Hips and Makers by Kristin Hersh

Hips and Makers, Kristin Hersh's first album away from Throwing Muses, came out on 4AD in Britain on January 24, 1994, with Sire handling America on February 1, and it strips her right down. Where the Muses bash and lurch, this is mostly Hersh alone with an acoustic guitar, her voice veering from a whisper to something close to a howl while the songs tumble out in that stream-of-consciousness rush of hers.

Lenny Kaye produced it and kept the company small: Jane Scarpantoni's cello darkens the edges, and Michael Stipe of R.E.M. adds a ghostly backing vocal to the opener, "Your Ghost". She tucks in a version of the traditional "The Cuckoo" among her own songs. Hersh described it as intimate in the most literal way, crammed with the small physical stuff of daily life that turns out to matter enormously. It also reached number seven in the UK, higher than anything she had made alone or with her band.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.