Awestruck with the sound of dream pop-“It was like heaven music,” Donelly recalls-Throwing Muses sent some early demos to co-founder Ivo Watts-Russell. Two interviewers from a Rhode Island School of Design campus magazine introduced the Muses to the Cocteau Twins and suggested they contact their label, the legendary British outfit 4AD. But this is electrifying.”Īt the urging of producer Gary Smith, who would later shepherd the Pixies to fame, the band moved to Boston and became regulars in the burgeoning college-rock circuit there. “I can’t even remember what it was like to hear a song that didn’t grab my face and shout at it,” she recalled in her 2010 memoir Rat Girl. She wrote most of these in a ramshackle apartment she called the Doghouse, in a frenzy of deteriorating health. Her head was severely injured, and she recalls hallucinating songs ever since: songs made of trauma and teeth, whose voice was the demonic roar Hersh would be known for on record and stage. But shortly thereafter, a 16-year-old Hersh was hit by a car while biking. Originally named the Muses, the band added the “Throwing” as a reference to a passage Hersh had read by philosopher Martin Heidegger (they’d later distance themselves from it after learning about Heidegger’s entanglement with Nazism).Įverything was proceeding rather normally as high-school bands go a profile in The Cowl, a Providence college paper, quotes Narcizo as looking forward to the summer and “a chance to define ourselves”: a fifth member, a synth, more percussion. (Narcizo and Langston would join later.) The band’s early songs were less rock than lo-fi new wave, running on tinkly Casio and teenage enthusiasm, but they had the bones of Throwing Muses: Hersh and Donelly’s sugary harmonies, the scrappy confidence of a band.
Around age 14, they started a band with two classmates at Rogers High School in Newport, Rhode Island with bassist Elaine Adamedes and drummer Becca Blumen. Hersh and Donelly were step-sisters who grew up in musical families-each received a guitar from the other’s father.
Following the Muses in the early years, the dirt might not have been immediately apparent.