Errors-To: ecto-owner@ns1.rutgers.edu Reply-To: ecto@ns1.rutgers.edu Sender: ecto@ns1.rutgers.edu From: ecto@ns1.rutgers.edu To: ecto-request@ns1.rutgers.edu Bcc: ecto-digest-outbound@ns1.rutgers.edu Subject: ecto #1003 ecto, Number 1003 Sunday, 6 February 1994 Today's Topics: *-----------------* kristen hersh interview Jane feature from Australia ======================================================================== Date: Sun, 6 Feb 94 14:07:59 EST From: woj@remus.rutgers.edu (the king of spain) Subject: kristen hersh interview [considering the recent discussion of her new solo album, i figured that some of you might enjoy an interview from last year. +woj] From: "Sievanen, Chris" Subject: Kristen Hersh Interview 93 This is an interview I did with Kristen Hersh over the phone in early 93 (I think that's when it was - whenever the last Throwing Muses record came out). I dont know why I never thought to send this to the list before. Though the muses are now kinda commercial, they were the first "indie" band I got really into, so this interview was fun for me. This is our exact conversation. She was exactly like I wanted her to be. christine C = me K = Kristen Hersh She'd been doing taxes., so she was as chipper as I was C: I don't read a lot about the Throwing Muses, why? Why not more press? K: In England they write about us a lot more , we get covers and we get articles every time a record comes out, but they're getting sick of writing about us too. There really isn't anything else to say. Our whole image is that we're very boring, as people. C: I don't think that's necessarily true, if you were boring as people you couldn't make the records that you do! K: That's apparently the most striking thing - we don't look like anything. I look like someone in an aspirin commercial! C: Then I'd hate to know what I look like! Does the fact that your msuic has gotten more widely distributed and more available, does it make you feel different about what you do? It seems like a lot of your songs are really personal, and that if were widely listened to, it would be different. K: You have to work hard at removing yourself from that aspect of it. I think no matter how many people are listening, as long as there are a few other people listening you have to decide that your aspect of the job has to remain intact. I personally have to be very strong in my focus, and if I started to second guess other people or feel like I was being too honest or they could hurt my feelings, then I would lose some of my focus, and it's hard to maintain anyway, just living real life, hearing songs and making good sound pictures of them. So, that's probably the most important part of my job. The people selling the records, that 's their job, people listening, that's their job. C: It almost sees like, though, someone' who's painting, they don't have to get up on a stage and do it in front of a whole bunch of people. It would be kind of hard. K: That's true. We were just playing Cleveland the other night. It was at this kind of strange, big fancy bar, instead of the nice big rock dives we're used to, it was very strange, everything was clean, and there were all these guys standing around my monitor, just kind of shouting at me going "well, we love you, we love you, we want to party with you after your show" and I thought, I bet other people don't do this for their job! That's another part of my focus. If I'm playing, I want to have played really well, and I want to enjoy myself, and so I just turn everything off and sit in the song, and David and Bernard are trying to do the same thing. We're really lucky to be able to get off like that every night. C: If you didn't have the music as a release, or whatever exactly it is for you, what do you think you'd be doing instead? K: Killing people! No, I, it doesn't actually feel like a release any more than listening to other bands I like. C: Well, that's what music is for a lot of people, I think. K:Well, I agree, and I get to do it every night, and that's great, I guess it doesn't feel like catharsis for me, because I don't think I'm expressing myself, and that's why the personal thing isn't so hard, because I'm not really talking about myself or my personality or my life all that often. I do if it's appropriate, if it's an appropriate picture for the song. But, I can't really take anything personally because it goes beneath my personality. So, I'm talking about them (the audience) as much as I'm talking about me. C: I guess that maybe people get that kind of impression, though, because your music is so emotional, and people have that kind of reaction to it, so maybe that's why it seems that way. K: But it's a weapon for me. It hits them that way, and it hits me that way, but I have control over when it starts and stops. C:It must interesting to be able to have that kind of effect on people. K: I guess so, and they're not going "I hate you I hate you" or anything. C: No, at least not in Cleveland! K: Right! So there's a lot of strength in that. That could be the most feminine thing about us. People seem to think we're very feminine as a band. Our approach has a lot of femininity in it. I think that it's emotional strength that's the most feminine thing, maybe the unpredictability as well. C: It's kind of interesting - guys listening to your music are allowed to feel that too...guys aren't always allowed to be so emotional all of the time. - the guys that I know that like you music - it seems like they get something from it like that. Do you think it takes a certain kind of person to like your music? K: No, I don't, I haven't been able to figure that out, because a lot of people who you think are closer to getting it than other people, it's only because they kind of use their brains a little bit so they can justify what they get, but they seem to stop at a certain point. Like, if they tell me who else they listen to, and it's someone I hate, I'll think, oh, wow, and whatever impact I've had is just erased by that, you've reached this point in the music and just cut it off right there. Whereas other people, I don't know how to say this without being condescending, are maybe straight out of top 40 who don't want to think about music, it hits them so hard, they love it, it makes them happy, it makes them cry, and it's crazy. You'd' think that Throwing Muses fans would all have haircuts and suicidal girlfriends in bands...and the people that really get it, seem to never put their brain in music, which seems like a much more effective way to listen. C: I can't really imagine people who listen to a lot of top 40 really being able to get it, but maybe I'm just underestimating people. K: I would too, but they have no preconceived notions, they just see us as a regular rock band. Not all top 40 listeners obviously, or else we'd be top 40. C: It seems like when I find Throwing Muses fans, I'm able to get along with them, whatever we have in common that makes us like you, is something that we need in common to be friends. K: I feel that way when I meet people in other bands. There doesn't seem to be such a thing as a bad person making good music, and I mean truly good music. There are people who you worship as a teenager, and they're rude and they hurt your feelings. But I've never met anyone who's making great music that is not a good person. There are a lot of good people making bad music.... C: But not on purpose! K: It's a sad mistake.. C: I read in a 1987 article I read in Puncture that you like a lot of older music, and there isn't much currently that you like. Has that changed? K: Um, I have very high expectations , I find. I don't know why. My husband was just saying it's because I love people a lot, and I always like them, but I really want to hear great things come out of them. It's not that I think that musicians suck, but that I'm very disappointed by what they let themselves do. We did tour with Pond, and we took them on the European tour, just on the basis of one song...because there is just no such thing as a good song anymore ...people don't know how to be unselfconscious in their music, it seems, and sometimes it takes you to be that way, naivete or whatever, or just being thrilled by sounds, because then you let all these sounds come in, and you don't edit out the magic, and they turned out to be great. They're a great young band. C: I've listened to a lot of your music....there's nothing quite the same. There's not a lot that fills the same need that the Throwing Muses do. K: I have a problem with the new breed of female musicians right now. It scares me more than something that's blatantly bad, because it's coming close to something that could be honest, but it seems more self conscious to me. C: Sort of contrived? K: It becomes contrived, which is actually dishonest, and I don't mean to rag on people, and when it's ladies it sounds bitchy, but I have very very high expectations of women, and Mary Marguerite O'hara is the only woman I know who's really doing something without being self conscious. She's a Canadian singer, and she was actually prevented from releasing her records by her own record company. She has a record called Miss America, which was released about 3 years ago, but it was put on hold for about 5 years, and she hasn't been able to do anything since, and she could be the best singer in the world right now. C: why can't she put stuff out? K: Just because she wouldn't agree to their choice of producers or production, and she wanted to do it herself. I mean, if they're looking for a focused singer songwriter, and they push her around, it's absolute evil. I think she's doing what women should be doing right now. She has the true female sound, without deciding I will be female, capital F, and I'm going to sing about this, and I'm going to be honest and uncompromising and everyone will see me that way. It's just because I have high expectations. Men don't always seem to have as much a problem with it. It could be that they don't' have much to fight against. Women have gone through - we have to be sex kittens towards men, or we're just one of the boys, so that we can be as good as men, which is still focusing on men, and to get beyond that, they decide on another image, instead of just saying , well, if we're musicians, we're just going to make music. C: It's like trying so hard to be strong that they put too much energy into being strong, and not enough energy into making honest music. K: Or too much energy on anything. It just seems like they're looking to do something else, and the music is a byproduct. C: So you're playing as a trio? Leslie was on the new cd... K: We hired her as a session player for Red Heaven, because this material seemed to need a real raw immediate treatment, and if you have to work at it, it doesn't come off like a live sound, but the three of us have been playing together for so many years that we all start at the same time and stop at the same time. It's very tight and very immediate. By the time we'd finished Red Heaven, Bernard George, our bassist, was already in the fold, so he was around to do b-sides, and he's done the whole tour, and he'll do the next record in the summer. C: It's funny, because your band personnel has changed a lot, and people get so upset. All the se people who are so worried about that, their lives changed and people change in their lives, and they have different friends, and yet they expect you guys to be all together until the end of time. K: Isn't that strange? You'd think that they'd just want to know that the music is good. I'm the one that should be the one that cares who's in the band. It's not necessarily something to be proud of , but it's always been something of a solo project for me. That's why I kept the name. It's not something anyone else would want necessary, but it's the name for a big batch of work, for ten years of work, that's not necessarily bad or good, but that's the continuity. C:Is it kind of weird to look back on all this stuff you did through the formative years of your life? K: I guess I'm just too used to it to be objective about it. C: Well to me, just having all of these records spread out, I can remember what I did during this album etc. K: I bet it does that to you more than to me, because I have so many different associations, and plus, It's the only thing I can do, I've been doing it my whole life. I'm just so used to this is how the world works. This part of the world is this record. C: Maybe you do that with bands you like, though. K: Just like smells are that way, it just brings back a whole summer. Summer records have incredible associations. C: I had an X summer. K: Me too! X is supposed to make another record. C: I dunno if I'm happy about that or not. K: I know. C: The last two... K: We were wondering if maybe they got a kick in the ass by not being together for awhile too. C: I don't really know what to expect from them...Exene and John Doe's solo stuff was so different from the X stuff. K: We were hoping that the same thing would happen to them that happened to us, where it was a bit of a return to our roots to get the kick in the ass of breaking up , you know, to have to decide to start a band again was really what gave us the thrill that let Red Heaven happen so easily. Records, if they don't happen easily, they just eat themselves alive. C: Especially the way your music is, I can't imagine your having to do it, or force it. K: Yeah, well, that's what was happening on Hunkpapa and the Real Ramona. Just getting forced out, and it's really too bad because there were some good songs on those records. C: I think so! K: Yeah, I think they survived, it could be a subtle thing that has more to do with us than the average listener. But, to start a band on the basis of my own emotional articulation, and then to pull out of it led to a lot of chaos. C: Do you think that the way you're feeling at any point affects the way you write and the way the music comes out? K: Not the way I write, but the way the music comes out, yeah, because I have to have a very clear picture of how a song should be kind of brought to fruition, how the ultimate sound picture should look. And I didn't care at all anymore, I didn't' want to be in the music business. I had no focus, and therefore, the band didn't really have a focus, people were kind of making stuff up and, there are a few things that went down that I thought were lies, just style decisions instead of substance decisions. There are just so many fights you can have in the studio you can have before you give up and say OK, well you can have that, you can put that down, but I get this, and that's not a good way to go about making records. C: Since you have such high expectations for yourself, it's probably why you have them for other people. K: I've learned a lot from it. It's been very educational for me to learn that I'm not responsible for the most beautiful things, I'm only responsible for the mundane things. If I bring something down to my level, it becomes mundane, and what a light feeling that is - my whole job is just to let go, just to take myself out of it. I have no responsibility, it's like your children. You do everything you can for them, but their beauty is their own, and it's the most God you'll ever see. And it's such a light feeling! Music should be the same way...for some reason we've made it into this crazy product that's like junk food. C: I can exactly see what you mean. K: Really? I hate to be high and mighty about it, cause what I really mean is that it should be light, it should be so easy and fun to feel emotion, it should always feel good, but what they decided felt good was just eating all this candy, and it makes you sick, it doesn't make you feel good. C: I understand what you mean, because it's a lot of the reason why I like your records... K: You enjoy them, right, it's not like, I feel like crying so I'll put o a Throwing Muses record. C: No, it's not like that, I listen to them all the time, I would've been a really depressed person if that were the case. It's just that it feels real. It's like what you said about junk food vs. something unhealthy. It feels emotionally healthy. It feels right. K: I agree. Emotionally healthy is a good way to put it. It's like couples that don't fight....it seems like that would be a good way to advertise coupledome, but it's not, it's not emotionally healthy. C: I've always loved your lyrics...a line that makes the whole album worth having... K: That's neat... C: Have you always written and kept journals and stuff? K: I pretty much focus on the sound of the words, and find that the most beautiful soundingwords mean the most and tell the best stories and last forever. It could work both ways too, and that's why they sound so beautiful. I'm kind of one of those people that doesn't know anyone else's words, I don't know the titles of anyone else's songs ...I just hear them as these great syllables and it seems like another instrument. I like it when lines hit you all of a sudden if you suddenly hear them and they catch your heart , that seems like the best way to hear it. It kind of bothers me that someone might buy our records and read the lyrics first and then see how they fit into the song, but I do agree that there's no excuse for bad lyrics. You know when you really like a song and then you find out what they're saying and you think "Oh, God, it was so much better before... I've got my own lyrics in my head that are so much better than theirs". C: Do you write most of the music as well as the lyrics? K: Yeah, I do everything, and then, I work in my home studio, put drum and bass and guitar, vocals down, and just keep demoing stuff like that to the band, and a lot of their parts will get rewritten. I've never really been able to collaborate that way. The whole song has to be done before I can even see outside of it. C: It would be hard, kind of diluting what you're thinking to say "well someone else will put something in here, but I don't know what" K : Which is kind of what was happening on the Real Ramona and Hunkpapa, as far as production goes. But I've never been able to let anybody into the middle of the song and help me write it. C: The last time I saw you guys it was at the off ramp during the Real Ramona tour. K: Was I real pregnant? C: That's what I was going to say - do you think that your music, and just - that would be a really interesting way to start a life - because I'm sure they can hear it. Do you think that your kids are growing up different having all of that music around them? K: I don't know, I don't know many other parents my age, a friend of mine, Vicky, actually, from Vicky's box...has a couple kids now.... C: I love that song ...(Vicky's Box) K: Do you? She has a couple kids now, which is very strange, because we were the last people we thought would have kids, at least this young, and she's the only one I have to compare it to, and I think it's a very similar upbringing....but it's also a lot more straightforward nuclear family than you'd expect. The traveling is the only strange thing. Probably, being in utero and having a rock band play around you every night.....now, as soon as Ryer hears loud guitar he just falls right asleep....and he recognizes all of our material and just freaks out whenever he hears any of it and gets really happy. Dylan was the same way, I was pregnant when we made the first record, and he used to just fall asleep to me screaming....But other than that, we have a pretty regular family. We're away from our six year old a lot. We write to him every day,, but many divorced families have the same deal, so... C: Well, he can listen to the records... K: He did think that everybodies parents had records when he first went to daycare. He asked what bands their mommies were in. C: That's funny! #011#K: But that's more of a sitcom thing...but there are just little things I forget to tell him , you know, that this isn't every mommies job, but probably I didn't really want him to know. I also forgot to tell him that his teeth were gonna to fall out. He found not too long ago, he's like "what do you mean, my teeth? my teeth are coming out?" and it's like "oh, yeah, and a fairy comes and gives you money for them" he's like "how much money??" C: That's really funny. K: "well you'll get more, dyl!" C: I guess I'd forget about those things too... ======================================================================== Date: Mon, 7 Feb 94 02:57:57 +1100 From: anthony@xymox.apana.org.au (Anthony Horan) Subject: Jane feature from Australia At the prompting of one of the people I sent this to privately, I'm posting my feature on Jane Siberry to you all to analyse and deconstruct. :) This feature ran as the cover inset story in the Feb 2 edition of Beat Magazine, Melbourne; due to the wide and varied readership, some Janeophiles may find themselves thinking this is a bit of a Jane-for-beginners piece; certainly it doesn't include a lot of the most amusing bits of the conversations. I'll try to get both interview tapes transcribed sometime soon, if there's any demand. But anyway, for now, here's this! ****** (Word count: 1282. This article is Copyright 1994 Anthony Horan. Permission is granted for Ectophiles to do what they will with it, as long as that doesn't involve publishing it in Time, unless of course I get royalties, in which case you can have it printed in "Tiger Beat" for all I care. :-) This is a direct ASCII copy of the feature as submitted, complete with intro header. ****** A pioneer purveyor of left-of-centre atmospherics and luscious soundscape-laden pop, Canada's Jane Siberry is finally heading to Australia to present her unique live show as part of the Melbourne Music Festival. ANTHONY HORAN spoke to Jane in Toronto... Her name is spoken by many in the reverent tones reserved for the truly special, often alongside those two default benchmarks of female vocal music, Kate Bush and Laurie Anderson. But Jane Siberry's music is impossible to neatly classify and incomparable to anything else. In the 12 years since the beginning of her recording career, she has produced six uncompromising albums, discovered film-making (she directed her own music videos for the new album when her label refused to make any, and made a couple of "trailers" for the album while she was at it), ventured into writing film soundtracks, contributed songs to films, and guested on numerous albums by other artists. Her current album, her third for Reprise since making the major-label leap in 1988, is possibly her best yet. "When I Was A Boy" encapsulated 18 months of recording around the world and at her home studio in a focused ten-song package that runs the full spectrum of styles and emotions, from the wall-of-sound sensual sweep of opening track "Temple" - produced, along with one other track on the album, by the increasingly non-reclusive Brian Eno - to the mellifluous atmospherics of "The Vigil", and the strange grooves of "All The Candles In The World" (complete with a sample neatly appropriated from Tears For Fears' "Mad World"!) and "An Angel Stepped Down". As the recording for the album progressed, Michael Brook stepped in to rework and mix some of the tracks; yet despite all the work done on the record, the seven studios and multiple producers, this album is the most focused Siberry has produced yet. While encompassing everything from neo-dance stylings ("Temple") to minds-eye film soundtrack inventiveness ("The Vigil"), everything gels perfectly. Jane's live performances have already attracted a great deal of attention overseas, and Melbourne audiences now have the opportunity to see what she does with the concert format that's impressed people so much. Occasionally billed as the "It Ain't A Concert Concert", the performance encompasses Jane's songs far removed from their native studio environment and carried on piano and guitar, along with poetry, videos, short films, and a question-and-answer session with the audience. Speaking with Jane Siberry is a wonderful experience; her sense of humour is always lurking behind the conversation, and in fact just keeping the topic on her music is near impossible. This is the second time we've spoken, and while trying to connect the voice on the phone to a previous interview, she relates a story of another Australian journalist who, doing an interview with Jane last year, "asked me about all these songs I'd never written and people I'd never played with, and after a while he realised he wasn't talking to Heidi Berry...!" Since the release of the album in the latter half of last year, Jane has not been idle; apart from playing what was supposed to be a series of small Canadian shows and finding herself in the middle of a tour, she's been writing a film score, and making more short films for tracks from the album. "I did a song for Wim Wenders' new film 'Far Away, So Close' as well," says Jane, "but that was done quite a while ago. In fact I don't know why the film hasn't come out in Canada - it was finished so long ago." I point out that it'll probably be sooner than we see the film here, if the past track record with Wenders' films is any indication. "I think that really most places see the United States as a test market, to make sure the product is good enough for Australia, for example. It's like giving Mikey some food and seeing if it poisons him and he falls over dead. I think it's very mean to be like that - make everybody else try things before you get them." The unusual format of Jane's live show brings it into the realms of performance art, but this is undertaken with a knowing sense of humour rather than with pretentiousness. "I read a story, I play some songs, I show some videos, and at the end I have a talk with the audience. That's my manager's favorite part...! People are a bit shocked at the question-and-answer section sometimes, but they do eventually relax, and the feeling at the end is that it was a meeting rather than a performance, and that's what I want it to be. A meeting of like-minded people, and then we all go out into the night our own way; I think that's really important. It's the opposite of a U2 tour vibe. Isn't music supposed to be the one thing you can rely on to draw people together...?" Doing exactly that is something Peter Gabriel has been working on for a while now. Jane spent some time in England at Gabriel's Real World Studios both finishing tracks for her album and contributing to some of Gabriel's various side-projects; amongst these is a track called "Harmonix" on the album "Way Down Below Buffalo Hell", a record credited to Jam Nation but actually a collection of rhythm-oriented music embellished by various guests from around the world. "Is that the song I sound like Minnie Mouse on? That makes me so mad - they sent me a demo of it. What I sang, they'd taken quite a different song, taken my vocal and sampled it. I told them you can't do that to the human voice, that's really a no-no. Sampled is fine, but you don't speed it up. I think it's the worst thing you can do. So much information is carried in the human voice, and if you make the tension that is there greater or less then it changes you as a person, and all the information gets garbled. I was upset, and they said they would slow it down, but they didn't. I hated it, I thought that was really disrespectful. But there is some other great stuff from the week I spent there that's really beautiful, and that'll be coming out too." The topic of film comes up often talking to Jane Siberry. She is justifiably proud of the videos she has directed for the album (two of them screen occasionally on "Rage") and is in the process of shooting some more, including one for "Temple". Her soundtrack for the film "Underwater" may be released in the future, but in the meantime its something Jane is obviously very proud of. Making films would be the next logical step, something Jane has already considered. "I have a very restless creative spirit, and I get bored easily, so I can see that happening, without wanting to, and I really don't want to... do I really mean that? I probably shouldn't even intone those words. But a feature film is arriving in my head, I have more and more characters filling in the gaps. I've never really known much about astrology, by I had a natal chart done - it's supposed to be the definitive reading of your life from when you were born. The woman who did it said that music didn't even show up in there. But I adore music, it gives me life. I'd like to do lots of things, though. I already am. How old can you get before it's embarrassing to strut across the stage in black leather bra and high boots?" ******* -- ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Anthony Horan, Melbourne Australia - anthony@xymox.apana.org.au "I kind of feel like I'm Metallica..." - Tori Amos on the perils of long tours, November 1992 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- ======================================================================== The ecto archives are on hardees.rutgers.edu in ~ftp/pub/hr. There is an INDEX file explaining what is where. Feel free to send me things you'd like to have added. -- jessica (jessica@ns1.rutgers.edu)