Kristin Hersh

Hersh's lyrics have a stream-of-consciousness style, reflecting her personal experiences.

Hersh was born in Atlanta. She moved to Newport, Rhode Island with her family, when she was six years old. Her father was a professor at Salve Regina University and her mother was a special educational needs teacher. Kristin was interested in music at an early age; her father gave her a guitar when she was nine. Kristin's parents separated when Hersh was 11, and her mother married the father of her best friend Tanya Donelly. Hersh talked Donelly into starting a band, then called The Muses, when they were 14.

Throwing Muses was formed in 1981 when Hersh and Donelly were freshmen in high school. Friends from school, including Elaine Adamedes, Becca Blumen, Leslie Langston and David Narcizo, were part of the group with Narcizo (and in the beginning, Langston) becoming a long-term member. Hersh initially wrote and sang most of Throwing Muses' songs, often in changing tempos. Donelly contributed songs and lead vocals. Hersh attended Salve Regina University in Newport, majoring in archetypal psychology and philosophy, but dropped out shortly before graduating to establish the band in Boston where they had been playing on weekends. While at Salve Regina, Hersh befriended film actress Betty Hutton, who was attending the school in her 60s; Hutton also attended several early Throwing Muses shows in Newport. The Throwing Muses were signed to 4AD, the first American group to be signed on the British label, and released the EP Chains Changed in 1987. Two releases followed, the mini-LP The Fat Skier and the album House Tornado. The 4AD Throwing Muses biography describes its sound at the time as "joining the dots between elliptical post-punk, harmonious folk jangle and rockabilly thunder without ever settling into standard genre patterns." For the Throwing Muses 1986 UK tour, the Boston-based Pixies, embarking on their first European tour, was the opening band. The band signed a U.S. deal with Sire/Reprise Records in 1987 and began touring the U.S. and Europe while recording albums, with Hersh writing most of the songs. The band became a trio when Donelly left the group after 1991's The Real Ramona. In 1994, Hersh began a solo career on Sire/Reprise and 4AD as an acoustic performer, beginning with Hips and Makers, an album sparsely arranged around her vocals, guitar, and a cellist, in contrast to the volatile, electric sound of her band work. Michael Stipe of R.E.M. made an appearance on this first solo album. After receiving some airplay and major media coverage for the Throwing Muses album University in 1995, Hersh moved to Rykodisc for the band's 1996 album, Limbo, and released her solo album, Strange Angels, in 1998. To better control her career and the distribution of her recorded material, she created the ThrowingMusic label with then-husband and manager Billy O'Connell in 1996. That enabled her to co-release some of her projects, including an ongoing download-subscription service called Works in Progress (WIP) for releases available through the label's website. Hersh continued to offer her solo releases online, releasing Sky Motel in 1999. Throwing Muses functions as a noncommercial musical enterprise, focusing on touring over record sales and airplay. In a 2014 interview, Hersh said, "As far as I'm concerned, music is not a commodity. It's something that people have earned by being human. They have a right to hear it, and a right to share it, as they always have in churches and parties. That's how music happens."

In 2001, Hersh released the Sunny Border Blue solo album, on which she again played nearly all instruments. She described the album as having even more intensity than her previous works, as she continued her pursuit of songwriting as being in part a way to transform "ugly feelings" into art. She also collaborated further with like-minded alternative artists like Vic Chesnutt, Willard Grant Conspiracy, Grant-Lee Phillips, and John Doe. In 2003, she released The Grotto, an acoustic solo album of song sketches with personal lyrics set in Providence, Rhode Island, with Andrew Bird on violin and Howe Gelb on piano. On the same date a self-titled album by Throwing Muses was also released, the first since Limbo. Both were recorded at Steve Rizzo's studio in Rhode Island. When Narcizo was unable to tour on a full-time basis due to other commitments, Hersh formed her power rock trio 50FootWave. Her touring appearances and recording efforts in 2004 and 2005 centered around both 50 Foot Wave and her solo career.

Hersh's vocal style ranges from softly melodic to impassioned screaming. She has an occasional vibrato that punctuates some of her more dramatic phrasing. Candid about her episodes of mental illness and despair, her songs cover a vast spectrum of topics, including childbirth ("Hysterical Bending"), love ("Tar Kissers", "Lavender"), surreal vignettes ("Delicate Cutters", "Fish"), death ("Limbo"), emotional anguish ("The Letter"), loss of custody of her first son ("Candyland"), and the shedding of a relationship's anxiety ("Snake Oil"). Simon Reynolds in The New York Times pointed to Hersh's "mesmerizing" explorations of "rage, aggression and mental chaos" as evidence of female rock artists of the early 1990s pushing against gender role boundaries to express "more than simply vulnerability or defiance" in their work. Ann Powers, also in the Times, wrote of Hersh's musical style: "Her plastic, sometimes obsessively circular song structures emphasize staggered rhythms and extreme dynamic shifts, and her voice, a carnal cry that pushes through her body gathering up air, lends her often oblique lyrics an oracular veneer."

Hersh's illustrated children's book Toby Snax was published in 2007 and further developed in 2011 as an interactive app for children. The app allows children to hear her read the story out loud and features her recordings of lullabies that she learned as a girl in Tennessee. Her 2010 memoir Rat Girl (published in the UK as Paradoxical Undressing) is based on a diary she wrote when she was 18, touring with Throwing Muses, diagnosed with bipolar disorder and pregnant with her first child. Rob Sheffield in The New York Times called it an "uncommonly touching punk memoir," and named it No. 8 in Rolling Stone's "25 Greatest Rock Memoirs of All Time." Her 2015 book Don't Suck, Don't Die: Giving Up Vic Chesnutt, is a rumination on her friendship with the singer-songwriter Vic Chesnutt. She cites him as being one of her songwriting influences with his "fluid timing and the grace of a melody that breaks the rules of meter."

Hersh was married to her former manager Billy O'Connell for 25 years and they divorced in 2013. They have four sons. As of 2020, she is engaged to former Throwing Muses bassist Fred Abong. Hersh has talked openly about her bouts with mental illness and its role in her musical process. When she was 16, she was struck by a car while riding her bicycle, suffering a double concussion that affected the way she heard sounds. She described it as hearing ambient sounds continuously and "the sounds would alter their sonic vocabulary until I was hearing syllables, and drums... then all these words would come". She has said that hearing "pieces of songs" in her mind compelled her to take the pieces apart and craft songs from them. She claims that she doesn't remember writing her early songs—that "they wrote her". Hersh has synesthesia; she sees musical chords in colors. She has had more than one diagnosis (and misdiagnoses) for her condition including schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and most recently post-traumatic and dissociative disorders, which she says have been successfully treated with eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR) therapy.

Hips and Makers (1994) Strange Angels (1998) Murder, Misery and Then Goodnight (1998) Sky Motel (1999) Sunny Border Blue (2001) The Grotto (2003) Learn to Sing Like a Star (2007) Speedbath (2008, under a Creative Commons License) Crooked (2010) Wyatt at the Coyote Palace (2016) Possible Dust Clouds (2018) Clear Pond Road (2023) Sugar on Blackstone (2026)

"Wave of Mutilation" (Pixies) – American Laundromat Records, High School Reunion: a tribute to those great 80's films!, 2005 "Like a Hurricane" (Neil Young) – American Laundromat Records, Cinnamon Girl: Women Artists Cover Neil Young for Charity, 2008 "Panic Pure" (Vic Chesnutt) – Columbia Records, Sweet Relief II: Gravity of the Situation, 1996