2. Kristin Hersh, Summer Salt
Kristin Hersh’s album Sunny Border Blue was without question my favorite CD of 2001. It might even be my favorite album of the decade. Songs like Spain and Flipside and Listerine bristle with drunken rage, while somehow never sounding especially angry, and I like that. Hersh’s lyrics are sad, funny, and mildly discomforting. “I don’t know where I am,” goes the chorus to 37 Hours. “Plus I don’t know when I am. ‘Cause you insist on using fucked-up military time.” She somehow manages to be eternally weird without seeming silly.
Recorded in-between 1999′s noisy Sky Motel and the disturbingly quiet 2004 album The Grotto, Sunny Border Blue is mind-blowing from start to finish. Musically, it strikes the perfect balance between the singer-songwriter’s poppier side and her strange habits (changing mood midsong, forgetting to write choruses, etc.) And with the exception of the drums on her cover of Cat Stevens’ Trouble, she performed the entire album herself.
Summer Salt is maybe the album’s catchiest song. A haunting story about falling “head over heels for a cold-blooded creature,” you never find out enough details to know what’s actually going on. But whatever it is, it sure doesn’t sound good. While Hersh backs herself up with playground-like “la la la” sounds, she threatens the guy with words. “I don’t have to talk,” she taunts. “I don’t have to talk. But when I do, if this is true, there’s nothing I won’t say.” The taunts are made all the more disturbing by Hersh’s voice, which was gravelly when Throwing Muses started recording in the mid-eighties but which has gotten steadily more jagged over time.
Re-reading my year-end song and album reviews from 2001, it’s obvious I had a lot of trouble writing about this song then. I’m having a lot of trouble writing about it now, too, if you can’t tell. A brief but monsoon-like rainstorm just swept through the area. As the sky opened up, listening to Sunny Border Blue conjured feelings in me that have lain dormant for years. Not anger or amusement or even sadness, but love of the intense emotional power that an album can hold.
Kristin Hersh, Summer Salt
Bonus Tracks:
Kristin Hersh, Spain
Kristin Hersh, 37 Hours
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