New pictures

Last week, I re-read the last half of Rat Girl. It's really a very good book and you don't have to know Throwing Muses music to like it. I'm hoping that it finds a large audience.

Thses are a couple images from the UK edition.

Rat Girl

Last week I went to the bookstore downtown, hoping they'd have Kristin Hersh's Rat Girl. They did; in fact, it was up on the main wall, one of the "Staff Picks".

It's a very sweet book, well written. I'll get my one complaint out of the way first: I could've done without the "69 songs". They seemed redundant. Maybe that was just because I knew most of them. I don't know.

Anyway, the book was everything you could want in a story- sad, scary, funny, interesting, suspenseful. One of the funniest parts comes right in the middle of one of the most disturbing parts: the story about the witch.

I have a feeling that this book is going to find a large audience. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised at all if it were someday made into a movie.

Note: Outside of North America Rat Girl was published under its original title, Paradoxical Undressing.

Upcoming Kristin Hersh show, New Throwing Muses demo up today

In June Kristin Hersh is playing, I think, three US dates, one of which is at The Iron Horse in Northampton, Mass, and I'll be going (hopefully I won't have a 6:30am shift the following morning cause I'd like to have a few screwdrivers or Cape Codders).

On CASH music, the website where Hersh has been posting her new songs for the past couple years, the latest Throwing Muses solo demo, "Swollen", arrived today. This is the fifth one so far ("Sunray Venus", "Milan", "Terra Nova", and "Freesia"). The only one that has grabbed me was "Sunray Venus", which sounds pretty good as it is. Still, they're just demos and a there are a couple that I'm interested to see how they turn out when they're played by the full band.

Also, the new solo record, Crooked, comes out this summer, I wanna say July. From what I read it's being released as a book or with a book and with artwork and whatnot.

It's a big year for KH and TM- This summer KH's autobiography comes out, as Rat Girl in the US and Paradoxical Undressing in the UK. I'm looking forward to that; she's a great writer and her blogs were always fun to read and it'd be cool to hear about the early Throwing Muses records.

Finally, a new 50 Foot Wave EP has been recorded and there's a new live CD out called Cats & Mice.