Lone star

Tanya Donelly, solo artist

by Joan Anderman

Tanya Donelly is darting about the kitchen at Fort Apache studios in Cambridge, a cheerful blonde sprite in towering blue Mary Janes, cutoff jeans, and teeny-weeny tank top. She's multi-tasking like crazy -- scanning the fridge for cream, apologizing profusely for being late, contemplating the ideal spot for a conversation, and chiding the office guys for debating -- again! -- the relative merits of Bob Mould and Grant Hart. And this is the woman who will shortly explain that, these days, she's moving ass-backwards through life.

True enough: Donelly has a predilection for finding out where she's going after she's arrived. She and her husband of a year, former Juliana Hatfield Three bassist Dean Fisher, moved from Providence to Boston a few years ago thinking it would be a way station en route to some other, more fabulous, final destination. Lo and behold, a year later it dawned on them that there's no place like home; Boston is their "perfect city." Likewise, Donelly sidled into her latest album project (her first solo disc, Lovesongs for Underdogs, will be released by Reprise this Tuesday) equally unaware, which in retrospect was a serendipitous approach.

"It would've been really, really scary if I'd gone into the studio to make a solo record," she explains. "When Wally [Gagel, her co-producer and engineer, whose credits include Folk Implosion's "The Natural One" and Sebadoh's Harmacy] and I went in together, we were supposed to be making demos. But we ended up putting down all this stuff and playing lots of parts. The drums actually came in last. So I really never had the experience of feeling I was making a record."

However skewed the method, the 31-year-old singer/guitarist/songwriter, who helped sculpt the alternative-rock landscape as a founding member of Throwing Muses, the Breeders, and Belly, is heading full bore into the mysterious heart of Phase Four: Tanya Donelly, solo artist. Mistress-of-her-domain is a daunting, if thrilling, prospect after 11 years as a band member. So rather than jet off to New York or LA and cut her disc with slick session cats in a music mecca, Donelly stayed home, hunkered down at the Fort ("That room has a really great vibe"), where she's made two records in the past, and surrounded herself with family and friends, who also happen to be some of Boston's finest musicians.

Hubby Fisher played bass. "Yes, we actually used to have a big philosophy about that, you know, we believed it was just wrong. But things got to the point where if I'm playing something around the house, he's gonna pick up an instrument and start playing too. Plus, we didn't want to be separated. Of course, I wouldn't have hired him if he wasn't great." Drum duties were variously handled by former Pixie David Lovering, David Narcizio from the Muses, and former Letters to Cleo/current Veruca Salt drummer Stacey Jones. Rich Gilbert (Human Sexual Response/Zulus/Concussion Ensemble), whom Donelly has "always, always" wanted to work with, contributed pedal steel, bowed saw, and most stringed things in between. Fisher, Gilbert, Narcizio, and keyboardist Elizabeth Steen (who's been playing lately with Count Zero) will hit the road with Donelly this fall; look for a hometown show sometime in October.

Great comfort that it was to have trusted friends supporting her in the studio, there's only one spotlight now, trained on the girl front and center. And whether the album takes off or bombs, there's one ass on the line.

"It feels good," Donelly admits. "It feels weird. There's definitely a lot more pressure as an individual . . . My publicist will say that such-and-such a reviewer doesn't like it, and I want to go talk to them. I want to ask them, `Why don't you like me?' "

But asked whether she could imagine being in a band again, she offers a resounding no. "I'm in a mindset where I'm actually wondering what it even means to be in a band. Because music doesn't call for two guitars, bass, and drums, necessarily. It's way more kinetic and flexible than that. I have parts in my head, and now I just play them, and I'm not stepping on anybody's toes."

Lovesongs for Underdogs is indeed a dynamic collection. (It's no paean to romance, however. When I mention this, Donelly cracks up. "The title was Dean's idea. Ha! There are around two love songs on it . . . ") Her smart, shimmering tunes, previously decorated with the discordant, breakneck badge of disenfranchised youth, have been stripped down, slowed up, and streamlined. The result is way more, well, kinetic than anything she's put out in the past. And even though ultra-mod drum loops and sampled sounds are tossed into the mix, there's an organic feel here -- especially on the lilting waltz "Mysteries of the Unexplained"; the somber "Acrobat," with its primal, wordless harmonies; the sweet acoustic rush of "Goat Girl"; and the hypnotic, marching "Manna" (Donelly's favorite track).

It's an aesthetic Donelly says is inspired by her deepening embrace of folk and country roots. The idea of breaking the rules of pop just for the fuck of it -- practically a by-law of the Muses and Breeders school of alterna-rock rebellion -- is no longer the point. And the lush/tough vision of a pop dreamscape that Donelly explored with Belly has segued into something more . . . mature. Not that the new songs have sacrificed any of her intensity or eccentric edge. Or that she's traded in her thundering Les Paul for a mandolin, though tiples (an instrument similar to a mandolin) and strings lace Lovesongs with a grace and warmth not heard, or for that matter aspired to, on any of her earlier band projects.

Reckless, in-your-face speedballs are simply not as big a turn-on, Donelly confirms, as finding the right two notes. "I'm learning the meaning of tradition late in life. I've been listening to the new Johnny Cash, Vic Chesnutt, Wilco, Mary Margaret O'Hara . . . And I'm starting to realize that what I enjoy are the slower songs, the spacier ones, the ones that are a little more sonically interesting. I just started to get bored of loud electric guitars, though that's great sometimes. In a context."

For better or worse, bad times tend to be a great time, output-wise, for creative souls; a lot of the music on Lovesongs was written when Donelly was coming off a massive wave of disappointment following Belly's break-up. "Even though I think everything unfolded the way it was supposed to, there was a lot of sadness and anger that came after Belly. I think we had another record in us if we'd been able to overcome some things, both musical and personal. But at the same time I was moving into this new area of excitement and expectation. So this music sort of happened in between."

The delicately gnarled rock tunes, moody ballads, and sly, provocative pop that emerged from those emotional and professional cracks indeed find Donelly in an ambiguous frame of mind -- reflecting and refracting, as ever, the general chaos of being alive. But the minefield of mind-fucks and free-form fears that she tripped through on the Belly records, like a kicking, screaming princess in a fairytale gone wrong, is dotted with beacons. At this stage, it would seem, love is dark and wrong and yet somehow redemptive. Hopes are dashed, transformed, resurrected. Details (a rare commodity in a Donelly tune, and getting rarer) are invariably set adrift on a vast, impressionistic seascape of doubt and, ultimately, faith -- the fallout, perhaps, of growing up and settling down.

"For a long time I'd sort of given up on the possibility of being happy," she allows. "I guess I thought, `Well, who deserves to be happy? It's a scandal to even think that you can be.' At some point you have to throw the word out the window, it's such an oversimplification of what really happens. But you know, I am. I never thought I'd be married. And musically I feel I'm headed, at least, in some sort of direction."

Such sage philosophizing doubles as excellent mental prep work for an uncertain future, especially when you're an artist on a professional precipice who confesses to worrying obsessively. "It's my great weakness. All-around, personal fear. That and not picking guitar well."

Are her wee morning hours filled with hallucinations about the fate of Lovesongs? "Well, I have started thinking about that. Whatever happens, I'll still in five years time want things to come down. I'd like the word `single' to be dropped out of my life at some point. In 10 years I probably won't want to be touring anymore. I'd like to just be making records, and on a small scale."

Might a couple of little Donelly-Fishers be shorting out the amps at some point? "We think about kids. We spent the last couple of days with Kristin [Hersh, Donelly's half-sister and Throwing Muses mate] and her children, and whenever I'm around them I get going on about it. But I don't have the kind of stamina that Kristin has, as far as touring with three kids goes. I think I'd like to wait a few years and do it on some kind of downtime."

Meanwhile, Donelly and band are rehearsing at New Alliance in what they've dubbed the "Aimee Mann/Weezer" room, after two of its former inhabitants. Later this month they'll embark on a fall-winter tour of England and the US in support of Lovesongs. Even at this monumental juncture in the arc of her career, even in the context of the current explosion of women in pop music, Donelly is reluctant to reflect on her trailblazing role in the evolution of alternative rock.

"Kristin and I were actually talking about this the other night," she says after a long, thoughtful pause. "For years we thought, `No, no, no, it was just timing.' We never wanted to say that we were responsible for anything actually happening. But in retrospect I can see that we were part of a vanguard. And that's a nice feeling. Especially on the female front. I've gotten letters from women saying, `I started playing guitar today because of you.' That's enormously, enormously gratifying."