"this is my house, roll out the red carpet
Hogs head on a rag doll
Never was a little girl
Run run run run mama
Drink until you drop
Die until it stops...." ("Garoux des Larmes", Throwing Muses)



So, I just finished the vibrant, synesthaesic, crazy, sadfunny whirlwind that is singer Kristin Hersh's (of Throwing Muses) memoir "Rat Girl".

My TM-loving friends had all been urging me to read it for some time and I can see why, now.

(an aside - it is quite interesting everyone I know who's deepest fans of them are female friends. Are they particularly resonantly female? I know Kristin herself would be cross at the very idea but it is curious how they resonate for women more than men in my limited experience).

So, the book covers a year or so in her life when, as a new, unsigned band they were finding their voice and in the one year, they became popular, she became severely bipolar, they scored a record deal with 4AD and then she unexpectedly fell pregnant - all as a 19 year old.

I could approach writing about this like a review but I don't want to, because it was all just too personal for me. Somehow her way of expressing herself sat with me so perfectly, and I realised it was because that's how I'd been voicing things in my stuttering attempts at slightly autobiographical) novels in the past. More importantly perhaps however, is the fact this band came into existence, and into my view,when I was 17 and finding my own feet creatively, and they've left tattoos and symbols stained all over my memory, psyche and growingup years.

When she elaborates on a certain event, a growing realisation occurs that she's talking about something that one of her songs is about (albeit usually in rather cryptic was, as was her wont). This delighted me. I'm all about lyrics but that said, they were never a band I looked for *meaning* in the words of. I could tell her words weren't for working out, they just *were*.

Have a fish nailed to a cross
on my apartment wall
it sings to me with flashy eyes
and quotes from Kafka
and sings to me

At 17 or so, sitting on my bed listening to 2XX (the AM university radio station) one saturday night, the DJ spun a few tracks from their ep "Chains Changed". I remember hearing "Cry Baby Cry" and being completely bewildered. The song makes no *sense* - the time signature slips out of reach like a wriggling cat, the lyrics are cryptic as fuck, and... that VOICE. Broken, plaintive, beautifully ugly and raw. Like, as she says in the book, "coughing up a beautiful liver". I don't think I really liked it at first, but something made me want to work it out.

That was the first time a band slapped me with weird, and made me ask for more instead of recoiling in horror.

Thusly, Kristin's own experience with her music, how it came to her (out of her?) without her bidding, took her over, forced her to write it down, fascinated me. I've always had an interest in neurology and madness anyway, and what happened to her is particularly fascinating. As she details in the book, she was hit by a car while on a bike as a teenager, and her head smashed into the ground, and afterwards, noise filled her head, and the jumbled cacophony eventually formed itself into a structure... into songs, and she had to get them down to get them out of her, to make them go away, be their own thing.

She also talks about how music made actual shards of colour fly about and around her. Synesthasia. I'm so envious of anyone who has this (Rob's said he does, in a way), because it seems so alien to me, something I can't begin to get a handle on, but wish I had.

As another aside, it is curious I've read this just as I've also started reading "Musicophilia" by Oliver Sacks where he goes into quite a bit of detail about people who hear fully formed music as... well, hallucinations? Neural anomalies? I mean we all get earworms, but he was talking about something a lot more visceral and actual, and thats what Kristin suffered (suffered? hmm) from. I would love to know what he'd think of her experience, to be honest.

The illness and music aside, she also describes the vibrant alternative and punk scene of the late 80s in New England with such love and delight and warmth that you just want to curl up in it and listen to her tell stories all night long. I had the same feeling when I saw her performing solo at the Athaneum once years ago - sat on a stool with a dorky old floor lamp by her side. She'd tell quirky tales in between songs, and it felt like hanging out with her in the living room. I was so entranced by that gig I wrote a long blathering letter I wanted to post her. I never sent it though.

Anyone who is a Throwing Muses fan *has* to read this, that perhaps goes unsaid. But even if you know nothing about the band or Kristin you'd

get plenty from this book. It is engaging, funny, smart, full of magic and totems and wisdom and youth and learning.

I didn't want it to end.

It's been an aeon since I did some music journalisticy musing. Have some here behind the cut (I got carried away).

( 2010 albums ahoy )

Phew! That was longer than I'd planned.