Kristin Hersh releasing album Wyatt At The Coyote Palace

Kristin Hersh

The ever impressive singer/songwriter and author Kristin Hersh will release her latest solo effort Wyatt at the Coyote Palace, a double CD/ book combination in November 2016 and anticipation is high.

At the age of 14, Kristin Hersh founded the influential art-punk band Throwing Muses in Providence, beginning a tradition of confounding expectations and breaking rules - both hers and others. From life as the reluctant front person for the Muses to the solo career she launched in 1994, which she swore would never happen, to founding an ambitious altruistic nonprofit and her recent foray into a surprisingly successful new career as an author, Hersh continues to push herself to the boundaries of her artistry and imagination. She also currently fronts the power trio 50FOOTWAVE, having released six mini-albums since being founded in 2004.

Wyatt at the Coyote Palace is the third release in the ground-breaking book-CD format that Hersh began with her previous solo album Crooked and Throwing Muses’ 2013 release Purgatory/Paradise.  Since sharing essays and tour diaries on her own website, she has published the critically acclaimed Paradoxical Undressing in the UK (released as Rat Girl in the USA), a children’s book Toby Snax, and Don’t Suck, Don’t Die, a personal account of her long friendship with the late Vic Chesnutt, which earned her rave reviews.

Wyatt at the Coyote Palace is a collection of true stories and songs of love and loss, combining Hersh’s humor with the pains and travails of a life spent constantly in motion. Defined by potent guitars, addictive melodies and poignant lyrics, this release is a serious sign of strength and depth, bringing the listener into what the BBC calls Hersh's "dark and dizzy world." 

Kristin Hersh - Soma Gone Slapstick

"The stories are all true. They happened over the last few decades. The songs were written in the last five years. They're true, too, in a much more oblique way," explains Kristin Hersh. "But it's always felt to me that songs were pushing my life around so they could be born: I live the stories and then the song lives. Very much like children. A baby isn't born because you got pregnant, you got pregnant because a baby was going to be born."

Recorded in at her favorite studio in Portsmouth, RI with engineer Steve Rizzo at the helm, Hersh performs and creates all instruments and sounds on this 24-track opus, including guitar, bass, drums, piano, horns, cello and even field recordings.  While the songs were written during a turbulent period in her life, the prose was inspired by her son Wyatt, who is on the autism spectrum, and his fascination with an abandoned apartment building inhabited by coyotes.  Wyatt often visited and even filmed the coyotes during the recording of the music, yet suddenly his intense fascination came to an end.

Hersh comments, “I had so loved his love of the place. Throwing Muses' drummer, Dave - my best friend since third grade - decided that Wyatt needed to encapsulate his sense memories of the coyote palace, make the experience finite, like bottling a memory. Dave thinks we'll see it again, and Wyatt's love of the place will come back, when the images have been filtered through Wyatt's intense and fascinating psychology.”

File next to: Throwing Muses, 50FOOTWAVE, Sleater-Kinney, St. Vincent, The Pixies

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