Belly Would Rather Face Forward Than Navel Gaze

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/06/arts/music/belly-tanya-donelly-dove-reunion.html

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Why go through the turmoil of re-forming a beloved but long-dormant band whose place in pop history is secure? In 2018, a better question is, why not?

“We decided we were going to never return to it rather than go back and try to figure everything out,” Tanya Donelly said, referring to the implosion of her band Belly 23 years ago. Facing forward has been “such a healthy model, I’m starting to apply it to a lot of things in my life.”

Ms. Donelly, 51, was phoning during a break in rehearsals with the band, who just released “Dove,” its third album — or its first since Season 6 of “Seinfeld,” to put it another way. The band is back playing in the bassist Gail Greenwood’s Rhode Island basement, known as the Rock ’n’ Roll Control Center, just as it did when Ms. Donelly parlayed her status as an indie-rock lifer into mainstream pop success with Belly’s 1993 debut “Star,” then flamed out shortly after its second album, “King,” two years later. “I think we have an extremely fortunate complementary set of skills,” she said. “We were aware of it and then we lost sight of it, which is a very 20-something thing to do.”

What was once a life-consuming, deeply romantic — or at least deeply romanticized — struggle to get signed, get heard and get along is now, for many bands of a certain vintage, a more comfortable experience, free of the pressures that may have contributed to their demise decades ago. They, as Belly does now, have more control over how they tour and how they make and release new music. “It doesn’t have that feel of a biological imperative,” Ms. Donelly said.

Of the ’90s-era indie bands who have had creatively resurgent second lives, many hail from Belly’s peer group in the Boston area, including Dinosaur Jr., Mission of Burma and the Breeders, which Ms. Donelly was once in. Her stepsister Kristin Hersh, with whom she played in Throwing Muses in the late ’80s and early ’90s, was at the forefront of crowdsourcing records directly from fans, a now-common practice Belly used to help finance “Dove.”

“Kristin was a complete pioneer and just watching that develop was really inspiring,” Ms. Donelly said. “I like the porousness of it.”

Anyone charmed by the mix of melodic hooks and imagistic lyrics exemplified by Belly’s breakout hit “Feed the Tree” will find a way into “Dove.” “Shiny One,” a single, is confident and propulsive, while “Stars Align” is unrelentingly sunny radio-friendly pop, whether or not radio friends it back.

“This sounds insane, but we didn’t have one conversation about what we wanted this album to sound like, we just started writing,” Ms. Donelly said. With Ms. Greenwood and the drummer Chris Gorman living in Rhode Island, Ms. Donelly in Massachusetts, and the guitarist Tom Gorman in upstate New York, the songs were largely composed sending ideas over email.

One of the new album’s standouts, the slow-burn “Human Child,” addresses the bubble of fame that burst quickly as directly as Ms. Donelly’s lyrics allow. “To be honest, that is a letter to myself,” she said. “How to weave what happened before into your present in a way that is constructive — it’s easy to hang on to garbage.”

Since Belly’s breakup, Ms. Greenwood has played with L7 and Bif Naked, while Tom and Chris Gorman work in commercial photography. Ms. Donelly released four solo albums and raised two daughters with her husband of 22 years. She also became a postpartum doula, and while she stops short of crediting that work with the band’s revival, it did make reconciliation of the estranged band members feel like a natural byproduct of maturing. “I don’t think I consciously was doing it for any self-improvement reasons; that was just kind of a happy accident,” she said.

A friendly, inside-joke-laden icebreaker email chain begat the successful dusting off of some old songs in the Control Center, then a couple of new songs that felt right, then a handful of shows in 2016 before committing to a new album.

Helping to keep priorities in check was Ms. Greenwood’s discovery, just six weeks before their first reunion dates, that she had cancer. Rather than add urgency or upend plans, this just reinforced the notion that Belly wasn’t worth reviving unless it remained a respite from real-life troubles rather than a source of them.

“I don’t mean to say we wouldn’t have been like this if it had happened in the ’90s, but back then everything was so serious,” said Ms. Greenwood, who described herself as a “walking petri dish of fast-dividing cells.” “And now it’s like, ‘I’ll tell you what’s serious.’”

Ms. Donelly has drawn recent inspiration from artists who followed in her footsteps such as Phoebe Bridgers and the British sister act Colour Me Wednesday, but she is wary that her role among the wave of successful female-fronted bands in the ’90s is sometimes misunderstood. “There’s this assumption that every single female artist from the time was hanging out and that it felt like a movement,” she said. “That always stops me in my tracks. Even my daughter has asked me.”

The world that greets Belly now offers new challenges, including a rapper named Belly (“There’s misunderstandings on a weekly basis,” Ms. Donelly said). But this time it’s just the four of them in a van — no roadies, no trucks, no buses, no drama. And they won’t need the drama for creative inspiration as they keep writing new songs; Tom Gorman has already been emailing new snippets.

“I feel like life is endlessly complicated,” Ms. Donelly said. “And human interaction is an endless mine of material.”