An Evening with Kristin Hersh

Over the last three decades, Kristin Hersh’s career has seen her heralded queen of the alternative release. Returning with a new solo record, Clear Pond Road, released in September 2023, the album is a cinematic road trip, a series of personal vignettes from a fiercely independent auteur, with layers of atonal, edgy-dreamy strings and mellotron.

It is a watershed moment in a career with many creative firsts and inspirational thinking, an elegant piece of personal reportage. It is a life-affirming statement, a very personal memoir, the blossoming of a true icon of independence.

In 2018 Hersh announced a new partnership with Fire Records that made possible the release of her tenth studio album, Possible Dust Clouds. Since then there have been new releases from Throwing Muses (Sun Racket, 2020) and 50FootWave (Black Pearl, 2022) along with her book Seeing Sideways (2022).

Hersh has released over 20 records, solo, with Throwing Muses and 50FOOTWAVE to date. She is the author of a memoir based on her teenage diary about a particularly eventful year, titled Rat Girl (Paradoxical Undressing in the UK), which was named #8 on Rolling Stone’s 25 Greatest Rock Memoirs of All Time. She later released her albums Crooked (2010), Wyatt at the Coyote Palace (2016) and Throwing Muses’ Purgatory/Paradise (2013) as books of music, artwork, essays and lyrics. Hersh’s work Don’t Suck, Don’t Die about her friendship with the late Vic Chesnutt was described by NPR Books as one of the best books of the year and one of the most beautiful rock memoirs written.

Previously, the juxtaposition of light and dark has been essential to the drama of Throwing Muses and 50 Foot Wave, but this new record is something of a departure, more inward looking. Produced and performed by Hersh, Clear Pond Road is quieter yet more outspoken, its inventive musical logic underpinned by the ambience of field recordings.

“Passion sounds less angry here, more grateful, I think,” Kristin says, “sweeter, sadder, and somehow no less alive. Honestly, it’s a love story and its erratic heart rate reflects this. As textured and raunchy as real life songs like these can get, the sonic vocabulary is delicate, so I had to respect that and keep it grounded with car engines and rain in New England, then whistling ducks and wind chimes in New Orleans, which sounds wistful, like a blurry photograph.”

Currently in the studio working on the next offering from Throwing Muses, Kristin Hersh is also preparing for a three-month solo tour to celebrate across the UK and Ireland before heading to Australia and New Zealand. She will be on stage at Hallé at St Michael's in Manchester on 1 October 2026 at 6h30.