Hear the Color, See the Music
An interview with alt-rock icon Kristin Hersh
BY DAVID CAMERON
Credit: Peter Mellekas
“If I were a better dreamer / You’d be a dream come true.” Such an artful line—delivered once with restraint, not looped into an eager, commercial chorus—gives a sense of why Kristin Hersh has been an inspiration to countless songwriters. Still, Hersh is a songwriter uncomfortable with the label. She says that if she actually writes a song, i.e., self-expresses through verse/chorus/verse, the end result is dead, and any true human connection between performer and listener has been snuffed out. For her, music is a self-luminous body—what she calls “an energetic.” She can—in the most literal sense of the word—see it. She hears it as well—literally—when no one is making a sound. Rather than writing songs and playing for fans, she and the listener together hold up that living entity we call music. As she sees it, the less she’s in the way, the better.
Hersh is best known as founder of the band Throwing Muses, which she began when she was 14, and which still exists. It’s hard to overstate the influence Throwing Muses had on the burgeoning alternative music scene that exploded in the 90s. Barely out of high school, they toured relentlessly in the mid-1980s, often with their close friends the Pixies, both bands establishing themselves as singular voices in the “cultish college-rock” underground scene, even catching the attention of the fledgling Radiohead, who has cited them as an influence.
Hersh also fronts noise-rock band 50 Foot Wave, has released almost a dozen solo albums, and has written several books—the latest of which, The Future of Songwriting, is a wry meditation on her creative process. Yet despite such outsize influence, she operates from the sidelines. Her refusal to play the corporate major-label game—a game she detests with prophetic zeal—has come at tremendous financial cost.
Her musical odyssey parallels a psychological one. Seeing music as a “body” awash in color, hearing it when no one else does, landed her in hospitals as a teenager and resulted in misdiagnoses such as bipolar and schizophrenia—along with the requisite medications. That, combined with the trauma of her first child being kidnapped as a baby by his biological father, resulted in decades of PTSD. It wasn’t until she was in her early 50s that she says she was properly diagnosed with dissociative disorder (see Dissociation below), realizing that most of her pain, as well as her music, had been channeled through a second personality she calls Rat Girl (also the title of her autobiography). After eight months of EMDR therapy, which uses eye stimulation to help process traumatic memories (she describes it as “chemotherapy for the psyche”), Hersh says she is fully integrated. Now, at age 57, this mother of four and recent grandmother still hears colors—a benign condition called synesthesia—and is more devoted to the purity of musical incarnation than ever. “I needed to disintegrate so I could integrate,” she tells me. We spoke over Zoom on separate occasions between soundcheck and showtime while Hersh was touring Europe.
David Cameron: How’s the tour going?
Kristin Hersh: It’s beautiful. It’s very touching to fly all over the world and see people who have adopted my soundtrack as their own engage in that circular breathing that is a live show. The songs are finished when they go through someone else’s nervous system.
I am really shy. It’s a total accident that I happen to be playing on stage, but it’s the only way to make money.
DC: You don’t make money selling “units”?
KH: They [the industry] sold the units, and sold many, but I never made a penny from that. I was held in debt for what the records cost. We never recouped. So I literally never made an income from records. I’m not missing the industry.
“I have always had to disappear so that I can experience music as itself instead of as me.”
DC: You have synesthesia, meaning you literally see music. Can you describe that?
KH: It’s hard because I’ve always heard music in color. I was prevented from playing guitar by my hippie dad who had a beautiful Yamaha guitar that I wasn’t allowed to touch. He said one day when I was very young, “OK, I’ll teach you a few chords.” He taught me A, E, and D, and to me that’s blue, red, and yellow. I was bored, and I said, “I want to know orange and aqua and magenta.” He looked at me, then handed me the guitar and said, “It’s yours. Play colors.”
DC: How do you see colors? Do you close your eyes and they appear?
KH: They just are. I wouldn’t be able to remember the chords if I didn’t. A lot of my chords are clusters, they have a lot of colors going on, and I have so many songs that I play in different bands that if I didn’t know, say, this one is burnt orange and this one is burgundy and it goes into aquamarine, along with all the words I have to remember, I don’t think I’d be able to do it.
DC: One of your formative experiences, shortly after you started Throwing Muses, was getting hit by a car when you were a teenager and almost losing a leg. It must have been terrifying.
KH: I didn’t think it was terrifying at the time. I just thought it was interesting. I was a kid, and I didn’t have anyone to be afraid for. I didn’t have that kind of selfhood, I wasn’t self-protective. But for the most part, I think I dissociated, and that’s why I was so calm.
I was in the hospital for a long time with a triple concussion. And I started to hear the songs in the room that I had always dissociated in order to experience. I began dissociating at a young age, but the bike accident made me hear the music. After getting out of the hospital, I continued to only play music in a dissociated state. I had no memory of writing the songs or of playing them. I know that sounds bizarre, but my bandmates were used to it, so I got used to it, and it was a relief because I had stage fright!
Even now I will occasionally dissociate when I’m playing live and I’m really exhausted. I let Rat Girl happen again, because she’s really good at it. Sometimes people call me out on it.
DC: How do people know if you’re dissociating? What’s the giveaway?
KH: Eyes glaze over, I stop blinking, my head weaves around like a snake. I’ve had health-care professionals tell me, “I’ve been coming to your shows for many years, watching classic dissociating behavior, and I’ve never identified it as such and I’m sorry.” Everyone just took it as metaphor.
DC: I took it as rock-star swagger.
KH: [laughs] That’s a relief.
DC: You’ve been diagnosed as schizophrenic and bipolar. Tell me about that.
KH: In my late teens and early 20s I think I was just subjected to the diagnosis of the day. First schizophrenia, then it shifted into bipolar. And I had always maintained, it’s just music. Music is my only problem!
At the time, my life was very dark. I was upset because I had a very upsetting life. I’d be crazy not to be upset. Mental health professionals are caring people, and they don’t want you to be upset. I wanted health. I wanted clarity. I wanted music to remain a pure form–not of expression but of its own body. And because I could hear music as a separate entity, it was called “auditory hallucination,” hence the diagnoses. I don’t blame them at all.
But I maintained that music was real. Just because others don’t hear it doesn’t mean it’s not real. I have to be here present with my craft in order to give the song a body in 3D reality. It’s just an energetic before that. It’s how I orient. And so yeah, I was misdiagnosed, I was put on lots of drugs, I was hospitalized. I understand why. The truth was that I was dissociating, but I didn’t have the vocabulary for it.
I have always had to disappear so that I can experience music as itself instead of as me.
DC: What do you mean by “experience music as itself”?
KH: I think that songs that I’ve written as “self-expression” are dead. A real song is bigger than the person. I’m fascinated and shocked by these songs. They say things I don’t know. They use my life stories so that I can play them honestly, but they make points I would not have made on my own. And when I try to be in charge of that process, I’m just as lousy as anybody else who imitates and moralizes and tries to create product. It’s no longer fascinating. And I want to be fascinated. I’m selfish that way.
I have a friend who says music is a river and if you know how to jump into it you can come back with river water. I have at times thought that music was pushing my life around so that I could tell its stories. The fingerprint that we all carry is going to be necessarily idiosyncratic, and that’s the only universal thing we have going on, so while I do appreciate that some people call these songs mine, I got them by listening, not by making shit up.
It’s not just craft. If you work without inspiration, you might make money and be a star. But if you have ever been to music, you have no more patience for that crap. It’s boring.
DC: You’ve said music is your religion.
KH: Yes, because it’s very human. Music as a religion is fully present in three dimensions. It’s a body. You can reach out and touch it.
And that’s the tragedy of shitty music. It’s the same thing corporate marketing has done to sex. They have turned our open and enthusiastic psychology into a product instead of something animal and honest and spiritual.
DC: It’s worth noting that every single religious tradition has some form of music at its core.
KH: Yes! And every kid that’s born has music. We discourage the honest musical response because it’s idiosyncratic and people with an honest musical response can’t be told what to buy because they can’t be told what to love. Love isn’t for sale. The music industry reps can tell people who just like “fashion sound” what to buy, but they literally try to keep actual music out of the business, and they have a good reason for doing that: They need to make money, and real music has no place in planned obsolescence.
DC: When did you learn you had dissociative disorder?
KH: It was very recent, last five or six years? I had given up on therapy. I had left any kind of experience with mental health professionals decades ago. I wasn’t avoiding mental health professionals for any reason other than just being baffled by the process and not wanting to be polluted by chemicals that weren’t helping.
One of my sons, Wyatt, is autistic and had just been diagnosed as dissociative, and I was meeting with his therapist, and she was asking me questions, and finally she said, “You’re dissociating. You’ve lost time.”
I thought, what does that mean? Sybil? “You’re losing time” was such a strange phrase to hear.
I ended up doing EMDR therapy with her for about eight months. It was chemotherapy for the psyche. There’s a time-period where you must feel all the pain you didn’t feel. At times it was horrifying. Everything snowballed. Throwing Muses had just released a new album and I was in the middle of a press tour and I called the therapist from London and said, “What have you done to me? You didn’t tell me this was going to happen. No one can live this much pain at once. I’m going to die.” And she said, “Let’s see if you live.” And I said, “Really? You can’t do any better than if I don’t die then I live?” And she said, “No. This is reality. We all feel pain, but you didn’t. You missed it. You put it all into the music.”
DC: Are you a proponent of EMDR?
KH: I can’t say I would recommend EMDR for people who aren’t really ready for it, because it almost killed me. I lived and I’m happy to know my music and know my memories. It worked, but I almost didn’t live through it.
As part of the therapy you need what they call a “psychological safe place” to go to as you’re going through the process. To me that all just sounded like 1970s “grooviness.” I didn’t know she literally meant it. I kept trying to come up with a psychological safe place and I couldn’t. She’d make up shit like “the beach?” And I said, “I’ve been pretty freaked out on beaches. I’m from an island!”
And I ended up using a house from a dream as my safe place. The only time I had ever felt truly safe was in a dream where I was allowed to play music in this house and my children wouldn’t suffer. It was a house I didn’t know, but I was going to be able to live the rest of my life there and make music and my children would have a home. So I used the house from that dream as my psychological safe place to retreat to when things got intense.
And here’s a fucking weird sidenote: I stayed with a friend on tour a few years ago and it turned out to be his house. I had never been there before, but I could show him around. I knew where everything was. I said to him, “I’m not really prepared to tell you why I can do this …” but I did. We both wept. It absolutely freaked me out. I had to accept it.
“There’s a time-period where you must feel all the pain you didn’t feel. At times it was horrifying. Everything snowballed.”
DC: So you went through this therapeutic process with your son? What was that like?
KH: Yes. We have walked through the integration together. He’s utterly brilliant. The most incredible mind I have ever come across. And that’s a really dangerous way to be in this world. His insights have been key for the both of us to be fully integrated. We occasionally dissociate, me when I’m playing, with him, his voice changes and his eyes change a bit, but people who know him recognize him and know that’s still Wyatt, just a different part of him. He says to me, “Even if you don’t like that I’m in pain, that’s me, Mom, and you have to accept it.”
That has helped me be in my music when I don’t want to accept it. I do this for others. There’s an audience there that needs this. They are here to feel their own pain and I can’t walk away from them when they show up in their incarnations to share this thing that can be passionately intense. And our job is to not gloss over it together. I’m the one person in that room who is not allowed to do that. Wyatt helped me see that. I love him and I know he’s perfect and he helped me see that a song can be perfect as well.
DC: What is life and music like now as an integrated person?
KH: Ever since I was 14 years old, I’ve been arguing about the idea that art and mental illness seem to be related. I always maintained a hope that real clarity can be achieved through art, not pretentious art, but art that is low and human and real. And I thought, when we achieve that clarity, the clarity itself will be artful—so how could any of this be mental illness? And yet, I was called crazy. Now I think I’ve achieved what I was arguing for before I even knew it was real. I can be present. I know the music is there. I know it’s a body and it’s an energetic. And I know the listener and I are holding it up—if it’s a necessity. If it’s a stupid Frankenstein of a song that should never have been, then that’s my bad and I won’t insult people with it. But I needed to disintegrate so I could integrate. Being a broken self was a nonself state in which I could see music for what it was. Had I not dissociated, I might have made a mistake in my perception, and it would have been a spiritual mistake, which is just unkind if you’re going to publish your work.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
Dissociation
Kristin Hersh describes a history of experiencing dissociation, which has affected her state of mind and her stage presence. An important concept in the history of psychoanalysis, dissociation is described by the American Psychoanalytic Association’s Psychoanalytic Terms and Concepts (revised third ed.) as
a disruption in the continuity of mental experience for the purpose of defense. Dissociation includes disruptions of consciousness, attention, memory, perception, and the sense of identity. It ranges in severity from minor lapses of attention or memory to serious and prolonged disruptions of the sense of identity, as in dissociative identity disorder … dissociation is strongly associated with trauma, especially acute (or shock) trauma. …
Following Freud, the psychoanalytic literature on dissociation has developed in several overlapping directions. In the literature on psychopathology, the term appears in writing about disorders (in Freud’s time, classified with hysteria, and now classified in psychiatry as dissociative disorders) such as multiple personality, fugue, and somnambulism, as well as disorders such as psychosis, intoxication, derealization, depersonalization, and others where altered states of consciousness are prominent.
Given the ecstatic nature of many rock performances, a musician who dissociates on stage may not raise any red flags for onlookers. Perhaps all performance involves a bit of dissociation as the performer leaves reality behind to inhabit a role, whether as a singer, dancer, or character in a play.—ed.
Published July 2024.