Having been a Throwing Muses fan since I first saw them play with Pixies some 37 years ago at the Town and Country Club in Kentish Town, it was with some excitement that I received the news that the band would soon be releasing a new record, Moonlight Concessions, particularly as their extensive UK tour would also include a date in Hastings, my new home since February 2024. Employing a different sound palette to 2020’s noisier Sun Racket, Moonlight Concessions offers an evocative collection of vignettes from everyday life that impact in a similar way to the understated and deceptively simple prose of Raymond Carver. Cello, strings and overlaid acoustic guitars imbue the music with an atmospheric presence that matches the directness of the stark but empathic lyrics. Yet the consistently hardworking Hersh again manages to carve out a distinct sonic identity that marks the release apart from her other (also excellent) solo material and work with her noise rock trio 50 Foot Wave. Hersh has in the past said that during her earlier years as a musician, songs would seem to arrive fully formed as a consequence of a dissociative disorder. Since integrating both sides of her personality via successful EMDR therapy, Hersh stresses the importance of a creative process that transcends the ego, humorously adding: “This process that we all are as humans is hard to keep tabs on. When we try, we screw up. So, I’d rather just keep saying the good songs are not me, while the bad ones are definitely me.” Hersh says that the process this time “took about three years. Usually, it’s longer. I recorded 30 or 40 songs, which is not unusual. Then I pared them down to the most elemental form, to this paragraph that is a collection of songs. If it’s your blue period, then you just gotta keep painting in blue over and over again until it forms itself into something that you learn from.” She again stresses that the writing comes from somewhere bigger than just the mind, adding: “I would probably say the same thing about my children. I didn’t invent their fingernails or what they say.”
You mentioned colour. Do you still think in terms of colour when you write music?
Kristin Hersh: Absolutely. Everything is colour. People still have doubts about synaesthesia. There are a lot of musicians who also claim that there’s no such thing as inspiration. A lot of writers and painters too. They’re just jealous. They’re baffled that sometimes they suck and sometimes they’re OK. It can be really confusing, because in the music business suckage is success! This activity that we engage in, it necessarily has to keep your mind and your ego out of it, or you’re going to make a dead body. The people that say there’s no inspiration, they’re just working on craft – absolutely, hone your craft, love your instrument. Fall in love with it. Lose time, lose self. But what happens when you’re good? That’s inspiration. I don’t care what they say.
Did the mood of the album appear over time, or did you have something in mind when you began?
KH: I can learn as I go, but if I had a vibe in mind, it would fall apart. I record so many songs so that I can just stare at the speakers and let the musical moments hit me. This one was honed to only nine songs. We’ve done records of 30 songs because it was like, “this has to work this way”. This time, it wanted to be very clean and clear and percussive and simple. Not simplistic, but simple in a human way. If I started dancing around the studio, I knew that it was working. And if I stopped dancing and just squinted at the speakers, I knew it wasn’t working. Sometimes you have to kind of crucify yourself. If it sounds pretentious, then you have to take that bullet. And if it sounds really unpretentious, like this one, then you have to take that bullet! Gravity is a truism in music. You can’t apply it to yourself, you can’t think that you’re important. Yet your process must engage with that kind of gravity and that kind of depth, or you’re insulting your listener.
Does the album title, Moonlight Concessions, have any specific meaning, or do you want to keep it mysterious?
KH: At Moonlight Beach in Encinitas California, there’s a concession stand. It’s really beautiful. I wrote a lot of the songs there. The cover art is all at Moonlight Beach. It’s my son Bodhi’s dog on the cover. We were living in our truck at the time. We had to escape a stalker landlord and we didn’t have a lot of money and we had to lose almost all of our belongings. We had to live in our truck while we tried to find a place. We ended up living in the ‘Junky’ Days Inn, with a bunch of people who were never gonna leave, and the staff from Tijuana. It was a very moving time but we didn’t know that it was going to end, we just sort of hoped and it did. A quarter of the nation’s homeless are in California. When we moved out there, we were really struck by the homeless. We made friends with them. We visited them every day. Bo called them our ‘burrito brothers’ because one burrito could feed them all day. So, we’d bring burritos and we’d listen to their stories and we’d sit by the railroad tracks which are on the ocean there and bring them donuts and listen to more stories.
This informed the record, the stories and the sense of human connection?
KH: I learned from these people and their stories. They’d had the inspired moment, which was sometimes something horrifying, and they would bring it to this kind of entertainment. We’d be sitting in a circle, everybody eating donuts and they would entertain. This process, I’d liken it to the process of creating music, since most of these songs were written at that time on that beach, and I think this is why there’s something you want to dance to about them, which is not something someone’s ever said about Throwing Muses! There’s definitely a humanising function in places with poverty. New Orleans [where Hersh spends part of her time] runs on the concept of redemption through sin. So, everything is forgiven before you even begin. I live pretty clean and I’m pretty pure of heart but I can’t stomach the places where hypocrisy runs the show. I get real ill about that. And here in New Orleans, with all the degradation, and it’s the murder capital of the country, it’s tough and it’s rough and yet it’s so kind. It’s where I come for my familial information. This is family and they treat you like family. You can’t get away with anything and yet they don’t call you out on anything either, you’re already forgiven.
From: https://thequietus.com/interviews/kristin-hersh-throwing-muses-moonlight-concessions-interview/
