Kristin Hersh will likely never write a Christmas song -- at least not one you'd recognize as that without being told. There is a Throwing Muses song called "Santa Claus," a blues-rock track with something viscerally off about it. The Santa in it is dingy, jolly in a disreputable way, seen and felt late at night in the blurry recollection of a girl of "eighteen and a half."
The song Hersh calls a Christmas song is "Bamboo," built around a guitar line with the melodic shape of ringing bells and the feeling of a downward spiral. It has actual bells, too: the funereal kind. It's a melting song, a rotting one, like a dirge sung underneath snow that's turning to sludge above you. "The real Christmas," Hersh writes, "would never let it join in any reindeer games." (It's also no longer streaming, so you'll have to take her and my word for this.)
"Torque," released around the same time as "Bamboo," also has a dingy Santa, in those words, and someone blank-eyed and disreputable. The melody has the same spiral as "Bamboo," the same cello blight. But it doesn't sound snowbound at all. It sounds like fighting your way forward through a blizzard you know will knock you backward eventually. Like many of Hersh's songs, the seemingly surreal lyrics describe something that actually happened, with flashback specificity. She writes:
This song was written under water.
On my last tour, our bus broke down and left us stranded in Idaho for a few days. When my band members and I finally arrived at a hotel, we were at first too dirty and disoriented to mind that we were either trapped in our rooms watching bad t.v. or trapped in the hotel lobby with sports fans and evangelist types. It got old fast, however and so did living on complimentary apples from the front desk.
I took refuge in the pool where it was quiet, swimming laps for days. Under the green, hyper-chlorinated water I began to time trip back to a winter night at Logan airport where I sat on a bench in the cold for hours, waiting to be rescued, as I was doing now. This is how songs work; they take your life stories and mix them up because, like old relatives and unconditional lovers, they really don't care about getting it right, they just care.
Songs do that. They do that in reverse, too: coming into your life without telling you they're going to be prophetic at some point. As I write, New York is besieged by SantaCon, whose disreputable, drunken Santas are the sort you rearrange your schedule to avoid. Because this shit insists on happening every year, I have a photo taken ten years ago while walking to the subway the morning after. A dingy Santa (inflatable variety, not bro) is keeled over punctured against the dirt and smiling, as if it has no idea how bad a scene it's in.1 The photo felt grimy when I took it -- if only because it put me at risk of people thinking I actually went to SantaCon -- and feels grimier today. Photos don't tell you they're prophetic either.
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I very nearly used this photo in Lies and Cigars, which I wrote about that year.