2022 Charity Shop Purchases #71 - Kristin Hersh - Learn to Sing Lke a Star
Last week Tanya Donelly and this week her step-sister and fellow Throwing Muses member Kristin Hersh. Both from the same charity shop in Ballantrae. What are the odds that they were handed in by the same person? Pretty short I would have thought.
Learn to Sing Like a Star is her seventh solo album from 2007 released on Yep Roc in the US and on 4AD in the UK.
It is the first of hers that I have had or heard since picking up the CD single of Your Ghost and her 1994 debut Hips and Makers when they came out in 1994.
I think Learn to Sing Like a Star is one which will benifit from a few listens. I am picking up many more highlights on my second listen than I did first time round.
Shawn Badgley from the Austin Chronicle said of the album it has thehe full Hersh experience, encompassing as it does all of her back-catalog iterations, from the knife-throwing thrills of the Throwing Muses' precise power pop to the cutting melancholia of her Hips and Makers-era balladry.
On the second listen I jotted down a short list of four songs from the album to feature today. Here are two of them.
I've still to pluck up the courage to take her autobiography out from the library.
It's one of her better solo albums and probably her last truly good one. I've long been a big fan, but her more recent stuff - either solo, with Throwing Muses or with 50 Foot Wave - have done little more than trudged along at mid-pace with little in the way of a decent tune between them.
ReplyDeleteI also love how you're keeping her up there as having the most frequently misspelled name in rock...
I was conscious of the spelling conundrum and was trying desperately not to slip up. One mistake of out five was not bad!
DeleteThe book is well worth a read.......tough and harrowing in places, but very well written.
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