It boggles the mind a little that a song as wonderfully offbeat as Belly’s “Feed the Tree” was a hit single. But such was life in the early-90s heyday of alternative rock. “Every time we play it I say ‘How was this a hit?,” says frontwoman Tanya Donelly. “It is the weirdest freaking song, for the subject matter alone. And there so many examples from that era. I think there was a time back then when a bunch of our friends were having the same experience of having these quote-unquote hits with very quirky songs. It felt a little like sliding under the radar, like we were getting away with something. And that was a blast.”
And after all these years, she still gets people asking her what the song is about. (It roughly concerns a woman asking respect from her partner, including being there when she’s buried). “This may sound precious but I actually figure songs out years later — ‘Oh, that’s what I meant!’ So I am still figuring it out too. And I like it when people make up their own stories too, to be honest. I love hearing people say ‘This is what I get from this’.”
Donelly originally formed Belly in 1991 after being the second singer/songwriter in Throwing Muses and the Breeders; then her own songs started pouring out. The classic lineup of Donelly, bassist Gail Greenwood, guitarist Tom Gorman and drummer Chris Gorman reunited in 2016 after two decades apart. Shows since then have been infrequent but they play the Paradise on Wednesday and Thursday, as part of a mini-tour that begins this Saturday at Fort Adams in Newport and will wrap up with West Coast dates with the Breeders.
The shows will debut a couple of songs from Belly’s second reunion album, which is mostly written but not yet recorded. “I feel that this bunch of songs is the most varied we’ve ever done. Even playing them in practice we were thinking, ‘Well, this is a super odd batch of songs, but in a really good way’.” She admits it’s a bit daunting to play new songs live, knowing they’ll probably be on YouTube by morning. “I don’t love that everything ends up on the internet; I’m a little old-school to be honest. When we play these songs live, we’ll do a spoken disclaimer that they’re being workshopped in real time. But we feel that playing them live will be revealing for us, in terms of which direction to go — You know how they say, one show is worth ten practices. So we are going to do the vulnerable thing.”
Donelly has played with numerous solo bands over the years, but Belly always had its own magic — a band that can sound dreamlike and mysterious even while rocking out. “That gets ascribed to me a lot but it is really all four of us who are contributing to that ‘ethereality’,” she says. “When we started the band, there was this feeling of experiment around it — We didn’t have a five year plan at all, it was just these people playing this group of songs. That’s the luxury and excitement of being in your 20’s, we had the time and the energy. Now it’s more like, ‘Okay, I can meet you tomorrow between eleven and three’.”
Yet the band remains special to her. “I just think we have very four very strong, very different personalities that just kind of jelled in spite of the differences. There is also a lot of joy in this band, a lot of laughter, a lot of love — and I know how corny that sounds, but it’s true. I also think our relationship with the people that come to our shows and love our music is really special. I hate to use the word ‘fans’ but our fan-friends have built relationships with us and with each other. So the reunion is not just for us, but for everybody in the room.”
