Tanya Donelly is on the phone from New York City, where she’s spending the day talking to journalists, being photographed for magazines, and taping a video interview for RollingStone.com. All of which reminds us that though the good-natured singer/songwriter has been a fixture of Boston’s music scene since 1983 — when she and her half-sister Kristin Hersh formed Throwing Muses and began making trips from Rhode Island to play gigs — Donelly is more than a local artist.
Far more, actually. As a founder of Throwing Muses and the Breeders, and then the leader of Belly, she is a pioneer of alternative rock. At one point she was the genre’s poster woman. When Belly’s 1993 debut, Star (Sire/Reprise), sold a half-million records and the band were nominated for a Best New Artist Grammy, Donelly was on MTV and the cover of Rolling Stone, and the single "Feed the Tree" was on radio everywhere. So though her new Beautysleep (4AD), which arrives in stores on February 19, is her first in five years, Donelly is quite comfortable with the cycle of recording, promotion, and touring.
Well, maybe not touring. "It keeps me up nights, frankly," she says. "I get extremely nervous about shows. Unless I’m out playing every night and in the routine, it makes me sick. It’s something I have a love-hate relationship with, because I love my fans. I love seeing them and playing my songs for people. I love singing. But it also makes me so terrified.
"The first show Belly played in Boston at T.T. the Bear’s, I threw up in my hands backstage just before I went on. I went up there thinking, ‘Oh great, I’m going to be emanating the smell of vomit toward all these poor people.’ You’d think I’d get over it, but it still feels the same way it did when I was a kid when I start touring again — every time."
That’s just one reason Donelly has made hardly a handful of appearances since she completed the year-long tour that followed her 1997 solo debut, Lovesongs for Underdogs (Reprise). Another is Grace, her daughter, who’ll have her third birthday in April. And then there’s the cyclical, finicky music business.
You see, after Star, Donelly was a star. Not an old one like Bob Dylan, who can do as he pleases and polish himself with an album like last year’s Love and Theft (Columbia) every decade or so and still seem undiminished despite years of odd and uninspired performances. Donelly was a new star, bright and fragile and vulnerable to the pressure of her record company’s expectations and those she had inadvertently created for herself.
"The fact that the first Belly record did so well on a fluke, sort of, put pressure on me to write a certain way that wasn’t natural for me," she explains. So writing pop songs, which she says was simply "a strange and natural impulse" when she was composing Star, "became a bad habit I couldn’t break because of concern for trying to maintain that level of success."
Maybe the album was a forced march. Maybe Donelly’s internal poetic compass rose too close to its surface. Or maybe the chicken bones that radio programmers use to make all their decisions — when they’re not being told or sold what to play — failed to spell out King (Sire/Reprise). Whatever the reason, that 1995 follow-up to Star fizzled off the charts, Belly disbanded after a long international tour, and Donelly began writing Lovesongs for Underdogs. She enlisted Dean Fisher, now her husband, to write and play bass, and she called up the fiery guitarist Rich Gilbert, who had distinguished himself for years in the razor-edged Boston bands Human Sexual Response and the Zulus. The finished album made it seem as if Donelly had given herself permission to sidestep some of the pop inclinations of Belly in favor of rocking hard. Its songs were full of barbed guitar hooks and spiky keyboard lines, a balance of her trademark melodic strength with sonic experimentalism.
"That’s much more a transitional record than I recognized at the time," she says. "To be honest, the pop songs that went on Lovesongs were 11th-hour songs, because I had these little panic attacks."
Actually, she admits that some of them were induced by her label, who kept pushing her for a "Feed the Tree"–sized hit. That didn’t happen. In fact, the album slipped off the map quicker than King, with hardly any radio play outside New England and plenty of backpedaling — rather than support — from Reprise. "I was depressed about it for a couple months after the tour ended. It was a hard and unhappy tour for me and my band. That’s when I started to realize that things were going to continue on a certain level and not really get any bigger again. Even if you’re ready for that and it’s the best thing for you, there is a disappointment that comes with it. So" — she exhales — "I had to deal with that.
"But I have dealt with it" — and now she perks up again. "And I really have to say, honestly, that this is the way I would have wanted things to go. It’s kind of perfect for me, because at this level I can have my life and raise my child and still make music. And no one’s disappointed in me, and I’m not disappointed in myself."
Donelly has every reason to be satisfied with Beautysleep. It embraces a part of the punk-rock ethos that she and Kristin Hersh burned a torch for on the stages of long-gone clubs like Kenmore Square’s the Rat and Storyville and Harvard Square’s Jonathan Swift’s: the concept of art as an intensely personal vision that can be shared. But Beautysleep arrives at that notion via an entirely different, less clangorous route. It’s a gentle and thoroughly nuanced album, blending rock and folk signatures into rich-textured arrangements that owe as much to Brian Eno’s sonic play as to good ol’ verse-chorus-hook songwriting.
That said, Donelly has lost none of her rock and pop instincts. "The Night You Saved My Life" and "I’m Keeping You" are good examples. Like much of this disc, their tales seek to bridge the carnal and the spiritual worlds. But the former charges ahead on big guitar chords that give way to beautifully spun verses; the latter floats like a sweet dream over its martial drums, and when the big chords come in, they’re an affirmation of its romantic spirit.
The album’s elaborate layers of sound seem every bit the product of the three years of creation and revision Beautysleep underwent in occasional sessions at Cambridge’s Fort Apache Studios. But that wasn’t the plan. "When we started, I was going to finish the album by the time I reached the ninth month of pregnancy," Donelly explains. "We thought I’d give birth and then tour for a few months.
"What happened was I became a more neurotic mother, so I decided to focus on Grace more than I’d planned. That also gave me an opportunity to work on the album more. As we went into the studio for a weekend to work on something new, we’d also listen to the old stuff and decide to put new tracks on it. There was also a lot of editing. We took as much out as we added in." Despite the spiderwebs of subtle guitar, keyboard, and sampler colors that stretch through the arrangements, the most powerful instrument on Beautysleep is Donelly’s voice. Recorded meticulously, it preserves every shade of her singing, whether she’s artfully hitting high notes that never before seemed in her range on "The Storm" or framing the ebb and flow of her most gossamer phrases with delicate breathing.
Donelly acknowledges that she’s made a breakthrough as a vocalist. "I discovered that my voice is more powerful when I’m not yelling, so I stopped pushing it and can just hit things more efficiently if I keep my volume really low. I did all my vocals this time in the control room with the engineer and sometimes my husband and daughter with me in there, and it was more natural — like singing at home to the radio. It really worked for me, both pitch-wise and on a comfort level."
Indeed, her voice — often soaring in wordless siren calls — plays a big role in defining the music as part of the search for transcendence that’s often reflected in the lyrics of Beautysleep. Not that the CD is some hifalutin Blakean affair. It can’t be when the rocker "Wrap Around Skirt" comes out of the speakers like an irritated watchdog. But how else to describe overtly spiritual numbers like the obvious "Life Is But a Dream" and "Darkside," which deals with the redemption of a fallen angel?
"There’s a lot of spirituality in this record," Donelly agrees. "It might not always be overt, but it’s in there. People are very afraid to talk about that stuff. It’s always been an interest of mine — the metaphysical — but that’s stuff I’m going over in my life after Gracie’s birth. I think that happens for most people who become parents. You see this new soul — or maybe not so new — and it’s truly miraculous. And redemption is also one of my obsessions. I do believe there’s a thin line of purity that runs through everyone. It’s something you can either develop or not." Donelly doubtless has plenty of time to contemplate these things as she stays awake nights in anticipation of the tour that begins in Glasgow on February 26 and will bring her back to New England sometime in April. But there’s something else she might consider before she steps back on stage for that first concert: Dramamine.
