Kristin Hersh Announces Two Solo Shows

Musician and author Kristin Hersh is heading to New Zealand for the first time in seven years for two intimate performances next month. The Atlanta native first rose to prominence in the 1980s as part of alternative rock band Throwing Muses, then in the mid-nineties she diverged to begin her own solo career. Her first solo Hips and Makers was released in 1994 and featured Michael Stipe of R.E.M.  Then in 2003, then she formed punk trio 50 Foot Wave, whose style runs a different course from her acoustic solo offerings. However, she continued to put out a stream of solo albums, the most recent of which is Crooked (2010), as well as develop written works. Here are the details for her two shows...

Kristin Hersh New Zealand Tour

Thursday 28th August, Bodega, Wellington
Sunday 31st August, Q Theatre, Auckland

Update: Hersh will also be making an appearance at the Christchurch Writers and Reader Festival 2014. Head over here for details.

Here's the video for 'Your Ghost' from her first album Hips and Makers, featuring Michael Stipe...

PRESS RELEASE:

CONE OF SILENCE PRESENTS: AN EVENING WITH KRISTIN HERSH

Wellington - August 28th // Auckland - August 31st

This August, Kristin Hersh returns to New Zealand stages for the first time in seven years for a run of highly entertaining and intimate solo shows featuring her powerfully emotional songs. Hersh quite enjoys her visits here, “I love touring New Zealand. Musically literate, critical thinkers and the energy of the audiences is unmatched. Just being there is healing: the air breathes FOR you.”

After founding her influential art-punk band Throwing Muses, at age 14, Kristin Hersh went on to spend the next 25 years confounding expectations and breaking rules - both her own and others’. From life as the reluctant front person for the Muses, to the solo career she swore never would happen, through the founding of an ambitious and altruistic non-profit, CASH Music and in her most recent foray into a surprisingly successful new career as an author, Kristin, like so many of us, didn’t see much of this coming.

Kristin’s solo-mostly-acoustic career spun off in 1994 and has lived in parallel to the Muses and 50FootWave. Her first solo release, Hips and Makers was widely acclaimed and since "Hips", Kristin has released a steady stream of solid and distinctly individual solo albums. However, her latest work of passion is her beloved band, Throwing Muses' epic work, "Purgatory / Paradise." An entirely listener-funded recording, written and demoed in public and in full conversation with the audience meant to consume it, it was published as a book. It is an absolutely gorgeous hardcover art book with a CD mounted inside 60 lush pages of photos, lyrics and narrative prose.

In the intervening seven years since she was last in New Zealand, Hersh has established herself as an author as well, with the publication of the alternately harrowing and hilarious memoir, "Paradoxical Undressing" (Atlantic Books.) It is clear that Kristin possesses as unique a voice as a writer as the one for which she is known as a singer. The memoir is based on her teenage diary entries from 1985 and ’86, a period during which the young Kristin lived in her car, crashed on friend’s floors and in empty apartments, unable to sleep for hearing the strange songs for which she is now known.

Kristin Hersh always seems to have lots going on. It’s been quite an eventful career, and one the teenage girl sleeping in her car could never have seen coming; so many changes, so many variations. But at its center, perhaps driving it all, is a happy and self-deprecating artist who has remained true to her passions, pure in her vision, and is always delivering the unexpected.

An Evening with Kristin Hersh results in a warm, intimate and hugely entertaining show of powerful songs.

AN EVENING WITH KRISTIN HERSH plays

WELLINGTON - Thursday 28 August, 8pm
Bodega, 101 Ghuznee Street
Tickets from: http://www.ticketmaster.co.nz/Kristin-Hersh-tickets/artist/765322

AUCKLAND - Sunday 31 August, 8pm
Q Theatre, 305 Queen Street
Tickets from: Q Theatre Box Office 305 Queen Street, http://www.qtheatre.co.nz/evening-kristin-hersh