The debut album by Throwing Muses was released in 1986, at the beginning of my sophomore year of college. Back then I had a friend who listened almost exclusively to artists on the British independent label 4AD, and I wanted to have musical tastes as esoteric as his. He told me that Throwing Muses\u2014who lived in Boston, like we did\u2014was the label\u2019s first American signing, and I bought their record without having heard a note of it, only moments after a clerk in the Harvard Square branch of Newbury Comics slipped it into the \u201cnew releases\u201d bin. I reasoned that since the record had come from England, and Boston was the easternmost major port in the United States, I was probably the first person in America to buy it, and for a long time I went around saying this. At that time my friends and I played a lot of I-heard-them-before-you-did\u2014I saw R.E.M. in a tiny club with only fifteen other people before they were famous<\/i>\u2014and naturally there was a little of this involved, but my proprietary feelings toward Throwing Muses were more personal. I had finally found the music that was meant for me. <\/p>\n
Back in my dorm room I studied the inner sleeve of the record trying to make sense of the lyrics.<\/p>\n
Follow the road, swallow a snake, find shoes in the corner, run away.<\/p>\n
Rent go ob ed a no face way shoes jealous fuck you stand up<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Sometimes an obvious meaning broke through. \u201cHome is a rage, feels like a cage\u201d: I understood that. But even when coherence was just out of reach, the music completed the logic of the songs. I heard the anguish and frustration in Kristin Hersh\u2019s thin, quavering voice. The instruments churned and chugged, or mapped out herky-jerky rhythms, and frequently broke into a wild, cathartic hillbilly dance.<\/p>\n
He won\u2019t ride in cars anymore
\nIt reminds him of blowjobs
\nThat he\u2019s a queer
\nAnd his eyes and his hair
\nStuck to the roof over the wheel
\nLike a pigeon on a tire goes around
\nAnd circles over circles.<\/p><\/blockquote>\nI had never before heard a song with the words queer <\/em>and blowjob<\/em> in it. But I had just come out of the closet, and this song, \u201cVicky\u2019s Box<\/a>,\u201d\u00a0somehow made me feel acknowledged. The wheel and the pigeon were mysterious, but they felt true. It was as though the band had detected the dark, metallic sadness that I was so urgently trying to believe wasn\u2019t there.<\/p>\n
\u201cKristin puts a lot of pictures in front of you, and you draw your own conclusions about how they all fit together,\u201d David Narcizo, the drummer for Throwing Muses, tells me during a recent Skype conversation. \u201cYou also don\u2019t have to if you don\u2019t want to. I used to liken it to early R.E.M. and Cocteau Twins. I didn\u2019t know what they were saying, but there are moments in those songs when I would think, I totally feel that. You get a sense of something genuine, but you don\u2019t have to define it.\u201d<\/p>\n
Hersh formed Throwing Muses in the early 1980s with her stepsister, Tanya Donelly, while they were teenagers growing up on Aquidneck Island on the Rhode Island coast. Both played guitar and sang; in the DNA of Hersh\u2019s early songs you can detect traces of such inventive and intuitive punk bands as the Raincoats and X. The sisters recruited Narcizo, a childhood friend, to play drums, and Leslie Langston, a local musician, to play bass. Hersh was the primary songwriter; Donelly contributed one or two songs per album.<\/p>\n
An impressionistic timeline:<\/p>\n
1987: Throwing Muses play a surprise Saturday afternoon show at the Rat, a grubby basement club, and I watch while standing on a chair at the side of the room. The ceiling is so low that I can touch it. The band performs a few new songs, and this is when I first hear Hersh\u2019s \u201cCry Baby Cry<\/a>,\u201d a clarion call against despair that still has the power to remind me of why it\u2019s good to be alive. The room swells with sound, and for a moment I have the exhilarating sense that I\u2019m actually inside<\/i> the music. \u201cThe whole point of doing a show is to turn a room into a church,\u201d Hersh says twenty-six years later when I interview her by telephone, and I remember how that concert gave me a feeling of transcendence that I had never felt inside a real church.<\/p>\n
1988: At Newbury Comics (I lived<\/i> at Newbury Comics), a bossy friend whose every word I hang upon sees me pick up House Tornado<\/i>, the band\u2019s new, second album, and says, \u201cYou\u2019re not going to buy that<\/i>, are you?\u201d I sheepishly let it fall back. I\u2019ve started frequenting Boston\u2019s dance clubs, and my friends and I are fans of arch and polished British bands like Pet Shop Boys and New Order. It takes me a while to learn that I don\u2019t have to take sides.<\/p>\n
1991: I read a glowing review of a new Throwing Muses album, The Real Ramona<\/i>, and regret that I ever turned my back on them. I buy all the albums that came out while I wasn\u2019t listening.<\/p>\n
1992: Donelly begins writing more songs and leaves to form Belly, her own band, which includes two brothers with handsome surfer looks. I so eagerly await the appearance of their first album that on the night before its release I have a dream that one of the brothers asks me to be his date to the launch party. Meanwhile, Throwing Muses regroups as a three-piece, with new bassist Bernard Georges.<\/p>\n
1994: Hersh\u2019s first solo album, Hips and Makers<\/i>, appears. Her songs have by now taken on a yearning sweetness. Nonetheless, when I play the single \u201cYour Ghost<\/a>,\u201d for my guitar teacher, because I want him to teach me the fingering, he has difficulty figuring out the time signature. \u201cWho\u2019s that singing with her?\u201d he asks me. \u201cMichael Stipe,\u201d I reply. \u201cOh,\u201d he says, \u201cwell, no wonder.\u201d<\/p>\n
1996: I pretend I am sick, employing some dramatic fake coughing, so that I can leave work early and buy a Throwing Muses album called Limbo <\/i>on the day of its release at an HMV in midtown New York that is now a Build-A-Bear Workshop. (And maybe, since it\u2019s barely lunchtime, I am once again the first person in America to buy it.) Not long after, the band leaves behind the world of corporate rock. Living in different parts of the country, they tour and record together less frequently\u2014their next album doesn\u2019t appear until 2003.<\/p>\n
2011: Hersh, an early adopter of the pay-what-you-wish model, posts solo demos for a new Throwing Muses project on the CASH Music Web site<\/a>. I am immediately convinced that they are among the best songs she\u2019s written.<\/p>\n
Purgatory\/Paradise<\/i>\u2014the band\u2019s first album in ten years\u2014comes with a downloadable commentary track during which Hersh and Narcizo chat about the music while it plays in the background. There\u2019s a heartbreaking song called \u201cDripping Trees<\/a>.\u201d \u201cYou a clean spark or a twisted parody? Well, look at me,\u201d Hersh sings. \u201cThese wicked memories\u2014it all comes down, eventually.\u201d The melody sounds like something tumbling earthward, in slow, sad, stately spirals, and yet still landing perfectly on its feet. \u201cThis is such an \u2018us\u2019 song,\u201d she says on the commentary, and laughs. \u201cIt\u2019s so us because you can\u2019t tell if it\u2019s saying something good or something bad \u2026 Anthemic and pathetic at the same time.\u201d<\/p>\n
Hersh\u2019s songs traditionally have dramatic time shifts partway through. On Purgatory\/Paradise<\/i>, it\u2019s as if the songs broke apart and the pieces started mingling. (For example, the third track is called \u201cSleepwalking 2.\u201d \u201cSleepwalking 1,\u201d its sonic cousin, is the twenty-seventh track.) \u201cA bridge will show up as a chorus or as an instrumental later on,\u201d she explains, \u201cor a song will show up again but not really. Some of the songs are thirty seconds long, but they\u2019re not unrealized for that.\u201d The result is a little like a landscape as seen from a passing car: a hill, a valley, a dense patch of trees, another hill, a stretch of wide-open field, another valley. Narcizo describes Purgatory\/Paradise<\/i> as a fusion of Hersh\u2019s band and solo sounds: \u201cI hear within this record a little more of her personal acoustic feeling. Our other records were always vying for your attention\u2014in a good way. This one is more delicate. It sits down next to you.\u201d<\/p>\n
Hersh says that this is the album that they can die after making, and for this she credits the fact that, being now listener-funded, she can take five years to record and revise. \u201cWe had this lump of granite, about seventy-five songs written over the last decade, and we just erased and erased until we had thirty-two.\u201d The result has \u201ca nice, Velvet Underground, flow-y feel. We didn\u2019t want to sound too experimental. When you\u2019re erratic you can hurt people\u2019s feelings, and I\u2019m not about that.\u201d She has said that she writes songs after first hearing them as auditory hallucinations. \u201cThe music that I\u2019ve always heard is not the music I\u2019ve put down on records, because what I hear would freak people out. It would sound like alien sounds. So I\u2019ve always tried to be nice and package it\u2014not with lipstick, but maybe with a bow.\u201d<\/p>\n
Purgatory\/Paradise<\/i> comes packaged as a book designed by Narcizo\u2019s graphic design firm, Lakuna, and published by HarperCollins. (The CD is tucked inside.) The album takes its name from the intersection of Purgatory Road and Paradise Avenue on Aquidneck Island, and the murk-green cover is a close-up Narcizo took of a local landmark called Purgatory Chasm, a long cleft in a high rock ledge overlooking the ocean. \u201cI was going for a kind of Hardy Boys look,\u201d he says. But the endpapers are warm gold, and the book\u2019s pages\u2014filled with essays by Hersh and photographs by Hersh and Narcizo\u2014are overlaid with bright tints. \u201cI wanted it to look like fruit. You peel off this dark husk and get all these jewel-toned insides.\u201d<\/p>\n
I point out to Hersh that twenty-seven years is true longevity. \u201cIt\u2019s also poverty,\u201d she says. \u201cIf you\u2019re never in, you\u2019re never out. We never made much of a living but we\u2019re still here. We were happy over the past decade to play for each other and the sky and whoever showed up, because that\u2019s what music really is. You can\u2019t count the number of people paying attention. That certainly doesn\u2019t make it matter, and sometimes it makes it matter less. You just have to measure the impact, and that can be measured even if there\u2019s nobody there.\u201d<\/p>\n
Since Belly broke up in 1995, Donelly has released solo albums at a leisurely pace\u2014her last came out in 2006. Meanwhile, she began a career as a postpartum doula. \u201cThis is something that nobody likes to hear,\u201d she tells me over the telephone, \u201cbut I was happy disappearing into my own life for a while. But a few years ago I had this epiphanic week where I realized, I think I\u2019m retired! Am I retired? I\u2019m not doing music any more! And it made me panicky and made me think I didn\u2019t take ownership of my own endpaper. It just happened to me.\u201d<\/p>\n
In 2009 the musician and novelist Wesley Stace invited Donelly to take part in his semiregular Cabinet of Wonders variety shows, where musicians, writers, and comedians perform together onstage. \u201cAfterward we would all hang out and everyone would say, Hey, we should do something,\u201d she says. \u201cAnd I classlessly took them up on it.\u201d The result is the Swan Song Series, an ongoing project launched in August that is turning out to be as epic in its own way as Purgatory\/Paradise<\/i>. Four of a projected five digital-only EPs have been released, with another on the way in January. Each is comprised of collaborations\u2014with Donelly\u2019s musician husband, Dean Fisher; with former Throwing Muses and Belly bandmates; with friends from the Magnetic Fields, the Breeders, and Buffalo Tom, among other groups that rose out of the Boston music scene; and with fiction writers. So far the series has featured two ravishing songs cowritten with Rick Moody, and another with lyrics Donelly adapted from an original short story that Mary Gaitskill sent her. Contributions by Tom Perotta and Paul Harding are in the works.<\/p>\n
\u201c[Donelly\u2019s] lyrics have become breathtaking,\u201d Moody writes in an e-mail. \u201cThese songs are about conflicted and elegiac adulthood, parenting, long love, disaffiliation, grief, loss. They are in the Leonard Cohen category, at this point, in terms of how pinpoint their accuracy is about adult things. My wife, Laurel, and I actually begged her to sing her song \u2018This Hungry Life<\/a>\u2019 at our wedding recently, even though it\u2019s a wistful thing, for just this reason. Because we wanted to decorate our nuptial event with her kind of pinpoint accuracy.\u201d A few minutes later, a corrective e-mail arrives, stating that Laurel quarrels with that last line. \u201cShe says, \u2018It\u2019s the most moving song I\u2019ve heard in my life and I was honored she sang it.\u201d<\/p>\n
Donelly\u2019s music is often described as brighter and poppier than Hersh\u2019s, but that comparison overlooks the long struggle with anxiety and doubt at the heart of her songs. Her albums often end in crashing apocalypse. \u201cJudas My Heart,\u201d the finale of Belly\u2019s King<\/i>, is about \u201ca lady who walks everywhere on her hands, doesn\u2019t trust where her feet want to take her.\u201d Beautysleep<\/i> closes with a dove falling into the sea. \u201cI can\u2019t stop the fallout,\u201d she sings at the finish of Whiskey Tango Ghosts<\/i>.<\/p>\n