Over ten years and eight albums, the music of Tanya Donelly resided at several different addresses. First there was the angular, tense art-rock of Boston, Massachusetts quartet Throwing Muses, who Tanya co-founded with her step-sister Kristin Hersh. She then temporarily moved on to play in Pixies bassist Kim Deal's other band The Breeders, before fronting her own, more clearly Donelly-esque outfit, Belly.
For such a fecund project, Belly curiously lasted just two albums. Their 1993 debut Star was an audacious marriage of girl-group classicism, off-kilter guitar-pop and folk-ballad purity confirmed the need to take centre stage. The album entered the UK chart at number two, and Belly concerts became sell-out events. Arriving two years later, King was a more commercial consolidation (recorded in Nassau, produced by the venerated Glyn Johns) that Tanya admits was affected by "all the outside influences that come pouring in when you've had a successful record", and by in-fighting - "which isn't necessarily a negative thing," she claims. "But, in this case, I got sucked under."
Belly's demise, Tanya recalls, "was drawn out for a while and nobody talked about it, though somewhere through our last tour in 1995, there was the feeling that it was our swansong. People were suppressing their own heartstrings and musical needs, myself included, and deferring to each other too much, and no good can come of that. Everybody had to go off and do their own thing."
Released in November 1996, Tanya's first solo release was the four-track Sliding And Diving EP. Ten months later came an album, Lovesongs for Underdogs, which was as melodic and moving as all her previous music, but also brimmed with a newfound diversity, confidence and maturity. An affirmation of her desire, as she puts it, "to piss out a small territory of my own. A niche. Going solo started off being absolutely daunting but the joy is being free to bring in other musicians - I didn't want to be monogamous musically! Now there are no constraints on my songs, except the ones that I put on them."
To that end, her husband Dean Fisher (ex-Juliana Hatfield Three) played bass, Rich Gilbert (Frank Black And The Catholics) joined Tanya on guitar, while the drum duties were shared between Pixies powerhouse David Lovering, Stacy Jones of Veruca Salt and Tanya's erstwhile Throwing Muses colleague David Narcizo (who also joined her touring band while the Muses went on hiatus). Wally Gagel of Folk Implosion contributed bass and keyboards, as well as co-producing most of the album with Tanya. The remaining four songs were produced by Gary Smith - Tanya's manager, producer of the Muses' House Tornado and Hunkpapa albums, and owner of Fort Apache studios in Cambridge, MA.
At one point, the album was going to be titled Manna From Mars, to tie in with lyrical themes of space (as in 'up in the sky', not 'room all around you') and Tanya's favourite track Manna. "But it sounded too like Men Are From Mars [Women, Are From Venus, to give the book it's full title], "which I thought was a little too goofy. So we concentrated on the love song aspect. But they're not pure love songs, they're neurotic love songs... Love songs for nerds!"
Four years later, Tanya returned with the Sleepwalk EP, her first record since becoming a mother in 1999. Two of its four songs ("After your party" and "Days Of Grace") were co-written with her husband Dean, who also played on the record alongside David Narcizo, Rich Gilbert and Buffalo Tom frontman Bill Janovitz. The EP was followed in February 2002 by Beautysleep: an album of stillness, depth and melodic certainty. It completed a curve in Tanya's songwriting, which since Belly's second and last album 'King' has moved away from the fizzy pop kick of tracks like "Feed The Tree" to something more subtle and more assured, as evinced by the spectral drift of the opener "Life Is But A Dream". Mellotron, feedback, glockenspiel and tape loops wreathed through the songs and gathered around some of the finest vocal performances of Tanya's career. "Wrap Around Skirt" and "Moonbeam Monkey" were firmly in the Southern Gothic tradition, latter's brooding impact heightened by the fact that it featured one of the last recorded vocals by the late Mark Sandman of Morphine.