Listening to a Kristin Hersh album is like receiving, unfiltered, a direct feed of someone’s thoughts, with all the internal symbols, memories, private jokes intact before they apply all the translation and explanation and interpretation to the outside world. One gets the sense she’s still trying to sort through it all herself. For this reason, her music inevitably is called “abstract”; it’s an understandable reaction, but totally inaccurate. Kristin Hersh writes in specifics. Her memoir Rat Girl—alternately titled Paradoxical Undressing, a typically allegorical reference to hypothermia patients stripping off their clothes even as they freeze to death—sheds light on a couple dozen of her and Throwing Muses’ tracks. Her songs are full of references to her own material,anecdotes that slip out in interviews and on stage, blunt and hyper-specific wisecracks. Singer-songwriters, particularly women, are often accused of writing confessional material even (especially?) when they’re not, but Hersh’s material generally is. “I haven’t got the kind of brain to invent anything, so I just write the stuff down that happens,” she told Soundblab. “The things that happened are so bizarre, you can’t make those things up.”
Wyatt at the Coyote Palace (named for one of her sons) is a typically personal and idiosyncratic affair. Like all her solo and Throwing Muses studio releases since 2010’s Crooked, Wyatt at the Coyote Palace is accompanied by a book of essays and artwork: less commentary on the tracks, and more another set of puzzle pieces to put together. (As well as a recipe for “hooker gazpacho.”) Like 1999’s Sky Motel, the sonics are rich; in addition to acoustic guitar, Hersh plays bass, drums, piano, horns, and cello, and engineer Steve Rizzo helps make it among her slickest-sounding recordings. After five years of tweaking results, she builds many of the arrangements to the beefiness of a typical Muses track; others are interspersed with muffled field recordings, an effect like hearing songs through mental fog. Like the Throwing Muses comeback album Purgatory/Paradise, the album is fragmentary and self-referential; songs reappear throughout the album in reprises, or reworks of and callbacks to past material.
And like her 2001 solo effort Sunny Border Blue, the album is viscerally preoccupied with loss: “I’m so fucking tired of dissolution,” Hersh says in “Sun Blown.” Sometimes it’s general loss—the running joke throughout the album’s accompanying essays is Hersh and her bandmates’ brushes with death, both funny and sneakily serious (a fair amount of essays end in the hospital). A few years ago Hersh divorced from her husband of 25 years. It’s crept into all her work since—last year’s book Don’t Suck Don’t Die started out as a eulogy for singer-songwriter Vic Chesnutt but became a concurrent eulogy for the two songwriters’ marriages. But “Sun Blown” is perhaps the most explicit she's been: “The bailing mate dance, failing patience, fool's silver...” Like most of Hersh’s imagery, it’s not oblique at all when you get the reference: in this case, silver being the traditional 25th anniversary gift. The verse appears as a refrain throughout the album: leading into “Green Screen” and its descending counterpoint of a melody: “Red skin blackening, what is happening? The Art of Kissing, the heart of missing you.”
Unsurprisingly, this is heavy listening. “Shaky Blue Can,” “Shotgun” (reminiscent of “Terra Nova”) and “Secret Codes” are up there with “Listerine” and “Flooding” as among the most fragile material Hersh has recorded. But her work is always threaded through with levity; these songs resist easy classification. “Detox” breaks through into anger—confrontational lyrics, distorted guitar solo—but the almost poppy “Wonderland” recalls the Muses’ midcareer singles; “Hemingway’s Tell” could easily be adapted into one. For every bracing line like “everyone like me’s a dead man,” there’s a gnomic one-liner like “Incense, strawberry candles and soap—way to butcher a street.” The former track, “Killing Two Birds,” is deceptively cheery—the essay accompanying it sets it during a teenage coke-fueled jog. The latter, “Between Piety and Desire” (like Purgatory/Paradise, a play on street names) becomes a “we don’t like the shit, ‘cause we belong in it.” The “we” is key. As memoirs, her albums are so intensely personal it’s little wonder she’s amassed a cult fanbase (and cadre of crowdfunders); as art, they’re arguments for the value of unapologetic individuality.
