Hersh's musical vocabulary is not only intact, it has grown. While her previous solo efforts had been notable for their spare, haunting sound, on her latest album Hersh took to the studio like a mad scientist. Sky Motel finds Hersh plugging back in after three mostly-acoustic solo efforts and tapping into some of her former fury.

Though Hersh busied herself with two releases last year, the songs on Sky Motel represent the first she had written in almost two years. "Other people call that writer's block," she said. "I just call it real life. When I finally did sit down to write songs, it was just a matter of setting the stage for them. It was so easy, it was great. I didn't feel tortured in any way...for once. They were still pretty much the same songs I had been writing all along. I just wasn't fighting them."

It was a very different story when she was struggling to write her last album, 1998's Murder, Misery and Then Goodnight. Hersh had decided to return to her family's roots in the Tennessee Mountains for inspiration. "I hadn't written a song in two years," she said. "That [album] was my husband's idea. He said if I could get him to listen to Appalachian folk songs, I could get anybody to. And I did want my kids to hear the songs that I'd grown up listening to. My kids had really grown up listening to Throwing Muses, and I felt bad."

But the songs of Hersh's youth weren't quite the singsong lullabies she thought them to be. "I made this record for [the children] not really aware that it was full of really horrifying songs," she said of the Appalachian murder ballads. "And the woman gets it in every one. It's all about marriage, too. If he won't marry her, then she kills herself and if she won't marry him, he kills her."

Sordid material for the tykes, but Hersh is certain her children are capable of discerning between fiction and reality. "I remember somebody telling me I shouldn't let my son watch Loony Toons. So I asked him, 'When you hit someone in the face with a frying pan, you know it hurts? And if you push them over a cliff, they die...you know that right?' And he looked at me like I was an idiot. He said 'It's a cartoon.' And that's how they felt about these songs."

It took the calm of Murder, Misery and Then Goodnight to give birth to the stormy sonic collage of Sky Motel. Washed in layers of guitars and keyboards, Sky Motel feels like a Muses album, but with fewer scars. It also marks the return of Hersh's collaboration with producer Trina Shoemaker for the first time since her Muses days.

While Hersh doesn't shy away from the emotional content of the album, she quickly warms to techie talk. "These songs just asked for an idiosyncratic production approach," she says. "The rhythm tracks were these goofy bongo things. Then I would lay a really sucky old acoustic guitar over that. It was one that Bob Dylan had abandoned in the studio. And I put duct tape over the strings and foam under the strings to just kill it. But if you triple track that, it becomes almost like a cello brush stroke. Those were our first two characters, in the cast of characters that would be the production style."

Other strange players in the cast include a 'guitorgan,' "a guitar with its guts ripped out and organ guts put in. You're never sure what it's going to do. But some of the atmospheric psychedelic sounds -- actually all of them -- are that guitorgan."

Now that Hersh is free of the Muses, she's become quite the studio-hound. Hersh played nearly all of the instruments on the album, including the Frankenstein-ish creations. "I sampled my Muses drummer because our old Muses tapes were still up in the attic at the studio, and I brought a guy in on a couple of tracks on a live kit, which I don't trust myself to do," she says. "I'm really small and way a chick. But I played everything else, which is not very hard. I didn't play bagpipes or anything."

Having just returned from a series of festival shows in Europe, Hersh is now set to bring Sky Motel to Stateside venues. For the first time, she faces the challenge of performing her louder, layered material as Kristin Hersh rather than Throwing Muses. "Well, my keyboard player used to play with the Muses," she says of the adjustments necessary to capture Sky Motel live. "So he was used to playing just whatever we handed him. Backing vocals, or rhythm parts or lead parts, he filled in the holes. So he's very good at playing the guitorgan."

ANDREW DANSBY
(August 20, 1999)