The Towns I Loved So Well

If it's true that travel broadens the mind, then Kristin Hersh's cerebral matter must have some serious stretch marks, for her wanderly wagon has waddled down each and every byway worth the petrol. Much of the impetus for the thirtysomething singer/song-maker's nomadic revelry obviously stems from the need to promote her music her itinerary is a marathon of gigs and promotional tours but her persistently itchy feet can also be traced back to a fractured, unsettled family history.
"Because I've been on the road since I was 16, it's very hard for me to sit still for very long. Once you see so many great things, you hunger to see more. After three days in a place, you start thinking, 'OK, what's next?'. So we've done New York, LA and just about everywhere in between! We're kind of like the Partridge Family," she laughs, with her customary self-deprecation.
'We' is husband/manager, Billy O'Connell, and their two sons, Ryder and Wyatt, who are all now newly settled in Rhode Island, the New England enclave where Hersh was reared (she was actually born in Alabama). They have moved back there to be closer to Hersh's first born, Dylan, who lives with his father close by.
For the preceding three years, rock's Partridge Family spent their time flitting between the hectic circus of Los Angeles and the hermetic bliss of Joshua Tree in the Californian desert (which, when not providing scenic backdrops for U2 photoshoots, was once home to Gram Parsons, and currently houses three of Hersh's favourite songwriters: Vic Chesnutt, Victoria Williams and Cracker's David Lowery).
"I found the experience of LA and Joshua Tree a fascinating Californian dichotomy," she explains. "California is such a newly settled place compared to most of the rest of the world. LA is this super-human habitat. Everything is 'more' and 'most' and 'much'. It's full of people who are intricately connected: whether they're out to impress, sleep with, get money from, or get jobs from each other they're so interdependent.
"Then Joshua Tree, which is an hour away, is full of people who stockpile food and weapons and see UFOs and have nothing to do with anyone else, except maybe to try and shoot 'em off their land! And both of those ways of living are valid. I had a very balanced lifestyle because I would go back and forth. I liked waking up in LA and thinking, 'gotta get the paper, what happened in this human anthill?'. And then in the desert I would wake up and wouldn't dream of even turning on the television because I knew what happened: the moon was half-full, the clouds were drifting, the hummingbirds were singing, and the baby cut his first tooth. It's knowledge that isn't ephemeral; that you do actually take with you, that you don't have to start over every day.
"But it gets boring after a while too I'm not a nature hound. I find LA to be very beautiful. I don't think anyone else feels that way about it. It's so pretty and happy. I'm impressed by the architecture and the smiles on the joggers' faces."
Hersh has just released her third solo album (or fourth, if you include last year's mail order/internet-only collection of Appalachian folk ballads, Murder, Misery And Then Goodnight). But it's no folk record: it's actually more of a Throwback to her beloved Muses. Like its title, Sky Motel is typically enigmatic and impressionistic; another puzzlebook rife with the complex psycho-dramas that make up human relationships. But whatever about its mental geography, the physical geography of the record encompasses San Francisco and Costa Rica (although Hersh admits that she's never been to the latter; it was "just a dream" she had). And it was recorded in New Orleans.
"New Orleans feels like home to us," bubbles Hersh. And very few places actually do. We usually feel like we're visiting no matter where we are. New Orleans is melting. You can see the air, it's so thick. And the people are drunk all the time, which sounds kind of bad, I guess, but if you don't judge it, it's just nice and sleepy and you don't have to make too much sense when you talk."
And, given her job, that must be a relief to not have to keep on explaining herself all the time? ". . . if you want to be understood," she answers. "But I never found that to be very important either!"
Is the South as spooky a place as a film like Angel Heart paints it?
"It is. It's real twisted and in New Orleans, there's plenty of voodoo. It's in the corners of every room you're in. They have salt sprinkled in the corner to keep the bad guys away. And people bang on the door and ask you for money, and leave a chicken bone if you give it to them and a cat bone if you don't!"
That's freaky!
"It is if you let it. I've had my name written on a lemon in blood in somebody's window."
What did you do to deserve that?
"I didn't invite a woman to my wedding. But I didn't know her. She was just a voodoo queen and thought she should have been invited. But nothing ever happened, I don't think. I mean, plenty of bad shit happened, but I never blamed it on the lemon! I think you've got to be an appreciative disciple of the black arts for them to have any effect. You can't just stand there grinning at it."
What's your favourite place in America?
"I like a place called Laurence, Kansas. It's the epicentre of the US. And for some reason, it's full of all different sorts, shapes, sizes, colours and orientations of people. It's like a little nirvana right in the middle of America. It's full of children mixed with intellectuals mixed with hicks mixed with blacks, whites, Asians, Hispanics, Indians . . . It's weird, because most people's impression of Kansas is of a very backward place, like in the Wizard Of Oz.
A world apart, then, from her birthplace in the Appalachian mountains in Alabama.
"They're a pretty scary people down there: Bible-thumping Jesus Baptists! That's where my accent came from, down South, which I try very hard to hide when I'm in New England! But when I'm sleepy or drunk or singing these songs, it comes out."
Indeed, Hersh's aforementioned album of macabre, blood-and-guts Appalachian folk songs, Murder, Misery And Then Goodnight, made Nick Cave's Murder Ballads sound like a Teletubbies tea party.
"Most of those songs could really be called Celtic because those are the people that settled the Appalachian mountains first. And then they were kind of twisted and uprooted by the drunken white trash!"
Do people look at you funny now in the street after all those songs of death and debauchery?
"I thought more people would be afraid of it," says Hersh. "I was afraid of it! I thought it was disgusting. I guess the sound of the instruments is attractive enough to people that they don't actually listen to the words.
"My father played those songs to me when I was a kid. They were my lullabies. I sang along and thought they were great. That's why I went back to do this record for my children. But the more sheet music I got and the more old recordings I found, I thought, 'this is just horrible! Why would I want to do this to my children? And why did they do it to me?! But my kids just sang along and they kind of enjoyed it. Kids have a sick sense humour. And then they walk away and they eat their cookies and they're fine."
Amen. n
The single, 'Echo', and the album, Sky Motel, are out now on 4AD. Kristin Hersh and her band play the Black Box as part of Galway Arts Festival on Monday 19th July, and HQ at the Irish Music Hall of Fame, Dublin, on Tuesday 20th and Wednesday 21st July.