TANYA DONELLY
Returned Belly/Breeders/ Throwing Muse on weirdness, vomit and old-school feminism.
mid all the early ’90s grunge drama, Belly’s 1993 debut Star was an unexpected hit, presenting disturbingly pretty songs inlaid with fairytales and dread. Its breakthrough was a culture shock for singer Tanya Donelly who, alongside stepsister Kristin Hersh, grew up in Rhode Island force of nature group Throwing Muses, later joining The Breeders for 1990’s Pod. Belly dissolved after 1995’s second album King, but Donelly increased her stellar CV with three solo albums and, most recently, the five-volume Swan Song project, conceived as a “little retirement party”. It didn’t quite work: Belly (with bassist Gail Greenwood and brothers Tom and Chris Gorman) are
Atouring this summer, with new material imminent. “I’m collaborative by nature,” she says, speaking from Massachusetts, where she lives with husband Dean Fisher (of The Juliana Hatfield Three) and their two daughters. “My teenager’s friends are very aware of the ’90s, but they know me too well to be impressed by anything I can do.”
Why reform Belly now?
We can put our businesses on hold, our kids are old enough – we’re just in a better place to put in some time, finally. We all genuinely like each other and are having so much fun. Did we feel Belly was unfinished? Absolutely. It was super-fun initially and then became very stressful.
How are the new songs?
We could easily have done the reunion without this handful of songs but we love to write together so it would have been odd not to. There’s some Bellyness to it, but I wouldn’t say you could point to any one song and say “that sounds like this”.
You once said “good music was popular by mistake” in the early ’90s – do you stand by that?
There were a lot of anomalies at that time. We were one of them. Feed The Tree, as poppy as it is, is a weird song. I feel like being puzzled was more acceptable in the ’90s.
Is it true Star was meant to be the second Breeders album?
Kim Deal and I had the tentative plan that she would write the first album and I would write the second, but I left the Muses before she left the Pixies. I wanted another full-time band, so I started Belly and the songs became Star. [Donelly sends a photo she has just taken of “the reels from the demos Kim and I did of the songs that ended up on Star. I don’t know why it says TanyaMania on the label. I did not write that.”]