Happy 30th Anniversary to Belly’s debut album Star, originally released January 25, 1993.
When I was around five years old, my grandmother made me a homemade birthday cake with fluffy peaks of white frosting topped with tiny plastic ballerinas, in colorful strapless tutus, that she found in the cake-decorating section at Kmart. She brought the cake out onto the patio amid the usual singing and fanfare in the mosquito-heavy Minnesota night, and I remember being transfixed by those tiny ballerinas—there seemed to be hundreds—in various stages of dance in the candlelight glow. I remember the adults laughing as my mom, cutting the cake, divulged that she and my grandma had discovered a few poor paint jobs across some of the ballerinas’ bosoms, and several of the photos from that party show my cousin Björn studying those ballerinas intently, playing Where’s Waldo with the bare-breasted ones.
I immediately thought of that beautiful, dancing cake many years later when, as a ’90s teen, I found Belly’s Star, with its congregation of ballerina figurines on the cover, amid the racks of CDs at the Sight-N-Sound on our American army base in Germany. It was hit or miss at the Sight-N-Sound—you could hardly ever find anything “alternative” there—and so I would usually have to wait for our summers in Minnesota to buy the bulk of the music I liked. Which is why Belly’s Star turning up at the Sight-N-Sound of all places somehow just felt magical. I hadn’t heard a song on it yet, but I knew it was going to be love.
By the time she formed Belly in the early ’90s, Tanya Donelly had been playing in bands since she herself was a teenager. After she and her best friend Kristin Hersh introduced their divorced parents to one another, Hersh’s mom and Donelly’s dad got married, and the girls became stepsisters who played Beatles songs together on their guitars. Even though there was no blood between them, with their matching self-described “dishwater blond” hair, Donelly and Hersh easily passed for sisters. “When people ask us if we’re twins, she tells them we’re step-twins and they always nod, like they know what she’s talking about,” Hersh recounts in her memoir Rat Girl.
After they tired of Beatles covers, the step-twins decided to form a band. Hersh, who had experienced synesthesia since childhood and then began hearing music after a being hit by a car in her teens, began writing songs prolifically to keep up with what her mind kept feeding her. The sisters named the band Throwing Muses. Eventually, Donelly would contribute some of her own songs to the Muses, but, due to shyness, she was often content to fill more of a lieutenant role, with Hersh acting as the band’s natural frontwoman.
Despite being teenagers, Throwing Muses were regulars on the bar-and-club circuit in their native Rhode Island, attracting the attention of Fort Apache Studios co-founder Gary Smith, who encouraged them to move to Boston. “When we got out of high school he started campaigning for us to come here, and so we did and he really took us under his wing,” Donelly recalls. “Gary made our first demo. He helped us get an apartment, got us jobs. He ultimately ended up managing Belly and me for years.”
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As soon as they had their demo, the Muses mailed it out in a flurry to record labels far and wide, but even though they had some interest stateside, it was 4AD in the UK that eventually won them over. After receiving the demo, 4AD’s co-owner Ivo Watts-Russell would call up Hersh just to chat about random topics—toasters, cats, a gnarly boil on his neck—without ever really talking business. They struck up a friendship, and the Muses got a contract, even though 4AD typically didn’t sign American bands. Donelly is convinced that being on a British label, and being covered in the British press, contributed greatly to her early success. “The press over there was kind of all over Boston to be honest,” she says. “The nonstop Boston coverage of NME and Melody Maker and Sounds—that trickled back here and college radio kind of built off of that in a way.”
Soon thereafter, Donelly met Kim Deal when the Muses performed with the Pixies one night at The Rat nightclub in Boston. Deal and Donelly immediately hit it off. “We started writing songs,” Donelly recalls. “There was no clear goal for it, we were just sort of doing it, and then the songs really started to come together. We're both big fans of the disco and originally we were going to try to make dance music. We quickly found out that we were incapable of doing so.”
They called themselves The Breeders, and the result of their mucking around is the gorgeous, sublimely weird 1990 album Pod. “[Making Pod] was a wonderful experience,” Donelly told me when I interviewed her for Albumism last year. “That was such a bubble—everything about it, the writing of it, the recording of it, the pre-production of it. [… ] It was a singular recording experience in my life. Kim and I really supported each other in moving on from where we were [by making the album]. I think of it as really a watermark in my life for that reason. It was a gift that we gave to each other.”
Even in the Breeders, Donelly had taken a second-tier position to Kim Deal’s helming of the ship. The plan was that Pod would feature songs written by Deal, and then the second album would showcase Donelly’s songs. But then they ran into scheduling conflicts—the Pixies were about to open for U2 on their Zoo TV tour—and Donelly was itching to get her music out. “I sort of got antsy, had already left the Muses and so I thought, I’m taking my songs and making my own band!” Donelly remembers. (Kim Deal was understanding, and no drama ensued.) And so the songs that were initially earmarked for the Breeders’ second album—Donelly had scrawled “The Breeders” all over her early demos—eventually became Belly’s Star.
Suddenly, Donelly was a full-on frontwoman. She enlisted bassist Fred Abong, and guitarist and drummer brothers Tom and Chris Gorman, and the newly minted Belly headed to Nashville to record their album. But that’s not what initially drew her down South. “It was a relationship. With Chick Graning from Scarce and Anastasia Screamed,” Donelly divulges. “We were together for like a year, and I was down there because they were recording. I selfishly made everybody come down to where I was with my boyfriend. But I think it was enjoyable for everybody, we always sort of liked traveling to record.” (Graning ended up contributing slide guitar and backing vocals to Star.)
The result was an album that stirred up an alchemy of jangly folk with dream pop, and ethereality with darkness, to conjure a witchy, slightly macabre fairy-tale world uniquely its own. In 1993, there just wasn’t much out there like Star—even if you had previously heard the Breeders or Throwing Muses, which most people had not. Like Kurt Cobain, Donelly succumbed to an urge to marry pop melodies with a punk sensibility, and Star was all the more revered for it. It became a UK Top 10 album, received two GRAMMY nods, and led to Belly’s being featured on the cover of Rolling Stone.
I remember hearing Star for the first time in 1993 and feeling like someone understood my weirdness. It’s an interior, intimate album, like skipping through the maze of someone’s brain, excavating their memories and rowing across the shimmering silver of their dreams. The lyrics are vague but evocative, replete with images of decapitated dolls, kids from bad homes, a tree that’s grown from an old man’s heart, and a squirrel who’s slammed her bike down the stairs. There are moons of many manifestations, fitful and restful sleep, and a sad dress you’d chew your foot off to get out of, all in those lyrics.
But Star is not a sad album, or a mad album—it’s non-judgmentally exploratory. For Donelly, the album was a way of sort of benignly “killing off her childhood.” “I was an extremely self-repressing child,” she muses. “The way I chose to deal with things was to put everything in separate little boxes and save them for later. That’s what Star really is in a lot of ways—me unwrapping each box one by one and clearing out that particular attic space.”
Star opens with the spare, spidery “Someone to Die For.” Not long after Star came out, I was hanging out in my bedroom with my best friend Nikki, singing along to the chorus—“Don’t you have someone you’d die for?”—when suddenly Nikki answered in a small voice, “Yeah. My mom.” Nikki’s mom was recently divorced, they lived alone together in a tiny apartment, and they drove each other crazy, which made Nikki’s expressed willingness to (hypothetically) die for her mother all the more poignant. And then I thought it over for a second, pictured my own exasperating mother, and answered, “Yeah, me too.”
A bell tolls in the opening of “Angel,” and Star’s second song builds up slowly, rocks out, and then dissolves slowly again as Donelly tells us about her bad dreams—“so bad I threw my pillow away.” She asks God for the moon, and he sends three angels to move the river so that it flows past her house. The song drives onward, taking on a madcap Pixies quality, and only then do we get the sense that the river will suffice, that it might eventually lull her to restful sleep.
“Dusted” is careening and jaggedly riffy, another rocker that sketches a bleak picture of a wasted chick who no one can decide what do with—“She’s just dusted, leave her.” The celestial quality of Donelly’s voice adds another layer, however, and the scene takes on an eerie, hazy-gray pall in the final chorus, leaving us to wonder if the wasted chick is playing dead or if she’s really dead, and just what the hell she’s doing lying in a cellar.
Donelly’s voice is the star again on the harmony-laden “I Heard Every Word,” where she deals with an avoidant lover in an innovative way—“Uh-oh, oh, you gave me too much room / So I filled it up with chairs you can’t sit on.” The jangly, magnificently poppy “Gepetto” is up next, and my heart did a little cartwheel when it was featured in last year’s ’90s-throwback Showtime series Yellowjackets. The show’s stranded-in-the-woods theme fits perfectly with Star’s sensibility, and it would have been a crime against the ’90s to not include at least one song from the album.
“Witch” begins with the lullaby “You’re not safe in this house / You’re not safe here” over spare guitar fingerpicking, and it offers a variation on the Hansel & Gretel fable that somehow feels more comforting than eerie, even though it’s that, too, the song existing somewhere on the border between dream and nightmare. Then comes the giddy, head-bopping “Slow Dog,” which I always thought was about an annoying but loveable hound a woman decides to carry on her back out of pity. However, it’s actually based on a Chinese fable about an adulteress whose scarlet letter is a dead, decomposing dog stuck to her back. Donelly decided to set the tale in the American South, infusing the song with a Southern-gothic sensibility. “Oddly, it ends up being about her liberation,” she explained. “Once the dog is gone—and I put it so that the dog was some sort of metaphor—she’s free.”
“Low Red Moon” features foreboding organ and takes on a cinematic quality that evokes a galloping Western. “Feed The Tree,” Star’s most popular song (it made the Billboard Hot 100, and the video was an MTV favorite) is breezy but also slightly morbid, with the titular tree sprouting from a dead man’s body. “Full Moon, Empty Heart” is another take on Star’s liberal moon theme, and Donelly coos like a night bird that may or may not be dangerous to man.
“White Belly” is murky and moody—dreampop’s answer to grunge, while “Untogether” is winding, jangly country-folk in stark contrast. “Sad Dress” finds a narrator contemplating her own drunkenness, and her own sad frock, as she makes her way home in the dark. And “Stay,” the album’s final lullaby, is dreamily singsong and Beatles-reminiscent, concluding Star with the melancholy lament “It’s not time for me to go.”
Star remains a widely beloved album, an artifact of a sound that was copied heavily by other acts and became ubiquitous in the ’90s, and yet it is also an album so singular and unique that it still sounds fresh today. “Because Star did so well, I tend to objectively think of it as this very polished album,” Donelly said when Belly reformed in 2016. “Then I go back and listen to it as we try to relearn our songs and I think, this is so intimate and weird!” Indeed it is, but in the best possible way.
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