Hersh Plucks Songs From the Air : Pop music: Leader of Throwing Muses, playing at Bogart’s Tuesday, says she gives audible form to tunes floating in ether.

If you want to discuss songwriting with Kristin Hersh, you had better be prepared to take a stroll along the astral plane.

The 26-year-old rocker from Newport, R.I., says the songs she writes for her band, Throwing Muses, come to her in the old-fashioned way. Make that the old old fashioned way--the one conceived of by the ancient Greeks, who held that artistic inspiration arrives by the mysterious agency of those supernatural beings, the Muses.

Hersh, who leads her band at Bogart’s in Long Beach Tuesday night, speaks of songs coming to her unbidden, arriving with images and titles that aren’t always clear to her, let alone to a listener who might try to puzzle out the abstract situations and symbolism of a typical Throwing Muses song. In a recent phone interview from Los Angeles, Hersh referred to the songs she writes as her “kids” but also as mysterious “ghosts” floating around in the ether, commanding her to give them audible form.

Those spectral intrusions have forced her to stay up all night and to spend a rare free day during a tour holed up in a hotel room with her guitar. She says the songs on Throwing Muses’ new album, “Red Heaven,” made the most presumptuous claim of all: They prompted her to reconsider her decision last year to quit the music business.

A raft of outside pressures and internal problems beset Throwing Muses while they were working on their 1991 album, “The Real Ramona.” Before the band finished it, the four members decided to make it their last. They would complete the album and go on tour, and then, when the tour ended, they would announce that Throwing Muses was finished.

“I was unhappy in the music business. The whole band was making me so miserable, I just didn’t care,” Hersh said. “It had become something we didn’t want to be a part of. We had lawsuits on our hands (including one brought by a former manager that Hersh said is now almost resolved). We had income tax problems. Emotionally, I just removed myself. I was very bad at making decisions, and having been the bandleader, it just resulted in a lot of chaos.”

Before “Ramona” was completed, “we said, ‘Right now we’ve broken up, but we’re not going to tell anyone. We’re not going to tell the record company, because we want them to push the record,’ ” Hersh said.

A pregnant Hersh played out Throwing Muses’ 1991 tour and then, 13 months ago, gave birth to her second son, Ryder James. Soon, she found herself strumming a guitar beside the baby’s bassinet, taken over by another onslaught of the Muse’s gifts--or demands.

“It gradually became apparent that the songs didn’t care about what I thought about being in the music business. They kept coming, and they kept making me truly happy.”

Not that the songs on “Red Heaven” could be described as merry. The majority of them reflect inner turmoil, which has been par for the course for Hersh in a recording career that, dating back to 1986, has yielded five albums and several EPs. Hersh said the songs don’t have to come out sounding sunny to make her happy. They just have to be honest and accurate representations of the emotions they explore.

These songs “are the perfect pictures of what we have deep inside us,” she said. “It makes me love the songs that they do come with sweat and mundane words and angry words and confused words. I think my (personal) life figures more prominently in them than I’d like to admit, but they are pictures of life that you recognize deep inside” rather than with the conscious mind.

In its current edition, Throwing Muses is down to two full-fledged members, Hersh and drummer David Narcizo. Tanya Donelly, who had been Hersh’s friend and musical partner since girlhood, left after the 1991 tour and formed her own band, Belly.

Besides business pressures, part of the reason for the split was Donelly’s emergence as a songwriter. In the past, she had written songs sparingly, offering no more than one or two for each album. But when the band gathered to make “The Real Ramona,” Donelly came in with a batch of songs of her own.

“There was so much material, we didn’t know which direction the band should be moving in,” Hersh said. “(Songwriting) wasn’t her thing, then she suddenly started writing a lot more, and I just didn’t think they were Throwing Muses songs. That was a problem, but it had an answer”--namely, the split into two bands.

Donelly and Hersh say they have remained friends despite the breakup.

“I decided I would rather be friends with these people than deal with being in the band,” Donelly, 26, said in a separate phone interview from her home in Newport. The split wasn’t that traumatic, she said, because “Kristin and I have had family problems more dramatic than the band breaking up; we’ve been through worse. When I’m here (in Newport), I see her about once a week. She’s literally right up the street from me, so I march up the street. I’m in love with her children.”

Donelly started Belly as an outlet for her unexpected creative surge over the past two or three years.

“I hit a wet spell, and I’m milking it for all it’s worth,” she said with a giggle. “I think I just hit my stride.” Throwing Muses’ former bassist, Fred Abong, joined Donelly in Belly but has since left the band. Donelly said she has been looking for a female bassist to round out a lineup that includes brothers Chris and Tom Gorman, a drummer and guitarist who previously played in the Rhode Island hard-core punk band, Verbal Assault.

Belly already has released an EP in England. Its debut album, “Star,” is due in America early next year. At live shows, Donelly said, the band has avoided playing songs she wrote and sang in Throwing Muses. “We tried doing that, but I felt very uncomfortable. It’s like wearing old lingerie in a new relationship.”

“We’ve always been great friends and we always will be,” Hersh said. “I miss not having another good friend around. But the band is something different. Musically, it’s better this way.”

Stripped down from the two guitars/two voices, bass and drums lineup of the past, Throwing Muses sounds tougher and more direct than it had on previous albums. “Our dynamics are much greater,” Hersh said. “Our solidity is much greater, and that may sound a little straighter at times.”

Besides Hersh and Narcizo, who has been the Muses’ drummer almost from the start (an early, short-lived incarnation was an all-female lineup of high school classmates), the band also includes bassist Bernard Georges, a former roadie for Throwing Muses who now is a full-time adjunct member.

Absent Donelly’s distinctive, ethereal harmony voice, Hersh sought some outside vocal help when she asked Bob Mould, the former Husker Du member, to sing with her on “Dio,” a hard-driving track on “Red Heaven.”

“I’d met him three or four times. We weren’t close, but I called him up and said I had this sound in mind for the song. He’s got an incredibly thick, elemental voice. He was really excited about it, which I didn’t expect. I’m really shy to do something like that, and he’s even shyer than me. He was so good that I had to re-cut my vocals so he wouldn’t show me up too badly. I have a thick voice for a lady, but I sounded like Minnie Mouse next to him.”

Hersh, an almost-immobile but intense stage performer, said she doubts that she’ll do anything different now that the band has been reduced from a quartet to a trio. “I’m usually not very aware what’s going on on stage because if I’m not (immersed) right in a song, I don’t know what I’m doing,” she said. Hersh said her obliviousness became evident when the band played a show in Philadelphia on its last tour. Donelly had lost her voice, and invited a fan who knew all the parts to come on stage and sing with the band.

“She did all of Tanya’s backups; she was right next to me, and I didn’t know she was there,” Hersh said with a laugh. “I had my eyes open, but I didn’t see it. I don’t know if that’s being focused, or stupid.”