Kristin Hersh returns to New Zealand

Kristin Hersh returns to New Zealand for her first shows since 1994.

Tickets on sale today (Monday 3rd September):

Auckland – Sunday 14th October – Kings Arms
Wellington - Monday 15th October – SFBH

Tickets are $30 and available from Slow Boat Records (Wellington) and Real Groovy (Auckland)

Who is Kristin Hersh? Twenty years and fifteen albums into her career, the question reasserts itself. The teenage girl who formed Throwing Muses mesmerised sad 80's alternakids with songs like ‘Delicate Cutters’ and ‘Soul Soldier’. She screamed, “Shut the fuck up” and “I don’t feel so sorry” fronting the blisteringly loud and fast 50 Foot Wave and has also managed six solo albums in between. It’s been a riveting rollercoaster of a career and one that now offers up her best work yet with her album, ‘Learn To Sing Like A Star’.

Hersh was still in high school when she formed Throwing Muses, the first American band to sign to 4AD. Throwing Muses defied easy categorization; recording eight albums in ten years (1986-1996), creating a body of work that startled and offered dazzling musical expressions of psychic chaos. However, by 1993, Hersh found herself hearing songs which didn’t sound like Throwing Muses songs. These songs became Hersh’s first solo album -‘Hips and Makers’. Then something unexpected happened. This small, personal record took off, outselling all of Throwing Muses’ albums, and expanding Hersh’s fan base at a time when Throwing Muses was ceasing to be economically viable. When Hersh sang in 1989’s ‘Devil’s Roof’, “I have two heads,” she might have been predicting her musical future, as her career would soon require her to move seamlessly between two musical heads: BandKristin and SoloKristin.

‘Learn to Sing Like a Star’ features beautiful strings, played by British friends, Martin and Kim McCarrick. Throwing Muses’ David Narcizo, supplies the drums (and also the album cover, starring Kristin’s lips!) while Kristin plays everything else. “No sound went down on this record unchallenged,” Hersh explains, “if we’d heard it before - a surf-guitar, for instance - we layered it with piano reverb, tubular bells, and backwards bass to create an unusual hybrid tone with more character.” Here’s a big, spacious, sumptuous record with emphatic energy (‘In Shock’ and ‘Winter’), stripped ballads (‘Nerve Endings’ and ‘Ice’), deceptively breezy upbeat numbers (‘Under the Gun’ and ‘Wild Vanilla’) and dreamy tunes (‘Vertigo’ and ‘Sugar Baby’).

And the title—Learn to Sing Like a Star—is there a story there? Of course. Kristin traded mixes and fixes on the record via email with engineer Trina Shoemaker. Every time Kristin attempted to download a mix, she reports, “I‘d see this recurring piece of spam with the subject line ‘Learn to sing like a star!’ It was this ludicrous piece of junk mail. I saw it so many times, it started to sound moving to me -- why not sing for the cosmos instead of the music business? And suddenly there wasn’t a better name for the record.” In an album rich with sad prophecy, might the title offer a prediction of a brighter hue, a reference to the meteoric rise to fame Hersh will soon experience as a result of this record? Hersh laughs, “Yeah, that’s probably it.”