In a city with as vibrant a music scene as Boston’s — a scene where you can hardly swing a stick without thwacking some up-and-coming young talent the majors are "looking seriously" at — it’s easy to take career artists like Tanya Donelly and Juliana Hatfield for granted. Yet over the past two decades, Donelly and Hatfield have been involved in some of the better music that’s come out of Boston, whether as solo artists or as members of the bands they helped start in indie rock’s formative ’80s. And in many ways, their careers have been on a parallel course.

Donelly, who got her start playing second fiddle to her half-sister Kristin Hersh in Throwing Muses (a name Hersh has kept alive since Donelly’s departure), broke out on her own as a bandleader with Belly in the early ’90s, but only after joining forces with Pixie Kim Deal to help start the Breeders. By ’94, following the release of Belly’s debut, Star (Sire/Reprise), not only did she find herself part of the first wave of women in rock that alternative radio embraced, but she was up for a Grammy nomination. Belly’s mainstream’s success was short-lived, however: the follow-up, King (Sire/Reprise), emphasized her quirks at the expense of immediate hooks. In the wake of its commercial failure, the band broke up, and Donelly, who was on her way to starting a family, became a full-fledged solo artist.

Meanwhile, as Blake Babies’ singer and bassist, Hatfield was the de facto leader of the late-’80s/early-’90s band in which she collaborated with drummer Freda Love and guitarist John Strohm. So perhaps it wasn’t as big a jump for her when she embarked on a solo career with Hey Babe! (Mammoth) in 1992, the same year she guested as the bassist in Evan Dando’s It’s a Shame About Ray (Atlantic) studio line-up. By ’93, though, she’d put together a band of her own, the Juliana Hatfield Three, with former Bullet LaVolta drummer Todd Philips and, as it happens, Donelly’s husband-to-be, Dean Fisher, on bass. By ’94, the Hatfield Three had joined Belly as a female-led alternative-radio staple. Nevertheless, it wasn’t long before Hatfield was on her own again. These days, she’s been able to rely on a loyal fan base to support her diverse artistic endeavors, which have included a successful Blake Babies reunion and the simultaneous release of two very different CDs back in 2000: the solo album Beautiful Creature and the more band-oriented Juliana’s Pony (both on Zoë/Rounder).

This summer these two artists’ careers lined up again when Sire/Rhino released Sweet Ride: The Best of Belly and Zoë/Rounder put out Gold Stars, 1992-2002, a career-spanning collection of Hatfield’s post–Blake Babies work that includes tracks from the "lost" Atlantic album God’s Foot. With Hatfield preparing for a tour with her latest project, Juliana Hatfield and Some Girls (featuring Freda Love and bassist Heidi Gluck), and Donelly back at home working on various projects including a children’s-music compilation following a tour in support of her second solo album, we figured the time was right to get the two together for a chat. And since they share a manager — Fort Apache studio owner Gary Smith — that wasn’t too hard. Here’s some of what they had to say.

Phoenix: The reason we’re having this conversation is that you’re two of the more important women to have emerged from the Boston scene over the past decade, and you both have retrospective compilations that have just come out . . .

Donelly: Isn’t that neat.

Hatfield: It just happened that way. It’s a coincidence.

Phoenix: Maybe, but over the past year or so I’ve seen a lot of retrospective compilations from bands who were instrumental in laying down the foundation of what was the alternative rock of the ’90s — Uncle Tupelo and the Pixies, for example. And now the two of you have joined that list. It’s as if one era in music had come to a close and another had begun.

Donelly: I hadn’t thought of it that way — I’m really culturally insensitive right now. I feel like an outsider most of the time. I mean, I think you don’t know you’re part of the culture when you are, and then when you’re not, you suddenly realize that you were. But I think you’re right.

Hatfield: It’s hard for me to totally agree that, yes, the end of that era is here, because I’m still eking out an existence doing the same thing. But it is in a different context now. I mean, I do have that feeling that something is gone, something is over.

Donelly: It’s like there’s a difference between music that you have to go out and find and music that just finds you. And I think we’re both making music that you have to go out and find.

Hatfield: We started out that way. In a way, things have come full circle. I think the fact that my music and Tanya’s music reached such a large audience at one point was a weird fluke. It only happened because of what was going on — we just kind of got swept up in it. And I don’t know if it’ll happen again.

Donelly: I remember there was a day when I realized that wasn’t my destiny, it was just a freak occurrence. And there is some adjustment you have to make after you figure that out — there’s a period of adjustment. A long fall [laughs].

Hatfield: A humbling and a reassessing of priorities.

Phoenix: Don’t you think that’s healthy for an artist?

Hatfield: Oh I think it’s healthy for a person.

Donelly: I agree. At the point when the wave was being ridden by bands like Belly, I remember hearing people say, "The best thing that ever happened to me was when I stopped being famous." And I would wonder, "Really? Is that really true?" But now I understand that, because I’ve got my life back, and I have choices. And for a while there, I didn’t feel like I did.

Phoenix: The two of you have had somewhat parallel careers in that you were both in respected indie bands, and then you both went more or less solo around the same time, with Belly and the Juliana Hatfield Three. And now you’re both purely solo artists. Do you think that was just a coincidence?

Donelly: When you first start making music, you want to be part of something like a family. I love the idea of bands, and my favorite music is made by real bands who can somehow function, which is a mystery to me. But then I think it’s just a microcosm of what happens in anybody’s life where you find your own path and you don’t need to be part of a group as much.

Hatfield: Plus, when you don’t have massive success on a gigantic scale, there’s no reason not to break up a band and go solo or do something else. There’s a freedom in not being massively successful — a freedom to do whatever you want without worrying about losing a huge audience.

Phoenix: You mean like putting out two albums under two different names at the same time?

Donelly: [Laughs] Yeah, or the freedom to not put out a record at all for half a decade.

Phoenix: Looking back, do you think there are steps that you could have taken to reach a bigger audience and to have been successful on a larger scale?

Donelly: I have to say that one of the greatest mysteries of the music world to me is why Juliana Hatfield isn’t huge. And I truly mean that. Because she’s enormously talented. And she is, quite frankly, beautiful. So I do think it’s strange.

Hatfield: That’s so sweet . . .

Phoenix: Do you think that there are steps that Juliana could have taken to reach a larger audience, or that she intentionally chose a different path?

Donelly: That would require some knowledge on my part of how this all works, and I don’t have that knowledge. So I don’t even pretend to know how anyone could do anything differently.

Phoenix: What about you, Juliana?

Hatfield: Well, I do agree with what Tanya’s saying . . .

Phoenix: You mean about your being beautiful?

Hatfield: [Laughs] No . . . I agree with what she’s saying about there being a lot of mystery involved in who becomes successful and why, and why something becomes a hit. I mean, record companies are always looking for the hit. They’ll tell you that they don’t hear any hits when you’re making a record, but they won’t tell you how to make one. And then when you have a hit, they take all the credit, but if you have a failure, they won’t take any of the blame. So on the one hand, I think it’s all just fate. But on the other, I also think that there are little things I could have done and didn’t do along the way that could have maybe helped me . . .

Donelly: Like what?

Hatfield: Like, maybe being nicer.

Donelly: But that’s not a given, not at all.

Hatfield: That’s why I’m saying "maybe." Or possibly if I had worked the crowd better and been more of an engaging performer instead of just getting up there and playing my music. Or maybe if I had worn low-cut shirts and mini-skirts, that would have drawn more people. But it’s obviously not something that I felt comfortable doing, so I didn’t. And I don’t have any regrets.

Donelly: Well, now that you say that, I can see that maybe the way you function on stage can be a benefit for a male and a detriment for a female. You know, there’s the moody allure of certain male performers like Thom Yorke that works in their favor. Whereas that doesn’t really work in favor of women performers.

Phoenix: So, Juliana, you don’t have any major regrets?

Hatfield: Well, there’s one photograph of me, and I won’t name the magazine, but it’s a photo where I let the stylist have his way with me, and I look like such an idiot.

Donelly: I think I have more than one regret in that area. The problem is that if you say no enough times, then you get worn down to the point where you finally say yes to one request, and that becomes the photograph they use.

Hatfield: Yeah, I guess I wish that I’d just said no more often and fought for my own way.

Donelly: I wish I’d had a clearer sense of what would protect me image-wise.

Phoenix: Well, I think if there’s one glaring irony of the past decade, it’s that after all that talk of women being liberated in the realm of rock, it didn’t take more than a year or two before we were right back to 16-year-old sex kittens in mini-skirts.

Donelly: That’s because women in rock was treated as a novelty. And I knew it was going to happen because, even at the time, I said that if you treat women like some kind of circus act in rock, then you marginalize them. And if you call it "women in rock," then it just becomes a trend. And women are not a trend.

Hatfield: Well, apparently they were in the music industry. It was a trend as far as the record companies were concerned.

Phoenix: I think of the three years when Lilith Fair was a force in the summer-concert season as being a very promising time for women artists, and it amazes me how quickly the entire attitude about women artists seemed to change.

Hatfield: Do you think it’s Sarah McLachlan’s fault that she pulled the plug on Lilith Fair so now the women-in-rock thing is over?

Phoenix: Well, I do wonder what might have happened if she had continued to let Lilith Fair grow. Maybe things wouldn’t have died out so quickly in terms of women in rock.

Hatfield: Still, the whole Lilith Fair thing was ghettoizing women to a certain degree.

Donelly: I agree that Lilith Fair added to the ghettoization of women in rock. But I also think it was a direct and balanced reaction to what Lollapalooza had turned into by the end, which was so boy-heavy.

Phoenix: Does either of you feel you benefitted from the success of Lilith Fair?

Hatfield: I played some Lilith Fair dates, and I don’t think it hurt or helped me. I don’t know if I won over any new fans. But I don’t think I alienated anyone by doing it. I’m not sure that I had a good time, but I don’t regret it.

Donelly: I don’t feel that it helped or hurt me, either.

Phoenix: Well, do you think that the attention that women in rock received during that period was helpful to your careers?

Donelly: Initially, maybe. Gary Smith, our manager, tells a story of dealing with one radio programmer who told him that he couldn’t put both Tanya and Juliana on the radio, so he’d have to concentrate on one or the other. That was the year when my first solo album came out, so it was 1997 or 1998, and that’s when I got a strong inkling that this whole women-in-rock thing was going badly.

Hatfield: When I had songs on the radio, I don’t know if it was only because women in rock were being embraced at the time or if it was part of the whole alternative thing. They kind of went hand in hand at the time . . .

Phoenix: I know you guys are friendly . . .

Hatfield: [Laughing] Tanya’s much friendlier than I am.

Phoenix: Seriously, though, I know that you’re friends, and you do have the same manager, so I’m wondering whether you socialize.

Donelly: I am a hermit.

Hatfield: I’m also a hermit. We’re both hermits, so we don’t go out together.

Donelly: I don’t go out at all.

Phoenix: Did you ever feel competitive with each other?

Hatfield: I felt no sense of competition with Tanya. I’m not a competitive person.

Donelly: I think one of the great variables here is that ultimately it does come down to what the majority of people want to hear, and you can’t do anything about that. So I think to a certain extent you have to leave behind your anger at your record company, or radio, or whatever you’ve decided is responsible for your not doing as well as you thought you were going to do.

Phoenix: Did you ever feel competitive with women artists in general?

Hatfield: Not personally. I think there might have been stuff like that going on behind the scenes at my label. I’ve heard that there are women artists who don’t want other women performing on the same bill with them. I can understand that, but I don’t have that problem at all.

Donelly: It does bother me that when I have a tour starting up and I’m looking for someone to open up, I get sent music from exclusively female-fronted bands. That’s the kind of thing that contributes to the whole novelty-act notion of women in rock.

Hatfield: You just want to play with good people.

Donelly: On my last tour, my booking agent sent me all female-fronted stuff and then something by a guy named Chris Lee. I liked Chris’s record the best, so I picked him. But the reaction was, "Oh, you don’t want a woman on the bill." I mean, I do feel sisterly feelings toward younger female musicians. And I feel obligated to give whatever assistance that I can because I’m familiar with their situation. But . . .

Hatfield: . . . but you want to like the music. You don’t want to just help them out because they’re female.

Donelly: Yeah, the music has to be good.

Phoenix: Are things are better or worse now for women than they were when you were both starting out?

Hatfield: From the beginning I remember getting all kinds of attitude and grief for being a woman. One time, back when I was in Blake Babies, Freda [Love] and I decided to shave our heads, and we got so much hell for that on a tour of the South.

Donelly: Throwing Muses were driven off stage by a group of people chanting "gang bang" in Alabama. We played three songs and walked off stage.

Hatfield: In Clemson, South Carolina, they were yelling "dikes" because we had both shaved our heads. But that kind of stuff, it just seems like it’s always been there and it always will be.

Donelly: I would say that it might be easier now for women because there are just more women doing it. But maybe there’s also a lot more self-consciousness about the issue than there used to be. Like, Kristin [Hersh] and I were surprised when people even brought up the issue.

Hatfield: Same thing with me and Freda. We just didn’t think about the issue until people started throwing it at us and using terms like "women in rock."

Phoenix: Okay, let’s switch gears a little: do you spend a lot of time sitting around at home listening to your own records?

Donelly: [whispering] I never listen to my own records. Ever.

Hatfield: Occasionally I will go back and listen to something. I never listen to my first album. I just can’t handle it. But lately I’ve been able to go back and listen to older stuff.

Phoenix: So how big a role did you play in picking the songs for the compilations?

Donelly: Initially, Rhino sent me a list, and then I edited it, and, well, it changed enough that I think I can say I did pick the songs.

Hatfield: It was pretty much the same scenario with me. The record company put it together, and then I vetoed and added until it was basically my list. I didn’t listen to the first three albums. And maybe my collection suffers a little because of that. For the first two albums, I just picked the singles — I had the feeling I had to put on the songs that did the best from those records. Aside from the hits, though, I picked a lot of the most obscure songs from each album, and then I gradually amended the list to be songs I liked but not necessarily the most obscure.

Phoenix: Well, it is a snapshot of a part of your career, and with a retrospective you do have the opportunity to redefine yourself as an artist.

Hatfield: Because of that I think I tried to make some eclectic choices so that it would represent the different sides of me.

Phoenix: What do you think are the biggest misperceptions of you as an artist?

Hatfield: I don’t really listen or hear what people say about me anymore. I think there are so many misconceptions. There’s probably a huge list. I do think a lot of people believe that everything I do is calculated to have a certain effect or impact. But I really don’t think about things like that. And I don’t try to affect a girlie voice. That’s just my voice. For a while I was even trying to wreck my voice. I took up smoking because I wanted my voice to get lower and rougher. But I finally just had to accept that that’s how I sing, and it’s going to change only with age.

Donelly: Yeah, the little-girl thing. I think any woman would take offense to being compared to a little girl. My favorite singers in the world are Leonard Cohen, Tom Waits, and Mark Sandman — I just like men who sing like cellos. So it’s a frustration on all fronts.

Hatfield: Do you have other misconceptions about you that you want to clear up?

Donelly: The girlish-voice thing is the only one that bothers me. In fact, I sometimes feel that misconceptions help ensure my privacy because somebody else is being represented, and that’s fine by me.

Phoenix: The Belly retrospective is a little different from Juliana’s disc because it’s a snapshot of a band and not a single artist. What did you want the album to say about who Belly were?

Donelly: You know, Belly is the only situation that I’ve ever moved on from that was left really frayed. It was an unfriendly ending. Everything else has come to a logical conclusion for me, and that didn’t because it got severed because of bad behavior. So I always felt that we had another one in us. When I went into doing this, I was thinking of making this be the last one — the third Belly album. But the consensus was that we’d include the singles and then whatever else I wanted.

Phoenix: Did you work with the rest of the band?

Donelly: No. There’s still tons of ill will. [Bassist] Gail [Greenwood] and I are very close still. And [drummer] Chris [Gorman] and I have a pretty good relationship. But I haven’t spoken to [guitarist] Tom [Gorman] in years. Overall, the chemistry of all of us doesn’t work. We couldn’t have all come together to make decisions about the album — it just never would have come out if everybody had been involved in it.

Phoenix: Would you have kept going with Belly if you could have?

Donelly: I think what I should have done was to drag everybody into therapy together. And I was a crappy bandleader. I just let the rudder go because I just didn’t want to deal. I didn’t want to negotiate all the different relationships, so I let go. It’s fascinating to me that people can regress to playground behavior in bands, with all the petty bickering . . .

Hatfield: Yeah, it’s like I don’t want a producer in the studio, I want a psychiatrist. It would help more.

Donelly: Well, the best producers are part psychiatrist.

Phoenix: How do you feel about the general state of music right now?

Hatfield: I think the state of rock right now is a reflection of the state of the world, and there are a lot of things wrong with the world at this time. I think music is a reflection of all the greed and conformity in the world.

Donelly: I’m going through a stage in my life where I feel that there are so many things that I concentrate on in terms of just trying to live well that music has become just a part of that. It used to be the sole focus and my only mirror. It’s a still a huge part of my daily life — there’s always music on in my household. But I would say that I don’t analyze it as much, and it’s not at the center of my life quite as much as it used to be.

Hatfield: My music is more important than ever to me, but the music industry is no longer important to me. I’m not involved in the industry, or I’m barely involved in the industry. I’m more involved in just making my own music.

Donelly: I guess I don’t think that the climate right now is healthy, but I don’t think that’s as big a tragedy as I would have 10 years ago.

Hatfield: I’m very accepting of this cycle that we’re going through. And I’m not depending upon ever again having a hit. But I’m pretty confident that I can keep making music until I don’t want to anymore. Every once in a while, in a moment of weakness, I’ll feel anxiety or terror in terms of my future. But that passes, and then I realize how lucky I am to still be able to play music for a living.