Kristin Hersh: ‘I really liked Sinéad personally. We were the same age. We had records out when we were 19. We bonded over that’

Back in the late 1980s, when indie bands enjoyed a fleeting moment of mainstream popularity, Kristin Hersh’s record label begged her for a hit. She had no interest in giving them one – but even had she wanted to, she wasn’t sure she had it in her. So she outsourced the task to her dad, a philosophy teacher and sometime musician. Struggling to keep a straight face, he hashed out Dizzy, a guilty pleasure bop that features on the second album by Hersh’s group, Throwing Muses.

“They were telling me they were going to drop us if we didn’t give them something radio-friendly,” says Hersh, a cult alternative songwriter and trailblazing feminist rocker. “My father wrote it. We gave it to them as a joke.”

Dizzy came about when Throwing Muses were with Warner Bros, which had gone on a spree of signing alternative musicians following the success of REM. Thirty years later Warner Bros no longer signs indie bands, and REM are long since broken up. Throwing Muses are still a going concern – but Hersh has also carved out a fascinating parallel career as a solo artist. In that capacity she returns with her stunning new record, Clear Pond Road, to be followed by a five-date Irish tour next month.

Described by the artist as a series of personal vignettes, the album was informed by the journeys Hersh made across the United States to visit her four grown-up sons, who range in age from 20 to 37. Along the way some of the majesty and uncanniness of the American interior got under her fingernails and into her pores. The result is a collection of beautifully understated songs that throb with a slowly building menace – like something from a David Lynch road movie.

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“I was bouncing from son to son. My children are all over the country. It’s a road story that is not about touring, for the first time in my life. I was a travelling from one child to the other.”

That sense of propulsion feeds the songs: they brim with a gripping restlessness. “Time skips… we’re too slow to follow,” Hersh sings on the hypnotic opening track, Bewitched Reruns, which evokes cinematic images of “a million mornings” and dust that will “never settle” while guitars chime louder and louder. By the end Hersh’s voice is lost in the mesmerising din: a song about losing yourself in the United States’ infinite horizon has been consumed by its own sense of endless possibility.

Those journeys affected the project in more literal ways, too. During their travels Hersh and her youngest, Bodhi (a professional surfer), visited a bric-a-brac store where the final piece of the puzzle that was to become the album fell into place.

“All the motion is reflective of something personal,” she says. “Clear Pond Road is a street sign my youngest son and I found in a junk shop. We were the last two people in our family of six [she is divorced from Bodhi’s father]. We were all alone. We were moving, moving, moving. We bought this sign and brought it everywhere with us.”

Hersh was on the cusp of her 20s in Newport, Rhode Island, when she had her first child. She was also fronting Throwing Muses, purveyors of beautiful, awkward and searingly fragile alternative pop, which she formed with her stepsister Tanya Donnelly (who went on to front the more mainstream Belly). At that time, motherhood and music were considered a bad mix in the business. Her experience was similar to that of Sinéad O’Connor, who had a child just as her career took off. It was something over which they struck up a connection.

“We got along,” Hersh says. “I really liked Sinéad personally. We were the same age. We had records out when we were 19. We bonded over that. Life stuff.”

Hersh and O’Connor were also artists who knew their minds, saw the major-label business as a sham and refused to be put into pigeonholes. In the late 1980s, to be a “female singer” was to belong to a distinct genre where you were defined not by your music but by your gender. This never made sense to Hersh. She was not a “woman” in music. She was a person, a musician, a questing soul.

“There was a lot of confusion for all of us when we were called ‘women’,” she says. “I thought we were ‘people’. Half the population is marginalised just because you decided that?”

I’m pretty boring as a person, but my life is insane. In a moment of inspiration you reach for a guitar. And that’s the only time I’m smart. After that I’m just chasing a song, hoping to do right by it

She took her kids on the road with her from the start. She looks back on their years living from a tour bus as a halcyon period. Her children saw the world. She felt the loss when they grew too old to go out with her. “Musicians or not, they lived my lifestyle. It’s harder to be engaged in real life without them. I had four little Buddhist bells, saying ‘life, life, life’. That’s what intelligence is. It’s not cerebral faculties. It’s the Buddhist bell of life.”

Hersh is more comfortable talking Buddhism than the economics of rock music. Making a living from music has never been her goal. She sees the choice as binary: you serve either art or commerce. You can’t do both.

“We never focused on the business,” she says. “We played: music was a river to jump into. Songs come and go. Sometimes we record them. Sometimes we release those recordings. But music is the world we live in. In our experience the music industry is very anti-music. It doesn’t want anything substantial or spiritual – or anything of depth. What they want they would call ‘radio-friendly’. What they meant is mean and insulting – that’s very sad. It insults people.”

In addition to Throwing Muses, her solo records and her 50 Foot Wave noise rock side project, Hersh has published two volumes of memoir (plus a book about her friendship with the late songwriter Vic Chesnutt).

She has a lot to write about. Rat Girl, from 2010, tracks her adolescence and early 20s. It begins with her chronic head injury, at the age of 16, when she was cycling in Newport and a car struck her. The concussion drastically altered her relationship with music: she began to experience ambient sounds constantly, which affected both her musicianship and her mental health in a way that she ultimately felt was damaging to her wellbeing.

“My manias and depressions have coloured songs in ways that were inappropriate,” she said at the time. “When I am free and clear and healthy the songs are also free and healthy, without me getting in the way.”

A sequel of sorts arrived during the pandemic. Seeing Sideways chronicles her experiences of raising her kids on a tour bus. She was working on it as the songs that would become Clear Pond Road were coming together. One project flowed into the other. Whether writing prose or music, her creative process has stayed the same, she says. The spark is always there – waiting for her to capture it.

“I’m pretty boring as a person, but my life is insane,” she says. “In a moment of inspiration you reach for a guitar. And that’s the only time I’m smart. After that I’m just chasing a song, hoping to do right by it. A song, when it wants to be alive, is trying to get born. That’s the only time I really know what beauty is.”

If she wanted to, Hersh could cash in on the 1990s nostalgia that seems to be everywhere nowadays – whether manifesting as misplaced affection for Britpop or in the evergreen popularity of Friends. Throwing Muses, as fans of Hersh will tell you, released one of the great albums of the post-Nirvana period in The Real Ramona, from 1991.

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But counting backwards to the past has never held any interest for her. She prefers to live in the here and now and regards the modern music business as, in some ways, healthier than in the past. For instance, she sees streaming as an inherent good. Unlike many artists, it doesn’t bother her that royalty rates are low. It is a way of getting your music out into the world – away from the gatekeepers. It takes the power away from the major labels and gives it to people who matter: the artist and their audience.

“Anyone who has trouble with streaming wants to make money. You can’t play music to make money. You just can’t,” Hersh says. “That’s a difficult decision to make when you’re really poor trying to do this. I have no problem that we can explore across music and genre now. I’ve seen that music education become a literacy in my own children. I’m certainly not going to complain about a musically literate populace that cannot be manipulated.”

Clear Pond Road is on Fire Records. Kristin Hersh will play in Kilkenny, Galway, Dún Laoghaire, Bangor and Dundalk between October 19th and 23rd