How Kristin Hersh Is Making Herself Whole Again

Her most recent tome Don't Suck, Don't Die: Giving Up Vic Chesnutt is about the late, great singer-songwriter from Georgia who tragically took his own life in 2009. The two were close friends and constant tour companions, and Hersh is determined to keep the tormented genius' work and memory in the public domain.

"We try to cover him and realise that he really is inimitable — you're never going to be as good at it as he is."

"I'm not playing a ton of Vic songs because I don't think anybody should," she admits. "I'm playing songs that I liked to watch him play or that we liked to play together, but we try to cover him and realise that he really is inimitable — you're never going to be as good at it as he is. Then if you try to make it your own that seems ever worse. As he put it, 'I ain't got no metre!' — so it's hard enough to just basically play it and fit all those syllables in.

"But the texts I'm reading from are the Muses book Purgatory/Paradise, and sometimes [my memoir] Rat Girl and then Crooked my last solo record and then the Vic book. I guess I'm just doing it for me, because every time I read a passage it informs the next piece and vice versa, and I'm sort of intrigued by that rabbit hole that seems to go up. I learn something at every show in other words."

Hersh is pleased to be intensely involved in her own performance because for her it's a new experience.

"Historically I've never really been there when I performed, I disappeared — that was my whole job, to disappear," she recounts. "And that disappearing act turned out to be dissociative disorder, which means multiple personalities — my other personality was music. I'd been diagnosed bipolar and I never believed that diagnosis, I'd just maintained that it was music that made me strange. It turned out to be true: I was treated for PTSD that I'd sustained when my son was kidnapped, and that treatment revealed the ultimate personality — she and I started to become the same person. The EMDR specialist said, 'All of your life's trauma has been endured by that personality and that's why your music sounded the way it did, and why you were so kind and easy as a person — so you're feeling all of the pain of your life in one moment.'

"So what ultimately happened was that I'm cured and I'm present every time I perform, and it's turned out to just sort of be interesting: I'm there now. I can see my hands moving, I know what my songs are about, but I need the help of the texts to walk me through it. I'm sort of wandering out as a newbie in my own material."