Love Quote by Kristin Hersh

Hersh makes songwriting sound less like craft and more like visitation: the songs "keep on writing themselves", arriving with their own momentum, their own demands. It’s a sly reversal of the modern myth of the auteur, the artist as master planner. Here, agency is outsourced. She’s not building a cathedral; she’s sweeping up after the storm. That move does two things at once: it honors the mystery of inspiration without turning it into a precious, untouchable story, and it quietly insists that the work is real because it happens to her, not because she manufactures it on schedule.

"I really love them" lands like an unguarded confession. Not "I’m proud of my work" or "I stand by it", but love - intimate, slightly irrational, the feeling you have toward something that surprises you. The "them" matters, too: songs as entities, almost people, implying relationship rather than product. In an industry that treats songs like content units, she’s refusing the language of inventory.

Then the kicker: "as close as I get to a religion". It’s not a pious claim, it’s a pragmatic one. For a musician who’s spent decades turning volatility and vulnerability into sound, songwriting becomes ritual, order, and surrender all at once - a recurring practice that offers meaning without requiring doctrine. The subtext is both defiant and tender: if institutions don’t hold you, you build a private faith out of melody, repetition, and the strange mercy of being given something you didn’t know you needed.