YOU can't quite picture the scene when Throwing Muses singer Kristin Hersh says she loves nothing more than baking muffins and selling them from her bike at home in New England.

After all, a dark and dizzy world is how the space she inhabits has often been described. And Hersh's bipolar disorder, which gave her hallucinations and personal demons, means it sometimes is.

"If I'd have known I could opt out of hectic I would've, but I guess I'm in the wrong kind of music for that," she says. "We didn't make it easy for ourselves and we weren't going to play the game, you have to be in the fields and in the trenches."

She also has an interesting take on the rock and roll lifestyle, believing some who initially treated music as a spontaneous impulse were rewarded with the misguided notion that it's all about ego and money.

"Music teaches you that, how can you unlearn it? They lose music when it happens ... and listeners, these people may continue to have fans, but fans aren't music listeners. Listeners know you're just like a plumber doing a job," she says.

Humility should be a given, Hersh believes. If you need to be reminded, this way of life will do that. And that's how it should be.

She has another reason to remain grounded. Life with her autistic son Wyatt is anything but rock and roll.

"He is a special boy," says Hersh. "I argued against the autistic personality until he came along. But Wyatt is consumed by aesthetics, he is utterly brilliant and I have to say also tortured. It's vivid for both of us, we will do better, we can do better and clarity is the way through it."

York Press:

Kristin Hersh: "I always felt the songs were pushing my life around"

Unlike other parents in a similar situation, Hersch has another, cathartic coping mechanism; words and music. As if to prove the point, her forthcoming solo effort: Wyatt at the Coyote Palace, a double CD/ book combination, has just been released by Omnibus Press.

The words were inspired by Wyatt and his fascination with an abandoned apartment building inhabited by coyotes. Wyatt often visited and even filmed the animals during the recording of the music, then just as suddenly his intense fascination came to an end.

"It doesn't feel like self-expression," says Hersh. "I lived all the stories, but I feel like I'm being groomed to accept this range of memory that becomes a song. I always felt the songs were pushing my life around."

Hersh says Muses' drummer, Dave Narcizo - her best friend since third grade - decided that Wyatt needed to make the experience finite, like bottling a memory.

"Dave thinks we'll see it again," she says. "He tells me Wyatt's love of the place will come back, when the images have been filtered through his fascinating psychology."

Since founding her influential art-punk band, Hersh has spent her time confounding expectations and breaking rules - both hers and others. From life as reluctant front person to the solo career she launched in 1994 – which she swore would never happen – to this recent foray into a surprisingly successful new career as an author.

Tonight in Leeds and on Wednesday in York you can spend time with this captivating woman on a rare UK solo tour: An Evening With Kristin Hersh, which celebrates her endless creativity with readings and songs spanning her entire career.

Not to mention Wyatt.

"I believe that life is a huge party," she says. "You throw confetti into the air and then you hope it will fall on somebody."

Kristin Hersh plays Leeds Brudenell Social Club on November 14 and The Crescent, York, on November 16, promoted by Please Please You. The York gig has sold out already.