Throwing Muses: A Homecoming Like You’ve Never Heard Before

By the time I get off my hour-and-change Zoom call with Kristin Hersh, my cheeks are physically hurting from smiling. Then, a text from my roommate comes in, asking if I wanted to grab dinner now that my interview was over. Confused, I ask how she even knew I was done. She replies, “Because I don’t hear giggling any more.” A beat. Then, a second text: “And why WERE you giggling the whole time?? Aren’t you supposed to be professional or something???”

Kristin Hersh has long been characterized as “wonky, disturbed, and in the grip of dark forces” (to quote a 2011 article from The Guardian). This perception—perhaps exaggerated or even weaponized by labels and press for album sales and media frenzies—does originate from somewhere. Even aside from the Throwing Muses bandleader’s very public struggles with mental illness and detrimental misdiagnoses of bipolar disorder and schizophrenia (which she chronicled in part in her phenomenal 2010 memoir, the critically acclaimed Rat Girl), there’s also the music itself. Her songs are “songs made of trauma and teeth,” as Pitchfork declared in a review of Throwing Muses’ 1986 self-titled debut, with the “demonic roar” of Hersh’s voice front and center, and that’s precisely what she became “known for on record and stage.”

Speaking to Hersh, however, the first thing you’ll likely notice is her laugh. This is in large part because it’s probably one of the first things you’ll hear: Hersh laughs a lot, and not as some sort of nervous tic or friendly overture. They’re all belly laughs, each and every one warm and tinkling and genuine. She really is just that tickled. The second thing you’ll likely notice is your own laugh, and that is, in large part, because you’ll be hearing it just as much. Hersh’s laugh is the most contagious thing I’ve experienced since… well, since COVID, really. Hersh’s sunniness is entirely infectious, even through a low-quality Zoom screen (“Sorry it’s so moody in here,” she laughs the moment she pops onto my laptop, her face grainy and poorly lit).

A Return to Form

This, however, is where her upcoming album, Moonlight Concessions, with Throwing Muses comes in. It’s like looking into an alternate universe where the band was allowed to remain itself, where Hersh and her mates were never manhandled and mistreated by the cruel, invisible hand of a callously indifferent industry. Moonlight Concessions is being branded in press releases as a return to form, which Hersh says is true, but finds rather funny: “I don’t know why anyone else would know it was a return to form, but it is,” she shrugs, “because these songs—songs like ‘Drugstore Drastic’ and ‘Summer of Love’ and ‘Libretto’—were songs that Throwing Muses used to sound like, before we made our first record. So, this is a return to form that no one would know is a return to form. But, you know, we used to sound like that!”

Moonlight Concessions is set to arrive on March 14th, with its third single, the warm-blooded “Libretto,” out today. The album is, simply put, just lovely—a quirky, off-kilter ode to the wonderful oddities inherent in life as it’s lived, filled with both childlike wonder at our world (and the people in it) and the kind of maturity that only comes with years and years of fighting for it. It’s a celebration of mundanity, of the bits and pieces that make up a life: From casually existential conversations with a friend in the back of a car (“South Coast”) to being stuck in a two-hour “Uber coma” driving across California (“Albatross”), from the excitable, kindly homeless man living outside a Sally’s Beauty store (“Sally’s Beauty”) to overhearing two men stumbling down a street, both convinced the other is debilitatingly high (“Drugstore Drastic”), Moonlight Concessions braids real-life vignettes and surreal, sinewy instrumentation into one cohesive tapestry, warm as any physical blanket.

The first Muses record since 2020, Moonlight Concessions is also a true homecoming for the band, although perhaps not in the way most of us would expect. It’s not the rehashing of Throwing Muses, their beloved 1986 debut, that some long-time fans have been yearning for, but honestly, that’s a good thing. Moonlight Concessions may not be the return-to-form that some fans might have wanted, but it is the one all of us needed—Hersh herself included.

The album opener, “Summer of Love,” serves as a bit of an unspoken thesis for the record as a whole—the song arose from “a bet with a guy for a dollar” that Hersh made, in which she put money on the idea that we don’t, can’t, change with the seasons, and he insisted otherwise. “He said we aren’t just planted here, stagnant, we’re in flux, responding to love like octopuses moving across the ocean floor,” Hersh says. “Turns out he was right, and I still owe him a buck.”

“Finally life,” she sings on the track, her signature rasp caressing the words over an earworm riff and some lively tambourine, “Finally life as it should have been / Finally life as it should be.” Hersh has not had an easy go of things, it’s true. (“Next lifetime, I’m signing up for boredom,” she cracks over Zoom. “I’m going to be all about tedium.”) But she’s no longer the person she was at 19, split between herself and Rat Girl, the caustic musical persona that arose as an offshoot of Hersh’s then-undiagnosed dissociative disorder, and Moonlight Concessions feels like the culmination of that growth—a homecoming finally allowed thanks to a newfound comfort with “home” itself. It’s a version of Muses that Hersh never expected herself to be able to return to. So perhaps this is Throwing Muses, as they should have been, could have been. Life, as it should be—and, maybe, could be yet.

A Cult Following for the Unlistenable

Hearing that Muses’ unrecorded early work had such similarities to their sound on Moonlight Concessions might come as a bit of a surprise. Their first record, 1986’s Throwing Muses, is perhaps the darkest, most brutal entry in the band’s discography, while Moonlight Concessions is jaunty, reflective, even hopeful—as Hersh puts it, it feels like it’s “chugging.” But when I say as much, Hersh just grins, as if she was expecting that skepticism: “Look, we were actually a fun band!”

“A lot of our songs were just real fun and sweet and happy,” she says. “We were playing these bars in Boston where they’d knock the pool table over for us and we’d set up on the floor and everybody would sing along—it was kind of like a hootenanny vibe. I was a freaking alien, and they loved it! It was just this party.”

Evidently, something got a little lost in Throwing Muses’ transition from being an unsigned band to releasing their debut album. The root cause of this was, of course, the music industry itself, and specifically, the band getting signed by Ivo Watts-Russell of 4AD, although Hersh speaks of Watts-Russell himself with nothing but affection. She barely gets through a sentence about him and the story of how Throwing Muses joined the British label in the first place without breaking down into giggles—but, to be fair, it is a very funny story. When he called about the Muses’ tape, Hersh was convinced he was just a very bad, very ridiculous scammer, à la those “Nigerian prince” emails.

“Ivo called our apartment when [my bandmates and I] all lived in this apartment in Boston, and I was the only one home because I thought I had the flu—it was morning sickness, but I didn’t know I was pregnant yet—so I was just grounded there, sitting in the kitchen, and he would call every morning for weeks. I thought he was speaking in a fake British accent,” she says, cracking up. “He spoke like the queen! It was so silly.” Hersh takes on a ridiculous, faux-deep accent when imitating him: “And then he kept saying, ‘Ohhhh, I have a record company, but ohhhh, I don’t sign American bands.’ And I was just, like, ‘You have a record company? Okay, yeah, right.’ He was like a six-year-old with a bowler hat!”

Their conversations were the furthest thing from typical contract negotiations one could imagine. Mostly, they consisted of Watts-Russell teaching Hersh British words for skin ailments that we don’t have in America, like “verrucas and shit like that” (“I mean, I’m sure we have the ailments,” Hersh clarifies, “but we don’t have the vocab”). He then told her he had a boil on his neck that had recently exploded in a cafe—Hersh jokingly pronounces it in the British fashion, like “calf,” in that same silly impersonation of Watts-Russell. She’s shaking with mirth just remembering it: “He said it burst in a cafe, just exploded and sprayed everywhere into the wall! And he had such a great fake British accent, and there was that stupid lie to make me think he has a record company… I was like, ‘I love this guy. He’s so amazing.’”

So, really, we have Ivo Watts-Russell’s boil (or, perhaps, carbuncle—Hersh recalls he had a really good name for boils but not what it was, and a quick Google search makes me feel like I should put my money on “carbuncle,” because God, what a word!) to thank for the Muses’ entrance into the mainstream, and every album that came with it. Because, if it weren’t for his fake-sounding British accent and Hersh’s glee about his bizarrely-named skin ailments, Throwing Muses likely would never have joined a record label in the first place.

“I wasn’t gonna sign with anybody,” Hersh says, lamenting her hatred for the “product shit,” the “sexist shit” and the “sign us for 10 records and drop us anytime they wanted” shit. “My whole thing was, like, ‘This is right now; you can’t freeze music in a recording studio, rip its limbs off, sew ’em back on, and expect it to walk around. We’re just here right now. I’m not gonna live much longer. We’re just a moment. And don’t try to freeze that.’ But then Ivo was there just talking about boils in this Queen’s English and I’m like, ‘You know what? Yeah, okay.’” (Although, to be fair, when he first acquiesced to signing Throwing Muses, Hersh was more confused than anything else: “I was like, ‘Wait, what? You weren’t lying?! You actually have a record company?!”)

Even so, Hersh’s fears did end up being realized, although it doesn’t seem like she resents Watts-Russell himself for it (as she puts it later, “These were not bad people. The machine is what’s bad”). “[Ivo] was this real dark, real moody person. Hilarious, but very much into the crazy stuff, the dark, tangled stuff. He chose the songs for the record, and, you know…” She pauses here for a moment, her voice deepening a little with the weight of it. “They make me sound insane.” (Then she breaks into a laugh again, shaking her head as she fondly teases that the record was “made British.”)

I say, somewhat defensively, that it is a great album—because it is. Despite not being on any streaming platforms (much to my, and many fans’, chagrin), Throwing Muses has maintained its cult following for decades now, and for a reason. But it isn’t a reason Hersh understands. “I don’t get it at all,” She says, leaning in conspiratorially, as if about to tell a secret that she finds very funny. “Honestly, I find it unlistenable.” She’s smiling like she can already see the dropped jaws of indie rock fans around the world. She finds it all quite silly.

Making Album #11

Hersh did not go into Moonlight Concessions with the expectation of reviving that old style, not in the slightest. “I was writing these songs in New Orleans and thinking, ‘What the fuck?’” she laughs. “I mean, I’m always surprised. I don’t think I would finish a song that didn’t surprise me, but this… I don’t know. I was just surprised and a little confused. It was really… really happy.” Then, in an offhand, flippant aside: “I figured maybe it means, like, ‘you’re gonna die or something.’” (Cue my knee-jerk reaction: “What?!”) “Well, you know, it’s as if your life flashes before your eyes! Like, I felt 17 again. And then through all of this wacky happenstance, I ended up moving next door to the house in Rhode Island [the Doghouse, as it was known] where I wrote Throwing Muses’ first record. And that was a dark, dark experience, so, I guess I just figured, ‘Okay, if somebody’s making me look at this shit, then I might as well have a few fun songs to help.’”

The sound of Moonlight Concessions is a far cry from the soothing subtlety of Throwing Muses’ most recent album, 2020’s Sun Racket. “There are a lot of songs on Sun Racket that are very hypnotic, and I had to be schooled in that,” Hersh says. “It was not a frenetic mode, and Throwing Muses can be very frenetic, so we had to learn to be hypnotic then. And that was great! I had to just let it go and say, ‘All right, you will groove now, and you will not be hyperactive.’” Moonlight Concessions, on the other hand, is every bit as esoteric and abrasive as the sound that Muses have long been known for—but there’s a softness, a warmth and tenderness and even joy, that seeps through like spilled water blooming its way across a napkin. It all might sound effortless, but in actuality, its creation was anything but. “I’m so obsessed in the studio that I’m— well, I don’t think I’m annoying,” Hersh grins. “But, if you’re annoyed by someone not blinking for months or, like, racing around going, ‘Wait, I can make this sound even worse, hold on!’ and building instruments to weirdify everything, then, yeah, I guess you’d be annoyed.”

Hersh has always “built” instruments for her albums, in large part because she “want[s] to hear things that [she’s] never heard before.” She immediately backtracks, a little self-deprecating: “When I say I want to hear something I’ve never heard before, it’s not because I’m pretentious, but because the song was something I’d never heard before when I first met it, and I want you to feel the way I did when I heard it.” As alluded to earlier, Hersh experiences music in a way that is entirely unique to her, characterized by colors and sourced from hallucinations. Every song is its own entity—an “energetic,” as she calls it—something intangible but vibrantly moving, its energy branching out, both being changed by and changing the tangible world it floats through, bright and glinting, sunbeams grazing Earth’s surface. “When you’re sitting in the ‘energetic’ that is the song before it has a sound body, you know it,” she says. “And it’s so huge and compelling that it can be very frustrating to come back to your human body and spend months in the studio trying to recreate that moment.”

There are few—if any at all—lengths Hersh would not go to in order to actualize that energetic in sonic form. For Moonlight Concessions, she grew obsessed with the noise made by an old electro harmonic fuzz wah pedal of hers (featured on their 1996 record University), precisely because it was drowned in a flood and subsequently stopped working. So, she did what she does best: She built a new instrument. And by that, I mean she drowned a pedal on purpose. “Sometimes I’ll take things apart and mess with them, but, well… pedals don’t like to be drowned,” Hersh giggles. “It had its shining moment, and then it expired. Just, you know, for the guitar nerds out there, be warned that you probably won’t own the pedal for very long after.” She says it was very much worth it, though—its influence can be heard, for instance, on the languid, string-heavy “Theremini” and the mesmerizing waltz of “Sally’s Beauty” (listen for “a texture in the low mids, this metallic thing that undulates,” she advises).

Music as a Living Organism

The most important thing a song can be, to Hersh, is alive. If it isn’t, then it isn’t a song. It isn’t music. It’s “zombie sound.” An alive song is one that breathes and moves and changes; it isn’t static, and it isn’t tied to its creator or their identity. It should surprise you as you write it, as you play it, because it is its own entity, its own living organism, not just a mere product of the person who created it.

“Songs are better than us. We need to learn from them,” Hersh insists. “If you write a song about something you already know, it’s dead. It’s even smaller than you. You need to disappear for the song, and it will use your identity however it wants. But I don’t think we really have the wherewithal to control music. It’s not our place. It will control us if we let it, which is good.”

At the same time, though, Hersh’s music all inevitably stems from her own experiences; she has to have lived the stories she’s telling in order to tell them right. It’s an odd duality, but one she seems at peace with: “It’s like ‘Well, I lived them. You take them now, and make them whatever you want.’” I’ve long joked that good art, be it music or poetry or anything else, is a kind of Rorschach test, in that what you take from it will always say more about you than its maker—you look into it and see yourself looking back, and that’s what matters. The song, the poem—the art—is just a vehicle for that kind of connection. Hersh sees it similarly: “I have met the people who took the songs in such a way that I thought, ‘I think that was for you.’ Like, they’re my stories that I lived in order to get there, but I really do think the song was using me to get to you.”

“Threads of energy work that way,” she continues. “We don’t all ride the same ones, but we’re not just bodies, we’re souls in bodies. And if we can share a soundtrack, then that would be an honor. That is why I cannot participate in the manipulation that implies that you’re supposed to dumb down sound and call it music. It isn’t music. I have to honor this thread of energy that I might share with somebody who might need it. It could be medicine, and it could be ignored, but I have to honor both of those outcomes, and not try to sell—” She physically cringes, her face twisting in disgust. “—zombie sound. Something that’s already dead? Ugh! It’s so not fair.”

Moonlight Concessions is a very short record, only nine songs long. But that’s not due to any lack of material. In fact, Hersh recorded nearly 30 songs for the project. Throwing Muses aren’t strangers to long records, either (Purgatory/Paradise was a whopping 32 tracks in 2013), but that just didn’t feel right for this particular album: “It just got more and more succinct and… sweet, I want to say. Direct.” Made up of all these little vignettes, Moonlight Concessions feels like switching through television channels and gleefully eating up all those weird, out-of-context beats, and that’s purposeful. Hersh says she views it as a braiding-together of three separate production techniques: “There’s the acoustic with brushes, then there’s that lost-in-that-drowned-pedal sound and then there’s a third production technique that’s more clean-strummed electric, although I layered lots of atonal things in to offset the cleanliness of it. In sequencing the album, I just went from one [element] to the other, like one-two-three, one-two-three, and it ended up really working—I think because they’re so complementary and yet so different.”

Hersh likes her art, and her stories, to be somewhat disconnected—at least enough to allow space for the imagination to enter in, but not too much so that the whole product feels disjointed and stilted. She’s long been a connoisseur of the “collage” style of consuming media, even just from making VCR tapes for her kids that were “out-of-context moments on TV, just flipping around the channels” and finding those silly, disconnected moments. “Oh my God, you were the original YouTube editor,” I say, slightly awed—I’m a sucker for those “[insert TV show] out-of-context” clips. “Yeah! It was great,” Hersh sighs happily. “I wish that could be an art form.” I’d argue she’s already made it one.

Just look at the lyrical content of Moonlight Concessions—Hersh constantly intertwines disparate experiences and moments into a single narrative, a single song. “The songs don’t organize my memories in the way I would,” she says. “They’ll make things glow and make them rhythmic, and I just have to spit them out. If I just told you the story [in ‘Drugstore Drastic’] of walking to the park, with those drunk guys, I don’t think I would necessarily have blended it with the tree [a New Orleans landmark Hersh dubs ‘The Cool Tree,’ which also features prominently in the song]. But the song will say, ‘Oh, we need this image, we need this rhyme, we need this color.’”

It’s precisely the inclusion of these small, odd experiences and observations—of the specifics that made them unique, like the Sally’s Beauty itself or the Buddha cup Hersh drinks from in the title track, or the name-dropping of her friend, Andrea, in “You’re Clouds”—that makes Moonlight Concessions feel so personal yet so universal, just so lived-in. Music, in general, is made up of memories, big and small, but Moonlight Concessions is full to bursting with them. After all, it’s a homecoming, a revival of a version of Muses themselves that they never expected to see again.

I ask Hersh what it was like for her to return to that pre-Throwing-Muses jaunty style, to go back to those long-forgotten roots, buried by the industry and her own personal struggles for so many years. Her response was immediate: “It was like going home.”

Getting Away From the Industry

It took a long time to get to this place of near-peace, however. After Throwing Muses came out in 1986, things got worse, a lot worse, before they got better. As the years went on, music became not an outlet or a source of catharsis, but an active detriment to Hersh’s well-being. Her loved ones often begged her to give up writing songs because it made her actively suicidal. She wished that she could. Her parents got divorced soon after Throwing Muses began making it big, around the same time Hersh had to have a tumor removed. She then lost a custody battle for her first child when the father wrongfully made her out to be a bad mother to the court, an ordeal that she found almost impossible to recover from. Then, Langston left the band in 1990, replaced by bassist Fred Abong. Shortly thereafter, in the wake of Muses’ fourth record, The Real Ramona, in 1991, Donnelly left the band as well, taking Abong with her. Muses continued on as a trio, with Bernard Georges replacing Abong, and although much of the rumored internal tension was made up (or, at least, heightened) by press speculation, it still left a lasting mark on Hersh. (She even sings about it in her solo work—all of which is phenomenal, by the way—just look at Sunny Border Blue’s unbelievably sad “Listerine” from 2001: “How’d I trust a band who’d leave me one by one? I only wanted the spark / I only wanted your hearts / It’s hard / It’s hard and stupid”).

All the while, the music industry had grown ever more demanding. As Throwing Muses gained traction, more and more focus was placed on Hersh—not as a person or a musician, but as an image, a pin-up lady airbrushed to sell albums. “As a woman, you were allowed only two faces: the ‘fuck me face’ and the ‘fuck you, deal with it’ face. I would smile, because I’m me, and they’d be like ‘No, that’s not gonna sell anything!’ They would say, ‘You have to look at the camera like you’re in love with it.’ It’s so silly and it’s so damaging. What you’re telling me to do is come on to all men, and teach women how to come on to all men—can’t we just play the fucking music?! It’s music. It’s sound. Why do you need my face for this? You have the album cover.”

Hersh shakes her head, gesticulating wildly in frustration, then laughs yet again, a memory seemingly having come to her: “God, I’d be like, ‘You’re asking me to come on to all men when I’m married with four children,’ and they would stop for a second and then say, “Oh! Lesbian, okay! So that’s why you’re not wearing tight clothes!’ And it’s like, you know what? Whatever works, because I’m not gonna do the bullshit you’re telling me to do.”

To make matters worse, Hersh felt more and more disillusioned with the music itself, her relationship with it skewed dramatically by the industry’s repeated attempts to get her to “dumb [her music] down,” to create songs that she felt “insult[ed] the listener.” And eventually, even after years of Cirque du Soleil-level contortionism just to try and satisfy record labels, the industry finally dropped Throwing Muses entirely, when 1996’s University failed to meet Sire’s album sales quota.

Hersh expands on this at length, her long-standing gripes with the music industry well-practiced by now, having spent years honing her frustrations into a sharp treatise: “They don’t want music, because music listeners can’t be told what to fall in love with; no one can. They prefer product, because people who don’t really like music will buy that, and planned obsolescence means that these trends are going to be out, so then the listeners will buy the next trend—that’s how the industry makes money. They make more money that way. So they actively keep substance out of the music business, when music is by nature substantive; otherwise, it’s not music.”

“My goal has always been to sell one record to someone who listens to it a million times, not a million records to people who will listen to it once. And, obviously, corporate record companies didn’t love that math,” she continues, with a self-effacing giggle. “I drive people nuts by saying I’m not looking to expand my audience, I’m actually looking to refine it.” She grows uncharacteristically serious now, her face darkening. “But that’s because I had it bought for me once, and it was the loneliest I’ve ever been—on those big stages where no one was getting it. That wasn’t music.” If she’s ever faced with a choice between that kind of successful loneliness versus the solitary struggle of a starving artist again, Hersh would choose the latter in a heartbeat: “If I have to just focus and starve to death, then I would rather do that than be as lonely as I was with all those people yelling ‘woo’ at me.”

The Paradigm Shift

Perhaps the pivotal moment, though, came in 2007, when her tour bus “lost its brakes and caught on fire” as it was going down a mountain. “There was smoke coming out of the back and I had a kid back there, so my bass player and I ran in and got the kid,” she says. “My husband was driving the bus, but he doesn’t have power steering anymore, and he was screaming, ‘Don’t go back there,’ because he didn’t know there was a kid back there. It was really… It was the end of my, well, everything.”

Except, it wasn’t. They pulled off into the woods and, somehow, they didn’t hit a tree, they didn’t explode, they didn’t die. Even so, Hersh was finally ready to fully call it quits. In the aftermath, she gathered her bandmates and said, as she relayed to me, “I’ll give you your salaries and fly you home. This is it, you know? We did a great thing, and no one can pull this off. I’m really grateful to you.” But, to her shock, they were not having it. “They just stood there and said, ‘Fuck that!’” she laughs, her eyes crinkling with welled-up affection. “We finished the tour, because it had never occurred to them not to.”

Then, in that moment, something magical happened: “All these people had heard what had happened, and we had hundreds and hundreds of emails saying, ‘Take my van, take my amplifier, record for free, eat for free in our restaurant, stay in my house.’” It might not come as a surprise to you or to me that fans would want to help out a beloved band in a time of need, but, at the time, it threw Hersh into a tailspin, because it went at odds with everything the industry had insisted about consumers for her entire career. “These people wanted to facilitate our music, to facilitate music that didn’t insult them. And I didn’t know that,” she says. “That’s not the narrative we’re told. I had only heard, ‘No! People are shallow. They don’t like smart women, blah blah blah.’ And it wasn’t true!”

Hersh describes this fundamental realigning of her relationship to that vague notion of the “audience,” that it was something she didn’t realize she had been waiting for her entire career. Audiences actually do want music, real music, music that means something, not the mass-produced consumer-friendly product the industry had spent years telling her ought to be the raison d’etre of every musician. She finally realized she was right all along. Now, she just had to wait for the rest of the world to catch up.

Of course, healing is never linear, and it always takes longer than one would hope—but with Throwing Muses finally able to separate from the music industry once and for all, that process could finally begin. “I was always looking for just a few people who wanted to hear what I wanted to make. It’s not for everyone! It was never supposed to be!” Hersh says, gesturing broadly. “I’m really shy, and I’m not ever going to change. I’m not going to sell. So, when our bus broke down and I just gave up, I thought, ‘Well, we did our best.’ I mean, we lasted a lot longer than most people, even people who play the game. But then we hung on—by a thread, yes, but we hung on!” And thank God they did—if for no reason other than Moonlight Concessions, which we would never be getting otherwise, not to mention the nine or so other albums Hersh and her outfits have released in the intervening years.

Since then, Throwing Muses has been funded primarily by a subscription service they’ve called Strange Angels, set up on the CASH Music platform, a nonprofit co-founded in 2007 by L7’s Donita Sparks and Hersh herself. Above a link to the Strange Angels service, a blurb on Hersh’s website reads: “Kristin welcomes listeners to join her as stakeholders in ongoing projects to support Kristin’s studio recording costs—Kristin’s music is all made possible by you, our Strange Angels.”

“Becoming listener-supported, it changed everything. There are no rules anymore. Well, I don’t think I’ve ever followed any rules, but… now that’s allowed. Now, I never again have to listen when people tell me that humans are dummies and that’s what we have to sell to, this so-called ‘lowest common denominator,’” Hersh says, screwing her face up in derision. “It’s made up. Humans are souls in bodies, and they deserve our respect. This is how I respect them.”

Her dedication to integrity in the face of the superficiality of the business paid off. In 2018, Hersh announced that she and Throwing Muses had signed to Fire Records, an independent label that felt like a tangible manifestation of that change within the music industry Hersh had been longing for throughout her career. “When Fire Records came along and they were willing to cover my production, promotion, distribution costs, so all of the Strange Angels money could go to studio time,” Hersh says, “it was like… Like the paradigm had shifted.”

The Muse That Binds

“Songs are never static,” Hersh says. “It’s not an old calendar; it’s alive. It carries memories, just like we do.”

Earlier on the day of our interview, Hersh was confronted with the reality of that statement first hand, and it felt like a punch in the gut. She tells me she was practicing “Albatross” for the band’s upcoming tour, singing lines like “Two hours later in an Uber coma / Santa Monica to Silver Lake / You mouthed the truth through Malibu” before suddenly stopping short. After all, just a few days before we spoke, Hersh had been in Silver Lake for a dinner, planning to head to Santa Monica afterwards—but that dinner “was the last normal thing that happened,” she recalls (alluding, of course, to the wildfires that devastated Los Angeles last month). “I went out there and it was just… war.”

Hersh describes being stuck in gridlock, trying to get to a safe house only for her to find out it caught on fire, then trying to go back to Silver Lake, to Altadena where she used to live when her kids were little. But then that caught fire as well. She managed to get to safety, thankfully, and, oddly enough, found herself “in this house in the hills where I could see the whole city and watch the fires as they spread, like a control tower or something.” Eventually, that house, too, filled with smoke, and she evacuated on foot and motorcycle, as the gridlock was too intense to drive. “It was so crazy, and so sad,” she says, “but the people were all so beautiful. There’s fire everywhere, and they were being so practical, yet so personal. It wasn’t like a car crash; a crash is just about you. This was about everybody. There was something beautiful and harrowing in that.”

So when she sang “Albatross” on the morning of our conversation, she almost froze in her tracks: “It talks about going to all these same cities where all the fires were, where I went. It just lists them.” Suddenly, “Albatross” had morphed into something else, in addition to what it already was—all those lines like “Santa Monica to Silverlake / Asking ‘Are we here? Why are we here?’” or “I know you aren’t asking to thrive / Just survive / That bird shoulda been able to fly / Or survive / I’m just trying to keep us alive” take on new meaning in the context of being trapped as a city burns down around you and all you can do is pray that you’ll make it out alive. And then there’s “South Coast,” which is also about Southern California, and feels, in hindsight, downright chilling: “This is the South Coast / Hot winds are gonna blow,” Hersh rasps. “I can see your house / And I’m not going home / Don’t have a rescue up my sleeve / As the crow flies / So do I.” It sounds as if it could have been written after the fires, written about the experience of fleeing California as your once-home goes up in flames. Except it wasn’t, not in the slightest; it was written about completely different experiences, with no foreknowledge of the disaster to come. It’s a little mind-blowing to think about. As Hersh puts it: “Songs are so fucking weird!” (She is, of course, cracking up.) “They tell the past and tell the future, but they can’t tell the difference. They’re just floating in time.”

Time itself seems to be something that has been weighing on Hersh’s mind—or, at least, weighing on Moonlight Concessions. The ending of “South Coast” is dialogue pulled from a conversation Hersh was having in the back of that Uber: “‘Life is so damn long’ / ‘It is?’ / ‘Yeah, I mean so far.’” “We were just talking about… time, I suppose,” Hersh recalls. “People will say, ‘Oh, kids grow up so fast.’ And it’s like, ‘No! They absolutely do not! This is the longest 20 years that could ever happen!’ Because you’re watching every millisecond and you’re fascinated and you’re distraught, and—” She cuts herself off, laughing at her own vehemence. “But I was just saying [in the Uber], like… Make every mistake you want to. Life is too long, if anything. People always talk about how short it is, and just, like, I look back at just too much now! It’s just too many memories at this point, and a lot of ‘em were super intense. There’s just a lot to care about. I’m tired!”

A beat, as Hersh pauses in her tracks, then rewinds as if correcting a typo: “Well, I mean, I’m not tired. I feel better than I ever have.” Of course, this doesn’t mean everything is suddenly easy, that all those years have scattered in the breeze, leaving nothing behind but the songs and the memoirs. But, perhaps, Hersh has started feeling like she’s living life as it should’ve been, life as it should be. Moonlight Concessions isn’t a saccharine, sentimental album; it’s just an honest one. Things are hard, yes, but maybe it’s okay to want them to be less hard—and maybe one day, you won’t have to.

That’s somewhat of the point of “Libretto,” the record’s third single released today. “You’re getting warmer and warmer / Slipping into something more comfortable,” Hersh coos on the third single, the warmth in her voice palpable even though, for now, “It’s so cold, the honey doesn’t flow.” But the song builds and builds, ballooning into something expansive, even hopeful: “You’re getting warmer and warmer / And then you land / You land so hard that you crack the weather / … / And we laugh / We laugh so hard / It’s our libretto.” A crash landing that’s transformed, almost inadvertently, into a symphony of giggles shared with a loved one—if that’s not the best summary of Kristin Hersh and her tumultuous time in the music industry, I don’t know what is. “[Libretto is] just a sweet one,” she says, after singing the song back to herself for a moment to make sure she was thinking of the right one. “I feel like most songs imply that it should be cold, and you should be suffering, but this one is like, ‘No, no, no; it’s too cold! Let the honey flow instead!’”

She tells me about playing “Libretto” for her brother as they drove around in his red car, on an unofficial tour of their high school haunts. When she turned to look at him cheekily while the voice on the recording sang about him directly (“Can’t make another mistake / My brother”), she saw him already weeping, almost comically so. She giggles, remembering how she had to grab the steering wheel to make sure they didn’t crash. Another instance of the un-static song; the song as a living organism engulfed in the past yet somehow predicting the future. Then she seems to realize something, a brief moment of pause before her mouth slants upwards impishly. “You know what? Those really are all the songs that Ivo took off the first record—all the ones where I implied, ‘Maybe it could be….safe?’”

“It’s been a while,” I reply, unable to keep a matching grin off my face, the genuine fondness out of my voice. “But hey! Now you’re coming back around, huh?” “Yeah. Yeah, I guess I am,” Hersh says, a small, sweet smile playing on her lips, the warmth in her eyes evident even through the grainy film of my laptop. “A little taste of honey.”

Casey Epstein-Gross is an Assistant Music Editor at Paste. Her work can be read in Observer, Jezebel, and elsewhere. She is based in New York and can typically be found subjecting innocent bystanders to rambling, long-winded monologues about television and film, music, politics, and any number of opinions on bizarrely irrelevant topics. Follow her on X (@epsteingross) or email her at [email protected].