Customer Reviews

Strings

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Beautiful arrangements... you will love this if you loved Hips and Makers.

This is a collection of several songs from Kristin's album "Hips and Makers" arranged for strings. In some cases, while the sound is pleasing, the arrangements worked better for me in some of the "calmer" songs like "Velvet Days." There are also three other tracks, including a cover of "When the Levee Breaks".

Really enjoyed this c.d. & really did a good job on the Led Zepplin cover"When the levy breaks,Tom

"Strings" is romance, or romantic orchestration substituting and proving more rewarding than the concept of love, illusion being more longstanding than reality. So inspires Kristin Hersh (Throwing Muses) in this eight-song EP compact disc which provides dark, beautiful cello and violin chamber music to Hersh's morning misted lyrical landscape of broken love remedied by nature. Her absent lover in "Strings" is embodied by environmental song title themes as, "Beesting", "A Loon", and "Sundrops". The quest, or avoidance of human relationships is the fuel that keeps the fire burning as in "Me and My Charms", in which she sings, "When I kiss an angel, I have a piece of you". But only a piece, she avoids the commitment of relationship and accepts the earth, moon, sun, and angels as her own. The strings on "Strings" are luscious full-bodied breaths of classical music, much like "The Brodsky Quartet's" work with Elvis Costello, but Hersh plays a strikingly sharp acoustic guitar as well, which accompanies the brooding strings like day and night. Her rendition of Led Zepplin's "When The Levee Breaks". which concludes the disc, is closer in heart to the American folk ballads that inspired it and sounds genuinely bluegrass.

Most people misinterpret this song, however if you listen to the lyrics it's all explained for you in black and white, and it is one of my favorite songs ever. The man whom she is in love with does not love her back. He is instead seeing someone else, as explained through the lyrics, "Is she here? Is she here right now? Drive her off, don't bother to call." Because of this unrequited love, Kristin is going to commit suicide, proven by the lyrics "I'm checking out today." Checking out is a well-known term for dying. When she does kill herself, she will be in heaven where she can finally be intimate with a heavenly being whom she compares to the man she is singing about. She will finally be able to kiss and take beauty, which she wasn't able to do with this man she's singing about.This is demonstrated by the lyrics "When I kiss the angel, I have a taste of you. When I take the angel, I have a piece of you." However, she hasn't killed herself yet, so the guy can still come back and save her as demonstrated from the lyrics, "You can come back, I haven't left you yet."

Hope this makes the message of this song clearer for you all, and when one understand what the song is really about then it's poignancy and absolute meloncholy is much more easily felt.