“A living song is dirty, a dead one clean.” So goes one of Kristin Hersh’s many theories of music. If this is the theory, then her band’s 1986 debut, Throwing Muses, is the proof. Songs tear themselves apart and reattach at odd angles. Hersh, without warning, will snarl out a line in a guttural roar otherwise reserved for metal singers. Guitarist and vocalist Tanya Donelly will play a line out of step with the rest of the arrangement, sweeten that which you would not expect to be sweetened, or invite in some ghosts with a whispered vocal beneath the track. Bassist Leslie Langston will design lines like labyrinths. David Narcizo’s precision drumming acts as rivets under strain, holding the song together but barely. The songs themselves are precocious yet visceral, about life in all its grime. Love is a battlefield rendered in gory closeups. Sex is likened to a pigeon crushed under a car tire. The music is alive, and it is dirty.
Following the Muses in the early years, the dirt might not have been immediately apparent. Hersh and Donelly were step-sisters who grew up in musical families—each received a guitar from the other’s father. Around age 14, they started a band with two classmates at Rogers High School in Newport, Rhode Island with bassist Elaine Adamedes and drummer Becca Blumen. (Narcizo and Langston would join later.) The band’s early songs were less rock than lo-fi new wave, running on tinkly Casio and teenage enthusiasm, but they had the bones of Throwing Muses: Hersh and Donelly’s sugary harmonies, the scrappy confidence of a band. Originally named the Muses, the band added the “Throwing” as a reference to a passage Hersh had read by philosopher Martin Heidegger (they’d later distance themselves from it after learning about Heidegger’s entanglement with Nazism).
Everything was proceeding rather normally as high-school bands go; a profile in The Cowl, a Providence college paper, quotes Narcizo as looking forward to the summer and “a chance to define ourselves”: a fifth member, a synth, more percussion. But shortly thereafter, a 16-year-old Hersh was hit by a car while biking. Her head was severely injured, and she recalls hallucinating songs ever since: songs made of trauma and teeth, whose voice was the demonic roar Hersh would be known for on record and stage. She wrote most of these in a ramshackle apartment she called the Doghouse, in a frenzy of deteriorating health. “I can’t even remember what it was like to hear a song that didn’t grab my face and shout at it,” she recalled in her 2010 memoir Rat Girl. “Must’ve been soothing. But this is electrifying.”