In an Ideal world, Kristin Hersh would give her songs away without having to package them up with her face on the cover. And, while she was busy charitably donating her work to interested parties, food would miraculously appear on the table for her and her family.

"I haven't found a way to do that," she states, obviously. "But the intemet is as close as I've been able to get."

Hersh is one of a band of musicians who are vocal in their support of music-sharing websites. She has also indulged in a little music sharing of her own with her Work In Progress series. For a small subscription fee, fans get a new Kristin Hersh song in demo form every month.

"I thought we could put up these lost tracks, B-sides and instrumentals. But what people really want to hear is bedroom demos, me singing out of tune a song that I don't know yet with terrible guitar sounds. So l just swallow and look away."

Kristin Hersh fans are dorky, to use one of her favourite words. They want the skeleton of the songs as much as the flesh and blood. To her modest surprise, Hersh is held in remarkably high esteem as a songwriter. Fellow nethead David Bowie is a Work In Progress subscriber "but we charged him twice so he asked for his $16 back".

Although she has been a solo artist for almost a decade, Hersh's name is synonymous with Throwing Muses, the torrid Boston-based band she formed with her step sister Tanya Donnelly when they were both teenagers. The band released seven fervently acclaimed albums before reluctantly splitting in 1997 because they simply couldn't afford to keep going any more.

"We had always agreed that if one of us won the lottery or if a rich fan died and left us all their money, we would be a working band again," she says.

'We never really broke up, because we didn't want to get back together and say 'this is a reunion."

Muses fans were given little hope of a comeback; the legend "TM1984-1997" was etched on the sleeve on Hersh's 1998 album, Strange Angels. But, at the same time, she was desperately missing her co-conspirators, drummer David Narcizo and bassist Bemard Georges. After a brief hiatus, the band reformed for occasional, isolated fan conventions around the States, called Gut Pageants.

When Hersh found that she was "still writing songs for my dead band", she decided it was time not for a reunion, but a resurrection, marked by the release of new material. Recording the album Throwing Muses felt, she says, 'like life as it should be - like going home'.

The album is to be accompanied by select international dates fitted around the day jobs of Narcizo and Georges (Donnelly contributes to the album but won't be touring). Fans in the UK should make the most of the band's presence while they can.

"I don't think that we will be able to work again unless the music business has some kind of sea change," says Hersh. "It doesn't really support this kind of musician and that's okay, that was a decision we made when we were 14. We knew that we could be writing stupid songs and hiring stylists but we wouldn't have been good at playing that game.

"It's not that we're so noble, it's really that we would be bad at that. Our heroes weren't played on the radio either; our heroes had day jobs too. But we weren't prepared for our last record to be the last record [appropriately, it was called Limbo]. So if this is the last record it's a nice period at the end of a sentence.'

But who knows, as nothing is ever mapped out in advance for Hersh. She talks of her songs as separate entities over which she has no control. They come to her in the night and wake her up. For years, she was tormented by voices in her head. She was eventually diagnosed as suffering from a bi-polar disorder. As a performer in the freak-loving realm of rock'n'roll, she cast herself wide open to voyeurism and amateur psychoanalysis.

Unlike Kurt Cobain, she's not one to cry emotional rape, once telling a fan during a webchat: "I am really happy. It's the songs that are depressed." And as for interpreting her lyrics, go knock yourself out: 'Lyrics to me are a percussive melody. I don’t find out what I'm saying until much later, when someone complains about it.'

"I try to keep my emotions off the songs," she says. "It's tempting to use them as personal catharsis but I find the songs last longer and speak to more people if I get everything off my chest before I go through a songwriting period. I have to live life and build up some life pictures and then the songs come and pick and choose among those stories.'

Her latest solo album The Grotto, which she regards as the other side of the same coin as Throwing Muses, was written following the death of her stepfather - though it is not exclusively about that - and named after the area of Providence, Rhode Island where Hersh’s mother lives and where she wrote the songs.

"We had just spent two weeks with them. We left with the plan to see them again and he died in a second,' she recalls. "So we turned our tour bus around and came right back- The whole town came out for his wake.

"I heard that my mother might be suicidal so I brought the whole family back to Rhode Island. She's always been a very vibrant, young person and something made me think she would go into a decline, but I think that surrounding her with my children for six months was good for her.'

Like her mother, Hersh was young when she had her first child although their circumstances were very different. "She was married and l was a teenager in a rock band. It seemed like a bad way to go and yet my baby saved my life and changed my outlook on everything. As soon as your baby is born, you're not here for you, you're here to give."

Hersh now has four sons - "I think l'd be afraid to have a girl, they seem complex" - all, as she gleefully points out, born at five year intervals. "It's absolute coincidence but it's like I go into heat every five years..." Her youngest, Bodhi, was born in November. He mewls quietly throughout the interview.

When she goes on tour, the family comes with her. When she's not on tour, the family still tends to move about, settling briefly in different parts of the States. For her children, "home is where mom and dad is". At the moment, that means Palm Springs, the Californian desert town where rich people go to retire or, as Hersh puts it, "where old people go to play golf. Apparently they actually live on golf courses and golf every day till they die. We ended up here by accident.'

For someone whose life appears to be governed by such accidents, Hersh says she has "lucked out" - closeknit family, David Bowie lapping up her songs, two fine new albums and, briefly, her old band back. Oops, she did it again.

• Throwing Muses and The Grotto are both released by 4AD on 17 March. Throwing Muses play the QM, Glasgow, on Sunday 23 March