second round game
(13) Kristin Hersh, “Your Ghost”
ESCAPED
(12) Belle and Sebastian, “Get Me Away From Here I’m Dying”
76-63
AND WILL PLAY IN THE SWEET 16
Read the essays, listen to the songs, and vote. Winner is the song/essay with the most votes at the end of the game. If there is a tie, we will play a one-hour overtime (and repeat until we have a winner). Polls close @ 9am Arizona time on 3/12/26.
The Lonely Tenement, or How to be Sad: Andrew Schumacher Bethke on “get me away from here, i’m dying”
A few vignettes, to set the scene and the tone:
It’s the summer of 2005, and a boy is sitting, alone, in the darkened lighting booth of a community theater. He’s listening to B&S’s “Slow Graffiti” on repeat, eating a sandwich before the show. He’s aware, vaguely, that the rest of the crew tolerates his presence at best, but he can’t shake liking the work, or feeling good at being part of something like this. He’s put aside some tickets for a few school friends, and is excited at the prospect of them getting to see this impressive hobby. They will not show up. They haven’t shown up before, and they never, in fact, will.
It’s a little less than a year later. The boy’s dad has, despite being an AC/DC fan, selflessly agreed to drive him and his (new, first) girlfriend and another friend to see Belle & Sebastian and The New Pornographers in San Francisco. Scouting out the venue for parking reveals the entire band out front. The boy absolutely chickens out of meeting them, a regret that he’ll probably carry for as long as he can carry regrets. The show is magic, despite the green wool sweater he’s wearing to look “cool” becoming absolutely disgusting. The future is bright and open and full of erudite, intricate pop songs that are almost all sad. His dad preferred The New Pornographers.
Summer of that year, and the boy is in Chicago, a place that has often been the focus of his dreams of escaping the agricultural cultural hinterland. The whole family is in the basement of his aunt and uncle’s Lincoln Park house, watching High Fidelity. He recognizes the sad strains of “Seymour Stein” even before it becomes the butt of Jack Black’s callout. “It’s the new Belle & Sebastian” becomes a good-natured ribbing for the rest of the trip. Later that night, he’ll stare at the ceiling and listen to Tigermilk as he tries to navigate a relationship that has deteriorated past dysfunctional into something approaching emotionally abusive. It’ll be another year at least before he realizes that maybe this isn’t love and he can just leave.
Fall of 2006, and Dear Catastrophe Waitress is the soundtrack to the great college application season that will finally extricate the boy from the desperately uncongenial environs of the San Joaquin Valley. He is so much the protagonist of “Wrapped Up in Books” and so obviously destined to finally be among his own kind, whatever that means, that he doesn’t even seem to notice how alienating and strange the application process is, and how woefully unprepared he is. It won’t be Glasgow (yet), but the daydreaming is better when it’s set in Chicago or Portland or Berkeley.
It’s spring of 2007 and it’s the kind of warm bath golden sunshine full color saturation day that only California can provide. The window is open and a soft breeze is adding to the analog rinse of If You’re Feeling Sinister on vinyl (!!!). Chicago was a no, Berkeley was a no, Reed and Bard and who knows where else were all in fact long abandoned, and the boy confronts that he won’t actually be leaving home any time soon. He’s felt sadder than this, but never before felt so resigned. Get me away from here, I’m dying.
Sadness as the Solution of the Now
If you’re the kind of person who’s voluntarily reading this essay, you probably have some more or less informed assumptions when I tell you that I was a teenage boy in Fresno who sometime around freshman year of high school decided (and proclaimed) that my favorite band was Belle & Sebastian.
Introverted, “bookish,” glasses-wearing, sad? Yes. Skinny, vintage-draped, “tragic air,” destined for SLAC glory? No. The thing about being a B&S (always the ampersand) fan across the pond and then across the continent and then 180 miles south of the civilization of San Francisco is that it really was the music that spoke to me, and not all the trappings. Now, this is true of a great many fans of a great many bands, but it is at least mildly strange for this band, a group so Aesthetic (après Wilde et avant Tik-Tok) that whole debates were raged in the British music press about whether the band that invented twee could be called twee. To a more read-in fan, Belle & Sebastian was a deeply emplaced band, rising from the ashes of founder Stuart Murdoch’s Chronic Fatigue Syndrome on the wings of the NHS and whatever public arts education programs Thatcher hadn’t been able to rip out of Scotland. It was the kind of group of people who were always willing to stick a finger in London’s eye on behalf of Red Clydeside, while filming themselves on jerky 16 mm film traipsing around the decaying Glaswegian hinterland wearing Breton stripes and berets and smoking. It’s helpful to have seen The Umbrellas of Cherbourg and have a (nouvelle) vague sense of the kind of place where you could get stabbed near Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s School of Art.
I didn’t know about any of that shit at the beginning, and even when I sort of learned about some of it, I didn’t want most of it. For all that, Belle & Sebastian got me through high school. I suspect that much of this has to do with how B&S as a group, and Murdoch as a lyricist, understood just how delicious melancholy was, and how the place of sadness was always better as a place you built in your mind.
A childhood you never had, an adulthood with real problems that are never quite real. Similar to golden age Wes Anderson, the best B&S songs evoke time in a kind of always/never way, disavowing the present in favor of a past and future lived simultaneously. It would be facile and quite incorrect to say that B&S are lionizing sadness, rather, in a Marxist mode, they’re valorizing it, showing all the sad boys and girls and enbies out there how to use it to ironically escape the crushing eternal horizon of the present.
The sadness that pervades much of the B&S catalog, and reaches a kind of anti-fever pitch on “Get Me Away From Here I’m Dying,” is very much a sadness of the external. What B&S understand, and what this song so perfectly conveys, is that sometimes you’re sad because shit you can’t directly control sucks. Sometimes your home town is crap. Sometimes people bully you. Sometimes you’re poor. Sometimes the people you love hurt you or leave you or both. Sometimes you can’t find a crowd to run with who fit your whole deal. Sometimes your plans don’t work out. Sometimes your dreams were stupid. Now none of these topics are revolutionary, and indeed most sad songs probably fall into these buckets, but where B&S truly excels is understanding how sadness often specifically is melancholy, rather than mourning.
Freud (oh boy) famously argues that there are two general approaches to grief (which I’ll here transmute to sadness): mourning, which is the working through of the pain of a specific loss, and melancholy, the pathological grieving of an undetermined object. I’d argue that most sad songs fall into the mourning category here. You had a bad break up, you miss your ex, you lost your job, so on and so on. This might be healthily contained, but it does tend to miss what often is the gerund of it all, the way that sadness sometimes just is undetermined. As a teenager, I didn’t miss my ex, I was lonely and waiting for something I had no way of accurately knowing about. I hadn’t gotten fired, I was just living with the consequences of not being rich. Even if nothing particularly, specifically bad had happened to me, I was existing in a present where nothing particularly good was happening to me. B&S, here and elsewhere, speak to the consequences of sadness as a general lack, rather than a specific loss. Here’s Stuart Murdoch putting paid to dear old Sigmund by pointing out that sometimes your here and now sucks and there just isn’t anything specific about it! Can’t get over the ex you never had, so what now?
Fortunately, GMAFHID offers not just a moment of recognition for the melancholic soul trapped in a present that just kinda generally sucks, but also a way to live in that present in a way that’s bearable. The secret is to recognize the power that living in melancholy gives you. It turns out that you can be melancholic and be hella cool. You can have catchy songs, and be photogenic, and even have some lovers. What doesn’t help is adopting some kind of cynical posture. Cynicism is the balm for someone who’s been hurt, not really for the person who is hurting. The narrator discovers this as he seeks to poke the psychic wound by reading a story with a similar naive, sensitive hero. Ready to see the character come to ruin, he’s shocked when everything turns out okay. What a reverse! But on the outside, in the real world, things are still sad. So what now? Crying is cool, actually, is what now. The secret, the answer, the way to live in this currently-inescapable melancholy now, is to be a little bitchy and superior about it. You’re the sensitive, sad boy looking moodily out of your rain-washed garret and you know what? That absolutely fucking slaps, actually. You’re sad and lonely and that’s so Aesthetic it hurts in the best way. You’re gonna wear a scarf even though it’s 65 degrees and go for walks in the fog looking sad and blasting “Fox in the Snow” and you’re gonna know, because B&S told me so, that the same constant melancholic navel-gazing about how everything sucks is cool and good and makes you at least a little better than all those people stuck with banal happiness. I could only make you cry with these words, indeed.
Now is this healthy, is this true, is this the kind of attitude that one should perhaps inculcate as a true way of life? Of course not. As B&S amply demonstrate, melancholy, especially a melancholy that’s been given the aesthetic imprimatur of some cool-ass Scots, is deeply seductive. Freud’s not wrong that there’s a danger to living in the eternal now of sadness, but sometimes imperfect problems only have imperfect solutions. When the sadness in your life is of the “get me away from here I’m dying” variety, you do just need to make it through until those conditions change. For now, you’re not gonna be less sad. You’re not gonna get over it; there isn’t anything to “get over” or “work through,” you just have to survive until something external to you changes, and if you need to do that by aesthetically collapsing the shitty present under the weight of a past and future that are both better places to be, and then being a superior little shit about it, the hope is that we can get a little grace once we’re out the other side.
The irony of finally coming out the other side of a present that seems inescapable is that, even if you now see those once-infinite horizons of sadness as quite small and even trite, the melancholy of it all is a trace that never stops being sadness, unlike the mourning of more specific hurts. As I finally live (and to some degree reject) the life that sad little teen me wanted and couldn’t seem to ever grasp, as I add experiences and happiness and knowledge and hopefully some wisdom, I’ve moved on from exes and lost jobs and personal mistakes but clearly will never quite move on from the pull of how good it felt to be sad in the lonely tenement.
Andrew Schumacher Bethke is now almost fully post-academia. This essay was partially written and fully revised in bits and snatches in St. Paul during an unprecedented fascist occupation. There doesn't seem to be much else to say autobiographically beyond fuck ICE, no one is illegal on stolen land.
annie zaleski on kristin hersh’s “your ghost”
On April 22, 1994, Kristin Hersh appeared on Late Night With Conan O’Brien. Conan introduces her as a housewife and a mother of two “who also happens to be the lead singer of the band Throwing Muses.” (Turns out the 1990s were not quite as enlightened as we might have thought.) Sitting on a high stool with her legs crossed, she proceeded to perform a languid version of her current single “Your Ghost.”
This take is much slower than the one on her debut solo album, Hips and Makers. Hersh plucks each guitar chord deliberately and sings as though she’s in a trance, even moving her head in a circular motion in rhythm with the music. The melancholy in her voice stings like an icy wind on exposed skin.
Released several months before this performance, Hips and Makers was a far cry from Hersh’s plugged-in electric work with Throwing Muses, the band she’d fronted for a decade. Hersh wrote and recorded Hips and Makers in a horse stable near her house, co-producing the record with Lenny Kaye. The music she made was sparse and cutting, dominated by intricate acoustic guitar and occasional meditative cello from Jane Scarpantoni. The album demanded attention, as Hersh vacillated between delicate compositions like “Your Ghost” and ones with more heft; “A Loon” and “Sundrops” especially resemble ornate folk-punk.
Nevertheless, Hersh didn’t plan on using these tunes—which she wrote for her then-husband/then-manager Billy O’Connell—to launch a solo career. To hear Hersh tell it, Hips and Makers was a fluke. “I was taken entirely by surprise by this record,” she said with a laugh in an early 1994 interview. “It wasn’t my idea. It was my husband’s. And it took years of convincing on his part to get me to take it seriously as a genre.
“The effect of acoustic instruments is so muscular, so physical,” she added. “You don’t have to go through any cords and amps and pickups and buttons and lies before you get there.”
Appropriately, Hersh searched far and wide for the perfect acoustic guitar to suit Hips and Makers. "I didn't want my record to have a shuffling, percussive sound or a wimpy Celtic approach because that's not what my songs are about,” she told Guitar in 1994. “Some blues lines sound really great on a bright kinda guitar like a Guild but I needed so much more than that as I had so many involved parts to play.
Hersh finally found her desired instrument in the attic of a music store in Kansas after the owner gave her a “tiny, beautiful guitar” made by an Austin, Texas, man named Bill Collings. “I played one chord and choked up – there were tears in my eyes!” she continued. “I couldn't believe how wonderful it sounded and I knew that I had to have one." Collings ended up making her a custom model.
Thanks to her discerning eye (and ear), the guitar tone on “Your Ghost” is particularly exquisite, like honey-gold rain. The song’s arrangement is also precise: With methodical patience, Hersh vacillates between wary minor chords and cliffhanger major chords, creating depth out of simple strums. Calling it folk or acoustic rock doesn’t feel quite correct; instead, it feels like something slightly antique, slightly mystical.
I’ve been on a huge Throwing Muses kick since early 2025, as the disquiet lurking beneath the surface of the band’s music captures how I’ve felt in the last year: rattled, unsettled, uneasy. My love for the band stretches back decades and encompasses the group’s many complexities. I’m forever drawn to the musical tension between beauty and sadness, turmoil and tranquility, chaos and contemplation. And as a vocalist, Hersh exudes fragility and strength—a weary but resilient character who feels everything intensely.
Like many 1990s kids, I fell in love with Throwing Muses via their 1995 album University, which arrived in a post-Nirvana world when weirdos and misfits had a mainstream platform. I was so entranced by the bouncy, bracing “Bright Yellow Gun” that I bought the whole album with one of my hard-won Columbia House record club selections. The rest of University also resonated with me, with striking moments such as “Shimmer” and “Teller” existing alongside more otherworldly moments such as the delicate “That’s All You Wanted” and hypnotic “Crabtown.”
University arrived roughly a year after Hips and Makers. As it turns out, the two records are inextricably linked. In an interview that aired in January 1994, Hersh noted that Throwing Muses were in the studio in New Orleans recording. “Ironically, the acoustic project has given the Muses a lot more time to work on their record,” she said with a laugh. “It’s become a very carefully done project, when [you’re] usually pushing yourselves to get product out. Now we have time to sit with it and make sure that it’s perfect.” A Billboard article, meanwhile, noted that the band had actually finished University the previous year.
Although polished enough to land on the radio, the latter didn’t sound overproduced or labored over. Hips and Makers also sounded raw. Lyrically, however, Hersh told an interviewer the subject matter of these songs didn’t diverge markedly from her past work; it was how she delivered the lyrics that differed.
“I don’t think that it’s strikingly more personal than the Muses songs, just more invitingly personal instead of aggressively personal,” she told an interviewer. “I’m not screeching so much. And there’s so much silence and space around it. It sounds like you walked into someone’s bedroom.”
Accordingly, Hersh told HITS in 1994 that she wrote “Your Ghost” in Scotland, after a late night drinking whiskey in a bar with her bandmates, roadies and others. “I had never done that before,” she confessed. “So we were up until 4 a.m. and when I went upstairs, I was just burning and pacing and I couldn’t sleep.”
The way she describes the arrival of “Your Ghost” is magical. “I threw open the windows and this huge moon came shining in, as goofy as it sounds. Well, I’m not one to start thinking, ‘I must write a song. I’m an artist with a capital A.’ Actually I just thought, ‘I’m never going to drink whiskey again.’ But I grabbed some stationery and wrote down all the words to ‘Your Ghost’ and what I thought the chords would be. And when it was done, I shut the windows and cooled down.”
“Your Ghost” might be considered the inverse of Kate Bush’s “Wuthering Heights.” On the latter, the ghost Cathy floats through the night until she reaches Heathcliff and begs him to let her in through a window. She’s on the outside looking in, asking to be back into his life.
In “Your Ghost,” however, a restless Hersh wants companionship. Awake in the middle of the night, she’s haunted by the silence in her house and doesn’t want to be alone with her thoughts. Instead, she imagines a comforting fantasy: dialing up her ghost—referred to simply as “you”—and calling and calling until they come to visit her. Delightfully, Hersh narrates this reunion, describing a lively presence (“Let him walk down your hallway, it's not this quiet”) and fanciful movements (“Slide down your receiver, sprint across the wire”) that end in solace and connection: “Follow my number / Slide into my hand.”
Unfortunately, this happy reconciliation is fleeting. The lonely pre-chorus imagery (“It's the blaze across my nightgown/It's the phone's ring”) represents moonlight and the sound of the phone, two sharp reminders of this spirit. As Hersh sings these lines, Jane Scarpantoni’s cello eases into the mix, amplifying the emotional ache in long, low strokes. And then comes the chorus, the line “I think last night you were driving circles around me” repeated multiple times. It’s a disorienting admission, as if Hersh isn’t quite sure she encountered her ghost. Did she sense their presence? Or was that the night talking? Did the visit actually happen?
The second chorus reinforces the end of this pleasant fantasy. She can’t go on with her life—or start her day—until she tucks her memories away (“I can't drink this coffee till I put you in my closet”) and she unfairly chastises herself for giving into her nostalgia: “I take it from his whisper/You're not that tough.”
Hersh is much too hard on herself. After all, missing someone is disorienting and confusing; grief can pop up when we least expect it. But it’s comforting to think that someone we love is just a phone call away, even in the afterlife, and that we can summon them at will to come visit. Giving into fond memories isn’t a sign of weakness; instead, it’s a way to keep someone alive.
I can’t remember where I first heard “Your Ghost.” Maybe it was on the late-night MTV show 120 Minutes, which played all the cool alternative videos. According to statistics, the “Your Ghost” clip aired once in February 1994, on the same episode Hersh contributed a fierce live acoustic version of “Sundrops.”
It’s more likely I heard “Your Ghost” on the radio, either in Cleveland or on the modern rock station in St. Louis, a city I visited frequently in 1994. Colloquially known as 105.7 The Point, this station was forward-thinking and open-minded. Archival playlists show that the station had “Your Ghost” in ultra-heavy rotation, alongside Morrissey, Material Issue, Soundgarden, Crowded House, Sarah McLachlan, and Enigma.
Either way, teenage me would have sought out “Your Ghost” because Michael Stipe was on it. In 1994, I was at the height of my R.E.M. obsession and needed to hear absolutely everything even tangentially associated with the group.
I had been profoundly moved by the band’s 1992 album Automatic for the People. At that point in my life, when nothing but possibility loomed ahead of me, I didn’t fully understand R.E.M.’s ruminations on mortality, grief, politics, and restlessness. But these songs stirred something in me and made me think bigger. One of the first album reviews I ever attempted was on Automatic for the People. I didn’t know how to be a music critic (or a writer, for that matter) but I felt compelled to articulate why these songs mattered so much to me.
As it turns out, Hersh was also drawn to the way Stipe instinctively used his voice to access deeper truths. “I just heard his voice in one of my ears, and ‘Your Ghost’ being played in the studio in the other,” Hersh said in an interview. “Suddenly I knew what could save the song: ‘Michael, would you sing on this song? I think it would save it.’”
Much to Hersh’s delight, Stipe was game to collaborate. “He has an unbelievably beautiful, deep voice at the same time as it whines in high tones,” she continued. “It flies around. I had already tried to save the depth in the song with a low thundering drum, a big marching drum that sometimes roars out below it all. It sounded very experimental until Michael sang. His voice balanced all these fragments from the drum and the cello at the same time as it introduced a certain character into the song.”
Stipe’s contributions do indeed add new wrinkles to the spirit visit. He’s the titular ghost, conspiratorial and wise. He first emerges during the chorus, shadowing Hersh as both sing the lines “I think last night you were driving circles around me.” Turns out she wasn’t imagining this ghostly presence; instead, she and the phantom are in lockstep. Vocally, Hersh and Stipe also sound perfect together, their twin murmurs unified by shared memory and sadness.
On the second runthrough of the chorus, “Your Ghost” has a breakthrough. Stipe repeats the line “You were in my dream” on his own, in a voice that cracks with need and longing, as Hersh chimes in with “I think last night,” before both agree: “You were driving circles around me.” The lyrical shift is poignant. Hersh isn’t the only one thinking of her ghost. Her ghost also thinks of her. Everything she’s imagining is true, and their connection survived into the afterlife. Despite singing slightly different lines, they always converge at the same place. “Your Ghost” is bittersweet, sure, but comforting rather than isolating.
Of course, Hersh never gives a firm description of who this mysterious “you” is to her; instead, this apparition is whoever we need it to be. But in an interview with Billboard, she had a much different take on the meaning of “Your Ghost,” one that wasn’t quite so morose. "When someone dies on you, it's hard to think, ‘How nice,’” she said. “But when you're used to them not being there, you have another angel, another ghost there with you. That's a sweet way to think of it."
In an odd footnote, Hips and Makers also functioned as a reverse olive branch of sorts, created so Hersh could cut ties with her then-label, Warner Bros. “I bought myself out of my contract by trading them my first solo record for my freedom,” she said in one interview. In other chats, she was even blunter about the transactional role of Hips and Makers, and how releasing that and University did indeed free her from her record contract.
“I had already said to [the label], ‘Look, I’m never going to give you bimbo product. Let us go and I’m out of here,’ and their response was, ‘No, it doesn’t work like that. We’re going to destroy you instead,’” she said.
“So I offered them a solo record, thinking that they were never going to allow it. I mean, they didn’t like my band so why would they like one-third of my band? When they said okay, I thought they were just being nice or feeling sorry for me or something. I didn’t honestly think they were going to release it. Why would they? I mean, if you listen to it, it doesn’t make any sense.”
Incredibly, Hips and Makers made sense to a lot of people. The album peaked at No. 7 on the UK albums chart and No. 1 on an indie albums chart. In America, it became Hersh’s highest-charting album yet, reaching No. 10 on Billboard’s Heatseekers chart and No. 197 on the overall albums chart. “Your Ghost” appeared on the With Honors soundtrack, four songs after Madonna’s blockbuster megahit “I’ll Remember,” and became a No. 1 hit in Iceland of all places.
“Your Ghost” has had a very long tail, with covers performed by The Dandy Warhols, Damien Rice and Greg Laswell, among others. In the mid-2000s, Hersh also re-did “Your Ghost” with her band 50 Foot Wave, transforming the song into a doomgaze elegy scratched with sunburned guitars and noisy distortion.
At first, Hersh sounds like she recorded her vocals underwater. However, as the song crests to the end in a tangle of metallic chaos, she starts howling like a possessed banshee with strep throat. The quiet grief of the original has festered into something feral and raw, like an angry blister that keeps coming back. Perhaps the porous connection between the living and the dead calcified, or maybe the passage of time dredged up other emotions.
In the end, perhaps “Your Ghost” represents the unique experiences that haunt your own life—the losses, the loves, the grief, the happiness. Over time they might evolve from benign phantoms into angry apparitions (and back again) but they are never very far away.
“It’s simple without being simplistic,” Hersh said in 1994 to describe the song. “My songs aren’t usually that specific. I believe your life’s experiences make chemicals in your body that have to match the chemicals in the song so that the song can almost inject you with something that feels like a color or chemical shooting through you and only then do you qualify as the singer of that song. My life experience plays a huge part in these songs, but I don’t think they’re stories about me. Everybody I’ve ever lost is in that song.”
Annie Zaleski is a New York Times best-selling author, journalist and editor with work in Rolling Stone, NPR Music, The Guardian, Variety, The Los Angeles Times, Stereogum, Salon, Billboard, Classic Pop, and Record Collector.
I’m also the author of Taylor Swift: The Stories Behind the Songs and Beyoncé: The Stories Behind the Songs, as well as a 33 1/3 book on Duran Duran’s Rio; the illustrated biographies I Got You Babe: A Celebration of Cher; Lady Gaga: Applause, Pink, Raise Your Glass, and Harry Styles: A Sign of the Times; and the music history books This is Christmas, Song by Song and We Found Love.
I’ve also contributed essays to multiple books, along with liner notes to the 2016 reissue of R.E.M.’s Out of Time, and reissues by Game Theory, ZZ Top and Jason Mraz. Additionally, I was commissioned by the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame to write induction essays for Duran Duran, George Michael, Cher, and Cyndi Lauper.