page_title: Tanya Donelly
section_title: Throwing Muses band beginnings
hierarchical_section_title: Tanya Donelly / Throwing Muses band beginnings
caption_attribution_description: Tanya Donelly of Throwing Muses touring the Real Ramona album. The Leadmill, Sheffield March 1991 My review of Kristin Hersh's memoir, Paradoxical Undressing, has now been published online in the Journal of Mental Health and is due out in print soon. Read it on the neate photos blog here. More neate photos
context_page_description: Tanya Donelly is an American Grammy Award-nominated singer-songwriter and guitarist based in New England who co-founded Throwing Muses with her step-sister Kristin Hersh. Donelly went on to co-form the alternative rock band The Breeders in 1989, before leaving to front her own band Belly in 1991. By the late 1990s, she settled into a solo recording career, working largely with musicians connected to the Boston music scene.
  Donelly is best known for her Grammy nominated work in the mid-1990s as lead vocalist and songwriter for Belly, when she scored a national radio and music television hit with her composition "Feed the Tree". Belly recorded on Sire/Reprise Records and 4AD Records; Donelly's solo works have been released on Warner Bros. Records and 4AD.
  Over the years, she has listed several musical influences. In one interview, she named her guitar playing influences as Marc Ribot, The Beatles, and former bandmate Hersh. More recently, she mentioned Leonard Cohen as a songwriting hero, citing her then current listening favorites as Lucinda Williams and Joan Wasser, and listing Boston-based groups like the Dambuilders, Pixies, and Count Zero as past favorites.
context_section_description: Around age 14, Hersh's and Donelly's fathers both gave them their own guitars and they initially started playing along with Beatles songs. Soon after, the two started to play along with songs written by Hersh's musical father and then began to write original songs of their own. Donelly co-founded Throwing Muses with Hersh and other members like Elaine Adamedes at around age 15.
  Throughout the 1980s, Donelly worked as lead guitarist and secondary vocalist/songwriter, complementing the work of Throwing Muses leader Hersh. The group moved from Rhode Island to Boston around 1986 and signed as the first American group on the influential British label 4AD. Although the band's work generally employed complex rhythms and offbeat chord structures, Donelly has said she eventually accepted that her compositions were simpler and had "more traditional songwriting sensibilities" than Hersh's, by the last two years she worked in the band. Some of her tunes from this period include "Green", "Reel," "Pools in Eyes", "The River", "Giant", "Dragonhead", "Honeychain", "Not Too Soon" and "Angel". Hersh's most popular Muses songs like "Fish", "Dizzy", "Counting Backwards" and most of "The Real Ramona" LP almost always featured Donelly's distinctive lead guitar playing, heavy background vocals, inner vocal workings with different lyrics and pop vocal harmonies and melodic hooks.
caption: Donelly performing with Throwing Muses, 1991
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