Tanya Donelly

Tanya Donelly began played guitar at age 16 alongside her half-sister Kristin Hersh in the Throwing Muses, writing some of that band's most engagingly tuneful songs, and helping to break the ground upon which so many women in rock now walk. Then there was Tanya Donelly as the trusty accomplice, joining Kim Deal in 1990 to help launch the Breeders, another trailblazing landmark in the genre soon to be know as alternative rock. And yet again, only three years later, Donelly made another inspiring piece of rock history by following her pop instincts into the spotlight as the leader of her own band, Belly. She took home her first gold record, earned a Grammy nomination for her efforts, and successfully completed the journey from underground hero to mainstream success without compromising her unique musical vision.

Her going solo had a lot to do with her romance with the idea of the rock band. "It was a combination of wanting to build up confidence, and also really believing in the concept of a band," Donelly explains. "To this day, I still believe in the concept of the band. When bands work, they're my favorite thing in the world. But it's very rare."

"Belly was like that for a while. It was very much a combination of four people. We were all coming from different places musically, and for a while that tension was a positive thing. But eventually we started to stifle each other." It was in the wake of Belly's amicable breakup that Donelly realized it was time to make the leap from collaborator/band-leader to solo artist. Rather than hiring slick session players to back her, she called on some old friends from the Boston music scene to join her in the studio at Fort Apache.

On September 1997 she released "Lovesongs for Underdogs", her first solo album.

Newly released in 2002, "beautysleep" is the first Tanya Donelly record in nearly five years.

-Bio from her previous Official site at Reprise Records

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