Creativity Quote by Kristin Hersh

There is a quiet provocation in Kristin Hersh admitting she "doesn't have the inclinations" other people have "as far as the business is concerned". It reads less like a complaint than a boundary line: a refusal to pretend that wanting to make art automatically means wanting the machinery wrapped around it. The sentence is carefully, almost stubbornly modest. She isn't claiming moral purity or throwing punches at the industry; she's describing a mismatch, the way someone might admit they don't have a taste for small talk or office politics. That understatement is the point. It makes the critique harder to dismiss as bitterness.

Hersh comes out of a lineage of musicians for whom credibility was never just an aesthetic choice but a survival strategy. From Throwing Muses through her solo work, her public persona has leaned toward the unsanded, the private, the lyric-first. In that light, "inclinations" is doing a lot of work: it suggests temperament, instinct, even wiring. The subtext is that the music business rewards a very specific personality type: the self-promoter, the schmoozer, the brand manager in eyeliner. Hersh positions herself outside that personality economy without grandstanding, which is why the line stings.

It also reframes "the business" as something external to the actual work. The implication isn't that commerce is evil; it's that the industry's expectations can be parasitic, demanding not just songs but a performance of ambition. Hersh is naming the awkward truth many artists dodge: you can be serious about music and still have no appetite for the careerism that claims to be synonymous with it.