Mixtapes for Hookers

Songs #10 Are Holding Out For A Spaceman

[Kicking off my review of my 10 favorite songs of 2002.]

#10. Tanya Donelly, So Much Song and Belly, Spaceman

I love Belly.

I mean, everyone loves Belly, or at least I think they do, because what’s not to love?  But Belly have a very special place in my heart for a bunch of reasons.  In seventh grade, for instance, the whole “alternative” thing was passing me by.  Nirvana may have been for the disenchanted, but I was too insecure to even hang out with the anti-social kids.  Plus I grew up on pop, with no angsty older siblings to make fun of my Janet Jackson fixation, so Temple of the Dog didn’t really cut it for me.

Belly, on the other hand, I understood.  Their songs were catchy—really catchy—and a lot more fun to bop around to than Alice In Chains.  They were cool, alternative, but also I could play them in front of my mom.  Plus their singer was a pretty lady, and when all the hot hot boys on the school bus used to ask me what celebrities I wanted to bang, Tanya Donelly was a really convenient (and convincing) answer.  (Never mind that, in retrospect, they featured on what may have been the most aesthetically displeasing of forty years’ worth of aesthetically displeasing Rolling Stone covers.)
And they were from Rhode Island!  A note from Tanya Donelly even graced the wall of my favorite restaurant, the Brick Alley in Newport, whose nachos are completely worth an hour drive and an hour wait.

Anyway, flash forward to 2002. Donelly’s just put out her second solo album, Beautysleep,  a lovely collection of languid pop-rock.  So Much Song, for me the album’s best moment, is bar-rock in the best sense, the kind of the thing that Cat Power’s been getting almost right for the last six years or so.  “Someone’s gotta stay to clean up this mess,” she says in the chorus, and while she’s describing a break-up you can almost picture someone sweeping an empty bar as the end credits start rolling.

Around the same time as Beautysleep came out, Rhino issued Sweet Ride: The Best of Belly.  Thankfully, it’s not structured like a best-of; nearly half of it is b-sides, for one thing, and some songs are presented in alternate versions (Dusted is live; Judas My Heart is in French.)  Spaceman, the opening track, was originally a b-side; in the liner notes, Donelly explains that the more ethereal sound resembles what direction the group might have gone in had they not imploded after the release of their King album.

(I remember in 1995, when King was named one of the worst albums of the year by People Magazine; none of the singles had caught on, despite the fact that Super-Connected is one of their best songs.  It made no sense.)

Belly were a brief moment in the grand scheme of things, but King and Star (and Sweet Ride) still sound better today than any other alterna-pop albums of the mid-nineties.

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