Since Belly disbanded two decades ago, Tanya Donelly has methodically and quietly assembled an impressive — and impressively diverse — body of solo work. Having already run through founding stints in both Throwing Muses and the Breeders, Donelly decided to embark on a solo career after Belly’s second album, King, crashed headfirst into a musical landscape that was drastically different from the one that saw the band’s debut, 1993’s Star, ride the top of the modern rock charts.
What she did not know, and could not know, was that the path she was embarking on would eventually circle back around.
In the late ’90s and throughout the aughts, Donelly released a series of albums that continued to reveal her gift for constructing punchy pop-rock songs, but they increasingly revealed her desire to write songs of a more singer-songwriter nature, songs that skewed closer to folk, jazz, and even country than alternative rock. By the time 2004’s Whiskey Tango Ghosts was released, Donelly’s sound was dramatically softer but much more nuanced, relying more on acoustic guitar and piano than electric guitar.
In 2013, Donelly began releasing a series of EPs dubbed The Swan Song Series, a series that would, to a large extent, explore this more nuanced approach. Rather than working with a single band, however, Donelly chose to work with a diverse cast of friends whose backgrounds and tastes didn’t necessarily overlap.
“I love writing with other people,” Donelly says. “I love being in the same space as other people and working on music. It’s just how I function; I’m not really a loner musically. I mean I can do that but I just feel that everything flows more easily and more happily for me when I’m working with other people.”
This May, Donelly released The Swan Song Series as a single set comprised of the five original volumes plus seven previously unreleased tracks. As a unified collection, it’s sweeping and expansive, moving from one genre to another with each song. Songs like “Blame the Muse”, which possesses a breezy, retro pop vibe, share space with “Flying at Night”, an arty, atmospheric fusion of lounge vocals and glitchy electronica that wouldn’t sound out of place on a Portishead album. The folk fingerpicking and jazz percussion of “Mass Ave” eventually give way to the lumbering heavy metal of “Tu Y Yo”, a track that Donelly’s Belly bandmate, Gail Greenwood, wrote with her band, Benny Sizzler.
This diversity of styles is largely driven by the collaborators that Donelly worked with throughout The Swan Song Series, collaborators that range from John Wesley Harding to author Rick Moody to Robyn Hitchcock to Buffalo Tom’s Bill Janovitz to musicians from Magnetic Fields and Calexico, to name but a very few. The overall impression The Swan Song Series leaves is of Donelly having a series of musical conversations with her friends, adventurously exploring where those conversations might take them.
“That was the entire purpose of it for me,” notes Donelly, “to collaborate with a wide variety of writers and musicians, very few of whom have any common DNA musically. So that was the purpose of it — for my own fun for one thing but also to stretch myself. I love the fact that there’s no connective tissue from song to song.”
So why did Donelly decide to cull together the various EPs of The Swan Song Series and release them as one set? Was it purely a marketing decision, a way to make the songs available in a physical format in which they didn’t exist previously? Or, perhaps, was she marking an ending of sorts and beginning a new period of her career — maybe even returning to a previous period of her career?
“It’s definitely marking the end of the series,” Donelly offers. Then, after pausing to think through her answer, she adds, “And probably, I would say — although I’m learning not to speak definitively as I grow older — I would probably say it also is the last body of work I’ll put out under my name, you know, just my solo name? From this point on I think I’m more interested in doing projects.”
Donelly slips into silence here, knowing full well what question her response will elicit. “Yes,” she continues, “one of those projects being Belly.”
This summer, two decades after they decided to disband, Belly will reunite for a tour that begins in Scotland, winds through England and Ireland, and then takes the band to both coasts of the States. In the run-up to the tour, Donelly and her bandmates — bassist Greenwood, drummer Chris Gorman, and guitarist Tom Gorman — are reacquainting themselves with their songs, a process that she describes as both exciting and scary.
“I think we all went into the first practice pretty nervous about playing together again. But it came together pretty quickly, knock on wood. I feel like there was a lot of muscle memory involved. It’s funny because the ones we played the most were the hardest, for some reason, for me, in terms of recall. Then we had B-sides that we played maybe three times live that, for some reason, just came together immediately. But at this point we’ve practiced several times and everything is feeling really good.”
The timing for a Belly reunion feels prime for several reasons. For one, reunions of notable bands often leapfrog over the generation of music that follows their original tenure, long enough for the inevitable musical backlash that follows the ascendancy of any subgenre to wear off and right about the length of time it takes for fans to indulge in the nostalgia of their youth. That’s right about the time, too, that the grumbling one does about the pathetic state of modern popular music and longing for the music of the old days reaches a fever pitch.
“Yeah, I think so,” Donelly says, agreeing that the timing for a Belly reunion seems optimal. While fans of the band have long expressed their desire for the band to get back together to finish unfinished business, Donelly observes that, “There’s more of a call for it now [than in the past].”
Beyond the predictability of the timing of such reunions, though, there’s a nagging sense that Belly called it quits prematurely, that two albums didn’t sufficiently capture their creative potential. While much of the music of the period sounds dated to its detriment (think of any number of Eddie Vedder impersonators, rap-metal bands, or “alternative” acts who were oh-so-miserable), Belly’s output has aged as classic pop. “Gepetto” or “Seal My Fate” sound just as fresh today as they did 20 years ago. Taut hooks and catchy melodies, turns out, don’t really go out of fashion.
Even so, Donelly chalks up the timing of the reunion to convenience more than anything. “It is syncing up with a time in our lives,” she observes, “where our kids are old enough that we can take off for a while, our businesses are in a position where we can put them on hold for a while. Like everything just sort of aligned. You know, we’re in a position with our day jobs and our families to be able to focus on this for a bit.”
As the band has worked its way through the process of learning the songs again and finding a comfortable groove, Donelly has progressed from feeling nervous to getting emotional. “For the first few practices,” she notes, “we came at it very pragmatically and very kind of Yankee, just ‘Let’s get this done. What do we need for this one?’ But now that we’re just sort of polishing, there have been a couple of times when I’ve gotten a little teary. Not dramatically, but just kind of a little bit.”
Though Donelly has remained friends with the other members of Belly over the years, seeing them all back together as a band has made her even more appreciative of the bond that exists between them. “There was a moment the other day where I looked over at Gail and I just got very…” Donelly stops here, perhaps searching for the right words or perhaps not wanting to get too emotional. “It’s just,” she slowly continues, “a joyful, very happy feeling.”
While practicing for their reunion shows, Donelly and her Belly bandmates have also been writing new material — songs that will make their debut on stage. The original plan was to release the new tracks prior to the tour, but the current plan is to see how the audience reacts to the new material before making it available. This, she explains, is mostly an issue of schedules and time.
“We’ve got two that we’re ready to do live and then we’re probably going to be adding as we play,” Donelly says. “We’re sort of road testing. Our original plan was to release them in advance of the tour but we’ve had such a hard time synching up timelines and doing the songs the justice we want to and so I think we have decided to road test them a little bit then decide how we’re going to release them later. So we have two that are in the set firmly and then we have a couple more we’ll be working on during sound checks and stuff that we will add.”
Of course, when any beloved band reunites for a series of shows, the excitement of it actually happening is always followed by the creeping disappointment that the reunion will be short-lived and, worse, that it may not produce much in the way of new music. Think back to one year ago when Paul Westerberg abruptly announced that the Replacements reunion — a dream come true for many a music fan — was suddenly, inexplicably done. Breakups are hard enough the first time, but a second?
Thankfully, Donelly does not completely rule out the possibility that Belly will continue on in some capacity after the tour wraps up in September. In fact, when discussing such possibilities, she frequently stops, starts over, and backtracks, as if torn between wanting to say something and realizing that it’s best not to do so just yet.
“We’re not really looking … I mean, that’s not true. I would say we’re looking beyond [the tour] but we’re not making any definitive plans. The summer of 2017 I’m sure we’ll do … I’m gonna say if something comes up — you know, like festival offers or things like that, we would be open to that.”
But what of the new music the band is writing and playing on the road? Is there any chance that those new songs will lead to the eventual recording of a full-fledged LP? While Donelly insists that’s not presently in the works, there is hope for Belly fans that the reunion will spawn more than a few new songs and that maybe, just maybe, one thing will lead to another.
“You know at this point we don’t have an album’s worth of stuff,” she notes, “but at the end of the tour we’ll have six, probably, that will be ready to go. I’m gonna say three we’ve already recorded and they’re pretty much done. There are three that we’re going to be working up. It’s just mainly a time thing. We’re trying to do it sort of Fleetwood Mac style and send each other tracks, but everybody’s tracks are kind of informing what we do next and it just sort of turns into a situation where we’re just like, ‘We could just really get this done in the studio so much more quickly,’ so we’re probably going to do that.”
One thing is for sure, though, and that’s that once fall arrives, Belly will take a backseat to Donelly’s main priority: being a mother to her two daughters. With one approaching middle school and the other entering college, Donelly doesn’t want to be away from home once the school year begins.
“September’s going to be the last [shows] through the fall and winter and spring now, most likely, because I have a child that’s getting ready for college and we all have to get back to our jobs.” After another characteristic pause and moment of reflection, Donelly — a mixture of pride and melancholy in her voice — confesses, “I’m going to be entering that sort of phase of parental mourning.”
From the sudden outburst of laughter that follows this moment of candor, it’s evident that Donelly wouldn’t miss that phase for anything. Some things, she knows, you can’t circle back to.
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