Tanya Donelly: Rediscovered muse

The indie diva Tanya Donelly has stripped her sound. Alexia Loundras hears why

23 July 2004

It's just after nine in the morning in Boston and Tanya Donelly is suffering maternal withdrawal. "Gracie's a great kid," she gushes, with pride. Her five-year-old daughter with her husband, the former Juliana Hatfield bassist, Dean Fisher, has just left for nursery. As tends to be the case with mothers and their youngsters, it's a bittersweet parting. But, although the two are particularly close, ("I didn't put her down for two years," says Donelly) there is certainly an up-side to their time apart. Having Gracie out of the house means she has had the time to get back into the studio, to set free her songwriting muse and to write and record her third solo record, Whiskey Tango Ghosts.

Still, she needs little excuse to rave about her daughter. "She's learning constantly - doing new things," says Donelly, beaming. "Just last year, she'd put her chubby little hand on my guitar strings to stop me playing, or cover my mouth. But now she really loves me playing. She's even started writing harmonies herself, which is amazing - she walks round the house singing background parts and playing harmonica."

It seems that finely-tuned musical ears run in the family. Donelly herself proved to be quite a precocious young talent. In 1983, at the age of 17, the Rhode Island teenager formed Throwing Muses with her half sister, Kristen Hersh. Four years later, not content with founding one of the most influential alt.rock bands of the Eighties, she started another, The Breeders, this time with Kim Deal of The Pixies, before leaving to form her most commercially successful outfit, the pop-rockers Belly, in 1992.

These days Donelly has it all: the doting husband, the charming child, ethereal good looks (blessed with porcelain skin and tousled red-blonde locks, Donelly spent the Nineties as a reluctant indie pin-up), not to mention a talent for writing impeccably crafted songs. She's is clearly having the time of her life. But things haven't always been this good.

When Gracie was born, Donelly was overwhelmed by a feeling of responsibility so intense it knocked her for six. "I had some really bad postpartum issues," she admits. "It was a form of depression - I felt abject terror. That's how it manifested itself. Not in little niggling worries, but this big clonk in the face: fear."

Donelly was besieged with a sense of inadequacy. Children were not something she ever aspired to having. "Dean and I never discussed it - there was even a time when I strongly resented the biological imperative to have a child. But then something just changed." She pauses, suddenly embarrassed.

Donelly's change of heart came, not too unexpectedly, at a time when the rest of her life seemed to be falling to pieces. As Belly broke up and Donelly's solo debut, Lovesongs for Underdogs, failed to sell as expected, her health took a turn for the worse.

"Things really weren't going well," she says. "I was sick from not taking care of myself. I was making bad decisions and doing stupid things." Donelly went through a damaging period of what she calls "excess and deficiency". "I was drinking too much and not eating," she says, cringing. "I needed something to push me up onto the next level."

Donelly got what she wanted. The arrival of Gracie, she says, "raised the bar". It was an experience that filled her with new confidence. It also inspired the fighting spirit that eventually spawned Whiskey Tango Ghosts.

"Making this album is the first truly premeditated thing I have ever done," says Donelly. "I've wanted to do something sparse for a while but I've always chickened out." Being quiet, says Donelly, is a really hard thing to do - especially when you don't really like the sound of your own voice. "You're going to laugh but when I write songs, the voice that sings them in my head is a lot lower than mine. It's a raspy, male sort of voice. Sometimes it's Nick Cave's voice, or Tom Waits's. I have to reconcile this with the voice I actually have."

Whiskey Tango Ghosts is a velvet claw of an album that gently digs itself deep under the skin. Donnelly's trademark goulash of sounds is completely pared down. Simple yet powerful cascading pianos, melancholy strummed guitars and pedal steels - tributes to Donelly's affection for heroes such as Neko Case, Lucinda Williams and Emmylou Harris - are all that colour the songs. And Donelly's voice is given no choice but to be heard unadorned.

What makes the album even more of a feat is the personal nature of the songs. "This album focuses on the grown-ups in our house," she says coyly. "It's about the conversations two people have who are working towards something.Dean and I have a successful marriage, but that doesn't mean it's easy."

By confronting her fears, however, she has emerged emboldened. "Everything has fallen into place in my life," she says. "I feel good right now."

'Whiskey Tango Ghosts' is out on Monday on 4AD

© 2004 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd

Album: Tanya Donelly: Whiskey Tango Ghosts, 4AD


By Andy Gill

23 July 2004

"I have lost something on the way," sings Tanya Donelly at the start of this, her third solo album. She's not wrong: mostly, what she has lost is the naive pop charm and awkward ebullience of her work with Belly a decade ago. That has been replaced here, on tracks such as "Divine Sweet Divide" and "Every Devil", by a placidly introspective form of piano balladry pitched somewhere between the Jones girls, Norah and Rickie Lee. It's not a good swap: there are a few moments here that dimly recall the soulful ruminations of Laura Nyro, the late high priestess of white soul, but the comparison is ultimately damning: Donelly apparently lacks Nyro's ear for great hooks. The result is a set of vague, ephemeral songs, some co-written with her husband and bandmate Dean Fisher, that pore over the emotional currents of their relationship too much. "You are the mountain; I'm the low-flying biplane," she sings in "The Center". "We come together in the most calamitous ways." Ah, if only that were true, or at least reflected in the sonic shape of this album, a dreary series of meandering ruminations garbed in the Americana livery of piano, guitar and pedal steel, a formulaic sound that reaches its apogee in the Stepfordesque "My Life as a Ghost". Hardly the greatest of recommendations.

Tanya Donelly. Whiskey Tango Ghosts. (4AD)

It's one of pop's little ironies that the gentlest, simplest music can be the most difficult to craft. Without volume or attitude to hide behind, songwriters are often left cruelly exposed - for every delight like The Sundays there are a dozen dreary Didos. Throwing Muses into the plush indiepop of Belly and ending here, with her third and finest solo album.

Wistful and almost whisper quiet, Whiskey Tango Ghosts is the shy girl at pop's party. It's never going to force itself upon you, but if you take the time to notice it you may fall in love with its depths and delicacies. Composed with little more than a piano, an acoustic guitar and Donelly's wonderful whipped cream vocals, these eleven tracks are stripped down to two essentials: melody and emotion.

By necessity, this is not an album of thrills or surprises in the way that Belly's Star was. Occasionally songs do meander and merge into one another, lost in the acoustic haze. But when Whiskey Tango Ghosts works best, it is as lovely and lulling as a summer's day, the perfect soundtrack to doing nothing. "Whiskey Tango" ducks and dives around its piano motif, the sweetness of the melody lifting it above its melancholic words, while "Just In Case You Quit Me" has the husky grace of Mazzy Star.

There are two surpassingly beautiful moments. Opener "Divine Sweet Divide" has a heartbreaking frailty, and includes one of the most gorgeously held high notes to be found outside a Jane Siberry album. The countrified "The Center" is more playful, boldly mixing a Gerard Manley Hopkins reference with deliberate cliché - "You are the love of my life". Its gorgeous tune rescues it from clever cleverness.

Whiskey Tango Ghosts isn't designed to change your life, and it won't, but its very modesty reveals a songwriter confident enough to keep quiet about it. A subtle delight.

Reviewer: Jaime Gill