Head cheese

Kristin Hersh’s vocals capture moments of desperation, defiance and surrender. She founded Throwing Muses with half-sis Tanya Donnelly (Belly) in high school, and released seven albums before going solo. Here are her monomanias.

5. Dope: The “war on drugs” and the incessant marketing of drugs blaring out of our TVs, the expansive vocabulary of parents and the elderly when it comes to discussing medication, the bimbos (see No. 4) who hawk brand-name prescriptions to doctors for drug companies, while our jails fill with people who are also in the drug trade.

4. Hooterville: That Playboy, cheerleader, “bimbos-are-the-only-hot-women” mind-set and the damage it’s done. It’s hard to be glib about this because I think it’s so dangerous. There are an infinite number of ways in which human beings can be beautiful.

3. Wicked garden: My 8-year-old son is heavily into Wicca gardening these days. He’s planting Dragon’s Blood and Elder Tree Mother. Whoa.

2. Foggy: I stepped out of the theater I was playing in London the other night and into the densest, Jack-the-Ripperest fog I’ve ever seen. I was mesmerized; I can’t stop thinking about the misty glow that shot out of the traffic lights. Very cool.

1. Shit: Your furnace gives up and the pipes in your house freeze, then burst. Your ceiling collapses and water fills all the rooms of your house, and leaks into the downstairs, soaking books, instruments and pictures. This just happened to us and we’re working on having a better attitude about it. But so far, all we’ve come up with is: They were only things. But they were our things.