New York – Rock singer Kristin Hersh had something else entirely in mind when she named her new band 50 Foot Wave.
Sometimes there’s just not much you can do about bad timing.
“It’s either on my part or God’s, I’m not so sure,” Hersh, a heroine of the alternative rock scene with her longtime band Throwing Muses, told The Associated Press in an interview.
The band’s first full CD, which is being released in March, was mailed to rock critics about a week before Asia’s devastating tsunami, which killed more than 160,000 people.
Hersh named the band after the audiophile term for the lowest sound audible to the human ear. It has a dual meaning, too, since there’s a surf-punk vibe to her music.
The album’s title, “Golden Ocean,” is the phrase one of Hersh’s four sons used to describe how the lights of Los Angeles look at night.
She said she never made the connection between her band’s name and the Asian tragedy until someone phoned to point it out to her.
“I wasn’t thinking about me,” she said. “I was thinking about all of those people.”
So what do you do when something you create, through no fault of your own, suddenly can make someone cringe? After the Sept. 11 attacks, images of the World Trade Center were quietly erased from movies and television shows, and plans for movies about terrorist attacks were shelved.
Hersh plans to stand fast and thinks most people won’t make the connection.
“It was such a good name a month ago,” she said.
