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Belly’s Star sounds so bright and timeless, it’s hard to believe it’s 20 years old. You heard me right: TWENTY YEARS!

In honor of this milestone, Belly singer/songwriter Tanya Donelly has released her original demos for the band’s classic debut, packaged with 4 new songs as part of her Swan Song Series marking her unofficial-official “retirement” from the music biz.

Recorded onto a reel marked “Breeders Demos” (the sequel to Pod was originally meant to showcase Tanya’s songs), the demos have been bootlegged across the internet but never officially released as a matched set.

The demos have a delicate, hushed quality (Donelly calls them “quiet and spidery”) that is really special. If you haven’t heard them, treat yourself to the whole set — a steal at $4.

To celebrate, I’m posting my Belly interview from the very FIRST print issue of WARPED REALITY, published a few months after Star came out.

Nice-T: Tanya Donelly Gets Her Own Band at Last

Tanya Donelly and her band Belly breezed into the press conference wearing white tuxedos and corsages. “It’s a contest to make ourselves as uncomfortable as possible,” laughed lead singer and songwriter Donelly.

“…and to hope that it rubs off on you,” quipped bassist Gail Greenwood to all of the journalists present.

A short while later, one intrepid reporter got up and asked the band,” How was prom?” — to which Tanya mock-tearfully replied, “I’m still a virgin, so it didn’t go so good.”

Alright, so prom was a bust, but things are definitely going well for Belly.

Since its release in January [1993], their debut album Star has sold more than 200,000 copies.

Tanya’s winsome and dark fairy tales, partnered with her strong sense of melody, have garnered the band both popular and critical acclaim.

So what does all this success mean to the band?

“It means we can afford some new duds,” laughs drummer/graphic designer Chris Gorman, referring to the bands’ formal attire.

For Tanya, it means being (at last) in the spotlight — an exciting but sometimes nerve-wracking prospect.

For 8 years, she was second guitarist and occasional songwriter for her stepsister Kristin Hersh’s band, Throwing Muses.

For one album and an EP she did the same for Pixie Kim Deal’s band the Breeders.

In 1991, after Throwing Muses’ Real Ramona tour, she decided to strike out on her own. She recruited Muses bassist Fred Abong and childhood friends Tom and Chris Gorman — Belly was born.

Tanya is adamant that she wasn’t creatively “stifled” in the Muses: “It was the kind of situation where the two songs you heard were the two that I’d written that year,” she explains. “I had just recently started to write more. And any small tensions that did happen — well, I left before it could get weird.”

Tanya notes that she could not have left the Muses before that. Not only did she not have enough songs, but she wasn’t ready to form her own group, either emotionally or practically.

To her, being the center of attention means “having to show you’re a fun person all the time.”

But she’s learning, thanks to Gail, who’s extremely funny and with whom she shares an excellent rapport — and to her own growing confidence as a songwriter and performer.

Tanya isn’t letting all this “flavor of the month” status in the fickle alt-rock world — Buzz Bin on MTV,Rolling Stone photo shoots, Gap ad — go to her head.

And the band’s live show is gelling too. When I saw the band at CMJ in October, Tanya seemed shy and barely talked to the audience.

By contrast, at a recent show at the Paradise in Boston, Tanya joked between songs, even going so far as to have the lighting engineer illuminate the big zit that she was “cultivating” on her nose. “I rub butter in it every day!” she laughed.

What does the future hold for Belly? The next album is going to be more collaborative,” promises Tanya. “We’ll be doing nude performance art,” quips Tom. “After that,” continues Tanya, “I don’t know — we don’t have a lot of foresight. We’re just touring for a while, and then we’ll be making another record, and then we’ll be touring again!”

I’m sure that the next time around, prom will be perfect — or as Gail would say, “Kill-ah!”

***
Buy Tanya’s Swan Song Series on Bandcamp.

PHOTOS: TUXES BY ANDREA FELDMAN | TANYA + GAIL SHOTS BY SCOTT KARDON

Last weekend I made a totally spur-of-the-moment decision to go to NYC, which is how I found myself crammed into a corner table at Mission Chinese Food listening to a group of foodie hipsters talk about “the really authentic places in Flushing” and amusedly watching them try to eat vinegar peanuts with chopsticks. (Don’t try this at home, kids.)

This was my 2nd trip to Mission, the hole-in-the-wall SF transplant run by bleach-blond culinary madman Danny Bowien, he of the sk8r shorts and genius way with Szechuan peppercorns.

On first visit, I fell hard for the restaurant’s Twin Peaks fetish and mashed-up menu that mixes the best of old-skool Chinatown with a modernist twist.

Visit #2 found me on less of a ma-la high, mostly ‘cause I decided to order some underdogs off the menu. No mapo daofu for me (it’s as f’ing good as the hype) — I went for the smashed cucumbers (deliriously good) and the pork jowls with mint, black beans and stir-fried radishes.

The jowls were … solid. Not earth-shattering, but ok. For one thing, jowls are deeply fatty, and — thanks to some covetous eyeing of my neighbors Chongqing wings — I wanted something crispy and a bit more toothsome.

But sometimes you just have to recalibrate your expectations and go with it. (The Black Lodge — a demented concoction with Fernet Branca and grapefruit — might have helped me along.)

From MCF I headed over to the New Museum to indulge in some pure ‘90s nostalgia. Yes, I’m talking about “Experimental Jet Set, Trash and No Star,” a curious wormhole into 1993 — a year that’s hard to pigeonhole, but if pressed I’d describe it as a watershed when gender and personal politics in art became deeply intertwined.

The nascent Internet became an increasingly powerful tool to create communities and rally around like-minded ideals, including the creation of art. (One of the last copies of “The Thing,” an early art net-community BBS, is included in the exhibition.)

Highlights: Haunting portraiture by John Currin, Andres Serrano, Nan Goldin — all emerging talents at the time.

Most haunting of all? Felix Gonzales-Torres’ “Untitled (Couple),” a string of lights that bisects the room and casts white-hot reflections across all of the art hung around the periphery. (Gonzales-Torres is one of the many artists in the show whose career was cut short by AIDS.)

In the same room, Kristin Oppenheim’s fragile interpretation of the Beach Boys’ “Sail On Sailor” brought a kind of closure to the show as a whole.

I rushed up to the top of the building to watch the sun set over the Bowery, then zipped downtown to meet my cousin and his fiancée at her bakery on Clinton St. (got the grand tour).

They rushed off to a birthday party in Williamsburg and I rushed a few blocks north to WD~50.

If you haven’t heard of WD~50, it pretty much introduced American diners to the concept of “modernist cuisine,” AKA “sci-fi food for intellectuals,” or (for the less snarky among you) “using science to push the boundaries of what food can be.”

Almost 10 years old, WD~50 has lost some of its “young upstart” luster — but the restaurant’s menu still hits a satisfying balance between novel treatments of the familiar and comforting (“bone marrow,” popcorn soup, s’mores) and wilder flights of fancy (smoked duck with parsnip “ricotta”; cucumber gelée with chartreuse and pineapple sorbet).

I was alone, so I ate my meal at the bar, chatting with the trio of bartenders and jealously eying their lineup of rare and underutilized booze, including an incredible array of amari.

I started my meal with Rye Not, a perfectly balanced concoction of rye, blood orange and orange blossom water. Wines: a floral Sylvaner and a light, jammy Dierberg Pinot Noir. I finished the meal with a glass of Aveze, a rare gentian liqueur from France.

Restaurants with a reputation for intellectualized, complex menus often have somewhat aloof or diffident service. Too often places totally overdo it, hovering at the table or fussing over every last detail, to the meal’s detriment.

Not so at WD~50, which offered some of the most warmly unobtrusive service I’ve encountered in a high-end restaurant. Friendly-but-detail-oriented was the prevailing tone — from the hostess, bartenders and sommelier down to the guy who brought out my soup spoon.

I’m not saying it was a perfect meal. The punnily titled “pho gras” struck me as self-satisfied — the flavors just didn’t come together. For one thing, the broth wasn’t hot or rich enough to properly meld with the cool slab of foie.

And what to do with the lone chicarrone hanging out by itself with a small daub of sriracha? It felt incomplete, and I resented the onus being on me to figure it out.

Thankfully other dishes delivered in unexpected ways:

• The richness of the mushroom jerky served with the Wagyu flatiron
• The salty, chewy fried black olive puffs that enlivened the monkfish with red pepper oatmeal coulis
• The black sesame powder that brought a savory bite to the bright, beautifully presented passion fruit “tart”
• The genius combo of cucumber, chartreuse and pineapple.

I was having such a delightful time that I miscalculated and totally missed my bus, necessitating an overnight stay and a breakfast trip to Má Pêche. (Life is rough.)

On my next trip I hope to check out Wylie’s new venture, Alder, due to open later this spring.

SUSAN & I IN NYC, 2005

Just days after she had received the diagnosis for the cancer that would end her life, my best friend Susan Curran gifted me with a magnet that proclaimed (in a jokey retro font): “I may be old, but I got to see all the cool bands.”

At the time it was a joke between us, since we were both reaching “that age” where early shows are a blessing and SEATING is a fucking godsend.

Now that she’s passed away at the untimely age of 41, I want to say, “We’re NOT old, and you had way too much time left. SHOULD have had so much more time left. Damn it, who’s going to see the 20th anniversary LAST SPLASH shows with me?!”

But she didn’t, which seems radically unfair. Fate works in some twisted ways. It hasn’t sunk in and probably won’t fully for a long time to come.

Susan started WARPED REALITY with me and rapidly became someone I considered an essential collaborator. The two of us had a kind of wonderful mind-meld: each of us spurred the other to greater creative heights. And we unfailingly trusted one another’s creative judgment and advice in all things: editorial, aesthetic and personal.

More than that, we were best friends who had more adventures than I can count. Usually, music was the spark but we loved seeing the world together when and where we could. Travel to Glasgow to see Prolapse and Arab Strap at King Tut’s Wah Wah Hut? Why not. Take two weeks to go to London for the 1st time and celebrate 4AD’s 13th anniversary? What the hell.

Once we graduated from college and settled into careers, those spur-of-the-moment adventures became fewer and far between. But we still found the time, whether it was spending New Year’s Eve in Paris with Susan and her husband Matt or meeting up in Williamsburg, Brooklyn to attend the first-ever Smorgasburg, we MADE the time.

I’m thankful for all those wonderful memories now as I contemplate a Susan-less future. Much love into the ether, Susan — we all love you and miss you.