Who is Kristin Hersh? Twenty years and fifteen albums into her career, the question reasserts itself. The teenage girl who formed Throwing Muses, who mesmerized sad eighties alternakids with songs like “Delicate Cutters” and “Soul Soldier” did not grow up to scream, “Shut the fuck up” and “I don’t feel so sorry” fronting the blisteringly loud and fast 50 Foot Wave, did she? Yes, she did, and managed six solo albums in between. It’s been a riveting rollercoaster of a career, one that now offers up her best work yet.

Hersh was in high school when she formed Throwing Muses, the first American band signed to 4AD Records. Throwing Muses offered dazzling musical expressions of psychic chaos. Tempo and mood ricocheted wildly. The songs roamed and startled and defied easy categorization. The young band made eight albums in ten years (1986-1996) during which time Hersh bore three sons. It was a fertile decade for Hersh to be sure, and a tumultuous one. A psychiatric diagnosis, a child custody battle, a lawsuit by a former manager, and step-sister Tanya Donnelly’s exodus from the band added up to what Hersh’s current manager (and husband; add that to the scandal sheet) refers to as “Kristin’s Behind the Music years.”

By 1993, Hersh’s personal life had stabilized and she found herself hearing songs that, to her chagrin, didn’t sound like Throwing Muses songs (Hersh hears a song… and chases it, stalks it, wrestles it to fruition). So she recorded them solo and called the album Hips and Makers. Then something unexpected happened. This small, personal record took off, outselling all of Throwing Muses’ albums, and expanding Hersh’s fan base at a time when Throwing Muses was ceasing to be economically viable. When Hersh sang in 1989’s “Devil’s Roof,” “I have two heads,” she might have been predicting her musical future, as her career would soon require her to move seamlessly between two musical heads: BandKristin and SoloKristin.

As if to complicate matters further, SoloKristin had a few different heads. Hersh released a CD of her favorite Appalachian folksongs (Murder, Misery, and Then Goodnight) in 1998 and some questions about the “schizophrenia” of Hersh’s musical oeuvre were answered – “maybe” – by offering fans a taste of the music she’d been raised on. In one song, a young man loves a woman so intensely, he loses his mind and kills her. In another, a new baby brings giddy joy and fantasies of filling his bottle with gin to quiet him.

This musical tradition illustrates the world view that is, perhaps, the one constant through Hersh’s multiple incarnations: pure darkness and pure light just don’t exist. Love is like a bee sting (Hips and Makers), like kissing gravel (Limbo), like a velvet bed of nails (Sunny Border Blue). Joy and sadness complement and mediate each other. The dazzling disarray of Hersh’s early work has given way to mature accomplishment. Her voice has grown deeper and richer and the songs now take flight without leaving artist and listener seasick. The gift that once overwhelmed Hersh, has been harnessed – “with craft, with age” – to magnificent effect.

Hersh conceived another son (her fourth) in 2002 and another band (her second) in 2004. Finding solo artistry often “insular and a bit of a mindfuck,” Hersh formed 50 Foot Wave out of a craving to take time away from her solo career and once again play with a rock band. Designed as a DIY, tour-intensive project, the band prioritized the live experience and literally gave music away on Hersh’s website, throwingmusic.com.

And then life dealt Hersh another hairpin turn.

“Something was definitely up with me and water,” Hersh observes, in perhaps the understatement of her career. When the tsunami occurred in 2004, a month before a band called 50 Foot Wave was scheduled to release an album called Golden Ocean, The New York Times called Hersh for an explanation. Hersh told the journalist he might want call the band Tsunami rather than her.

Then the water got closer to home. In the fall of 2005, Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans (one of Kristin and Billy’s former haunts). Shortly thereafter, a burst pipe flooded Hersh’s home while the family was away on tour. When insurance only paid out half the cost, Hersh and her husband emptied their savings repairing the house. Financially depleted, they were forced to sell their home at a loss and move on.

How to explain, then, Hersh’s lyrics on Learn to Sing Like a Star? The songs were written in Los Angeles–before Katrina and before Hersh’s house flood. In “Day Glo,” Hersh sings of being “twisted in slo-mo by angry water” and screams, “I’ve lost everything” with palpable fury. From the song, “Ice:” “Damp and sour-skulled, we land with a thud, eight hours off our old life.” A song called “Under the Gun” reflects on “our puny savings – “blown.” Hersh observes, “It’s like the songs knew water would make us really poor really fast, though that didn’t happen for another year. Songs don’t care about time.”

The phenomenon isn’t entirely new to Hersh, whose 1988 Throwing Muses album, House Tornado, has been widely interpreted as Hersh’s rock n’ roll meditation on female domesticity – “marriage, housework, the demands of family.” Hersh allows that the album may be just that, but, “I didn’t have a house or a marriage yet when I wrote those songs.”

But enough backtracking. Here’s the present. Here’s Learn to Sing Like a Star. Here’s a big, spacious, sumptuous record with emphatic energy (“In Shock” and “Winter”), stripped ballads (“Nerve Endings” and “Ice”), deceptively breezy upbeat numbers (“Under The Gun” and “Wild Vanilla”) and dreamy tunes (“Vertigo” and “Sugar Baby”).

The album features beautiful strings, played by British friends, Martin and Kim McCarrick. Throwing Muses’ David Narcizo, supplies the drums (and also the album cover, starring Kristin’s lips!) while Kristin plays everything else. “No sound went down on this record unchallenged,” Hersh explains, “if we’d heard it before– a surf-guitar, for instance–we layered it with piano reverb, tubular bells, and backwards bass to create an unusual hybrid tone with more character.”

There will be live dates, with solo songs and a band format: Throwing Muses/50 Foot Wave bassist, Bernard Georges, and 50 Foot wave drummer, Rob Ahlers, plus strings.

And the title – “Learn to Sing Like a Star” – is there a story there? Of course. Kristin traded mixes and fixes on the record via email with engineer Trina Shoemaker. Every time Kristin attempted to download a mix, she reports, “I’d see this recurring piece of spam with the subject line ‘Learn to sing like a star!’ It was this ludicrous piece of junk mail. I saw it so many times, it started to sound moving to me — why not sing for the cosmos instead of the music business? And suddenly there wasn’t a better name for the record.” In an album rich with sad prophecy, might the title offer prophecy of a brighter hue, a reference to the meteoric rise to fame Hersh will soon experience as a result of this record? Hersh laughs, “Yeah, that’s probably it.”