Kristin Hersh

You should have seen what I saw

Kristin Hersh was the front woman for the band Throwing Muses before embarking on a solo career. When Strange Angels, her second solo album, came out in 1998 I hadn’t heard of either her or her band. I don’t even remember how I came to hear the album—maybe I picked it up during one of my frequent trips to Tower Records.

I immediately loved it, though. Hersh’s songs are harsh, melodic, strange, and often moving. There’s an underlying weirdness to the lyrics, too, that resonated with me although I didn’t really understand why.

A few years after I first heard Strange Angels I read an interview in which Hersh discussed her struggle with mental illness, including her many misdiagnoses—schizophrenia, bipolar disorder—following a severe concussion she sustained when she was a teenager. Somehow the weirdness and implicit desire for connection that suffused her songs made more sense to me.

“Home” embodies all of it.

I had planned to pick the songs “Stained” and “Shake” for this post. They are linked by a solo-guitar transition from minor to major that is achingly beautiful (Hersh’s guitar playing is by turns raw, intense, and melodic) but I couldn’t find a link to it. I highly recommend you seek the album out. I have not been able to find Strange Angel streaming anywhere, which is ridiculous, but you can still buy the CD. I own it but, after too many moves, unfortunately, it’s in a box I can’t locate . As soon as I find it, though, I will listen to it from beginning to end many times over just as we used to do.

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“Houdini Blues” is the best song on Hersh’s first solo album, Hips and Makers which also includes “Your Ghost,” a duet with Michael Stipe, the lead singer of REM.

BONUS TRACK

“Cartoons” is the last track on Strange Angels. After the studio recording of the song ends, the recording continues and you can hear Hersh’s guitar pick fall into the sound hole of her guitar (which can be very frustrating). “I give up,” she says.