No fair

Hersh and Ferrick don't do Lilith

by Brett Milano

Oh no, you might be thinking, not another women's singer/songwriter tour. Not another night of achingly sensitive singers baring their souls. Well, sort of. But if you overdosed on wispy balladry at last week's Lilith Fair, there's relief to be found next Friday at the Paradise in the form of Kristin Hersh and Melissa Ferrick. Both are women and both rock, but they're not "women in rock" -- at least not by the wispy, achingly sensitive definition put forward by Lilith's main stage. Hersh's preference for mysterious and elliptical songs and Ferrick's for screamingly intense ones have kept them a few steps from the mainstream -- even now that the mainstream is stepping in their direction.

Although still associated with New England, both singers now reside on the West Coast. Laying Throwing Muses to rest after a frequently brilliant decade, Hersh pulled up roots last year and left Newport for the deserts of central California, where she now lives with her husband/manager and three children. And Ferrick has lived in Los Angeles since her first album, Massive Blur, came out in 1993, though she's played here at least twice a year since then. Her new live CD, Melissa Ferrick + 1 (on W.A.R.), was largely recorded at two venues: the Hollywood singer/songwriter hotbed Club Largo and T.T. the Bear's Place, putting that Cambridgee spot on disc for the first time. Meanwhile Hersh has a new solo album, Strange Angels, in the can and set for a January release on Rykodisc.

The very idea of the Lilith Fair rankles Hersh, who was offered a spot on that tour and turned it down. "Separate but equal isn't equal," she explains over the phone from a San Francisco hotel room. "An all-guy tour would have been just as offensive, maybe more. If we want people to stop calling us `women,' we should stop acting like women. But women are always women's worst enemy, and Lilith is like the Phyllis Schlafly tour if you ask me. It's wrong and it's wimpy."

"I have my own little resentment to that tour, because I'm not on it," says Ferrick, from on the road in Wyoming. "It bummed me out, that's the honest truth. I was put up to play on the second stage and I don't understand why I didn't get picked. I feel I've worked really hard touring for the past seven years; and I'm on the same boat as most of the second-stage acts in terms of recognizability. It's interesting, though, because I don't see any `out' acts on that tour except for the Indigo Girls [and Tracy Chapman, who played in Boston]. It's nearly all straight female acts -- and most are from the same agency, which is also interesting. But now I'm glad I'm not on it, so I could tour with Kristin."

Ferrick outed herself during promotional interviews for her second major-label album, Willing To Wait (Atlantic, 1994), but the news of her sexuality was no great revelation to most of her fans; it was more a matter of clearing the air. "Talking about it got boring after a while. It seemed silly to do interviews just because they wanted to talk about whether I was out or not. But I'm glad I did it, because now I don't have to deal with it anymore. And I'm not even famous, so I can only imagine what it must have been like for Melissa, k.d., and Ellen. I think that everybody comes out in their own good time, and all I'll say is that the ones who don't come out should write bigger checks to gay and lesbian organizations."

Still, Ferrick's lyrics are pretty much universal, in the sense that getting screwed up by love is universal. In the past, most of her songs have dealt with two kinds of romantic relationships: obsessively sad ones and really scary ones. Nothing unique there, but it's her vocal delivery -- sometimes an accusatory whisper, more often full-throttle throat tearing -- that puts her in the realm of edgier bands like Sleater-Kinney or Chelsea on Fire. Or, for that matter, with Kristin Hersh in the early, punkier days of Throwing Muses. On "Willing To Wait," for instance (redone from the second album), she insists that she's surviving before breaking into a repeated cry of "Abuse me, abuse me." This is one of her happier numbers. That may be changing, however: though the material on Melissa Ferrick +1 (a solo disc whose title refers to guest lists) stretches back to her teenage years at Berklee, the newest songs reveal a softer side. "Heredity" shows as much love angst as ever, but it also sports a pretty tune; Ferrick strums her acoustic guitar gently instead of throttling it Townshend-style. And the closing studio track, "Favorite Person in the World," is her first unmitigated, non-ironic pop song, big hook and all.

"It's a very simple song, no getting around it. I was very in love at the time and still am, and I thought the title was a cute little catchphrase. The songs always reflect whatever I'm going through at the time. There's still a part of me that loves to do the screaming, but maybe it's from a different place."

Ferrick's two Atlantic albums went for a guitar-band sound, but the one she's working on now will be mostly solo with loops and samples. "We're just starting, so this isn't carved in stone, but it looks like we're getting away from that rock/alternative direction."

She went the do-it-yourself route after Atlantic dropped her, releasing the live album on her own before W.A.R. picked it up; she'll also make the next album for the Boulder-based indie. "It's different from being on a major, because I feel like I'm being paid attention to. It's the first time I've had 10 people working with me at the same time."

Kristin Hersh has her own issues with the music business, having broken up Throwing Muses because they couldn't afford to stay together. In retrospect, their last area appearances in the spring were obvious farewell shows. With Hersh playing seated and appearing more relaxed than usual, they took audience requests and did many obscure album tracks they hadn't played in years. Hersh says that every show on the tour was played that way, and they wound up performing every song they'd ever recorded. For the record, the last Throwing Muses show was at the House of Blues in Los Angeles; and the last song they played was "Two Step" (from The Real Ramona) -- a song about a band breaking up.

In a post-tour press release, the band still insisted that they weren't necessarily breaking up, but Hersh now confirms that they were. "We didn't want to preclude the possibility of one of us winning the lottery and being able to make records again. My heart was breaking, really. We didn't want to be splitting up, but we couldn't afford to keep touring and making records."

The band temporarily solved their problems by forming their own label and setting up a distribution deal with Rykodisc, but the last album, Limbo, didn't sell as well as expected -- despite being a stronger set than its predecessor, University (their biggest hit, at 75,000 copies). "It might have worked, but not with the bottom falling out of the music business the way it has. It was really a great band, though, and it's taken me a while to stop grieving. We were playing two-and-a-half-hour shows on the last tour, and everybody was crying by the time we did the last show in Los Angeles. Exene Cervenka was there, thank God. She was the only person in town who knew how we felt."

A strange thing has happened to Hersh since then. She's always insisted that she doesn't write songs in the traditional sense, she just channels them. The songs wake her up blasting in her ears in the middle of the night; she just hears and learns to play them. But now the songs have started to leave her alone. "I haven't heard any songs since the Muses broke up, so maybe I get to be normal now. If the songs don't come again, then they don't. I never necessarily wanted them to come, or asked them to. So yeah, maybe my muse is gone with the Muses."

It's fitting that the songs on Strange Angels, all written just before the Muses' break-up, represent what she considers her first upbeat batch. Yes, she knows that Laurie Anderson already used the album title -- it's simply that the idea of blessings coming from unexplained places seemed too appropriate to throw away.

"The album sounds very positive to me, extremely happy and confident; but I've said that before and I've been wrong, so maybe you shouldn't believe me yet. It doesn't have that minor-key, mountain-girl aspect that the songs on Hips & Makers [her last solo album] had. And the production is very pretty -- so much so that I had a nightmare that I'd just made an album full of [the Beatles'] `Yesterday's. I do get worried that people will say, `Whoa, I need her to be depressed.' But I'm out of my 20s now, at least I will be in another week. So I'm allowed to start being lame."