GUT INSTINCTS : Belly’s Tanya Donelly Follows the Muses With a Faith That Puts Her Back in the Spotlight

Like a lot of people, Tanya Donelly hit a snag in her mid-20s that left her feeling uncertain and adrift.

She had just walked out of Throwing Muses, the critically acclaimed cult band she had been part of since her mid-teens. Her first post-Muses move in the summer of 1991 was to travel to England to be with a lover who was going to double as her manager. But within a month the romance was dead, the business plans were kaput, and Donelly was back in her hometown of Newport, R.I., wondering what to do next.

“I was pretty confused. I didn’t know which end was up,” the singer recalled over the phone recently from Boulder, Colo., a stop on a tour that will bring her new band, Belly, to the Coach House on Monday. “I was in total limbo.”

Donelly says she sincerely believes in the existence of guardian angels. Recent events in her life have only confirmed that faith. At 26, she has climbed out of limbo and into the spotlight as the leader of one of this year’s hottest new alternative-rock bands.

If she lacked direction after leaving Throwing Muses, Donelly was not without creative resources.

During her years with the Muses, her songwriting had been sporadic as she played the overshadowed sidekick to the more prolific Kristin Hersh. Donelly’s role was to write and sing one or two songs per record and contribute lead guitar parts to the Muses’ intricate, nervously circling rhythmic patterns. But near the end of her tenure with the band, she began to write more.

With childhood friend Hersh well-established as the Muses’ primary singer and songwriter, Donelly decided to leave and seek a creative outlet of her own.

The parting was a gradual one: Donelly says she told the other members she was leaving on the day the band finished recording its excellent 1991 album, “The Real Ramona.” But she stuck with Throwing Muses for another year of touring.

“I was such a wreck,” she said of her final phase with Throwing Muses. “I really wasn’t concentrating on anything. I wasn’t completely pathetic, but it was a hard time for me. I was going into myself. But I’m glad I waited that year because I wrote a lot of songs.”

Those songs would eventually help her sail out of the becalmed waters she found herself in during the summer of 1991.

The first sign of favorable winds came when drummer Chris Gorman, an acquaintance from the Rhode Island rock scene, phoned Donelly and asked if she would be interested in starting a band with him and his guitar-playing brother, Tom.

“That was the first step, and the most important one,” she said, adding that she had been thinking about the brothers as possible playing partners when the call came.

She knew Tom Gorman well from a summer they had spent bumming around Newport. But she didn’t know much about the brothers’ musical abilities.

That question was answered when early rehearsals went well, with Fred Abong, a bassist who had also played in Throwing Muses, joining Donelly and the Gorman brothers. Abong left after Belly’s debut album, “Star,” and has been replaced by Gail Greenwood.

Around the time that Belly began to take shape, Donelly’s personal life also brightened. She became involved with Chick Graning, a Tennessee-based rocker whose band, Anastasia Screamed, had toured Europe and England with Throwing Muses during 1991. The two are engaged, but Donelly said a planned August wedding may have to be delayed while Belly tours and Graning launches his new band, Scarce.

Donelly’s personal and career outlook were on the upswing by the time Belly recorded its album. But, ironically, most of the songs look back on less pleasant times. Recording in Nashville--a site chosen because Donelly wanted to be with Graning, who was living there at the time--she was enjoying a growing romance while working in the studio on songs about relationships in collapse and sundry other forms of suffering.

“That was strange. It was still close enough to the time those happened to know how I had felt,” she said of the unhappy experiences. “There was still residual weirdness. When the album was finished and I listened to the whole thing, I felt I’d closed a few doors without stepping on too many toes”--especially those of her ex-bandmates, with whom she says she remains friendly.

Donelly says the album’s only lyrical reference to her split with Throwing Muses is the final verse of the folkish slide-guitar lament “Untogether.”

We threw outrageous parties, we were golden.

Now the bird keeps her distance,

And I keep my speed.

Sometimes there’s no poison like a dream.

. . . you can’t hold the impossibly untogether.

Donelly hasn’t been in touch with her old bandmates Hersh and David Narcizo since Belly’s album came out in February.

“They’re so busy and I’m so busy, but when we’re together we’re fine. Dave and Kristin and I are very tender, we’re very careful with each other’s feelings.”

“Star” may be an album of dark themes, oblique lyrical imagery and barbed emotional edges, but it also is a richly melodic, riff-happy piece of work that manages to be adventurous and inviting at the same time. The array of sounds and styles ranges from the hot blast of Sonic Youth-like noise guitar that introduces “Angel” to the creaky, wistful, old-timey violin that waltzes into “Stay,” the folk ballad that closes the album.

A light, airy prettiness is Donelly’s vocal trademark, but she can muster enough weariness, conviction or alarmed bite to carry the heavy emotional freight of her songs.

Like her old partner, Hersh, with whom she began playing guitar and writing songs at the age of 14, Donelly favors symbolism over narrative and realistic description. Generally, Belly’s thematic drift is easier to catch than on most Muses songs, including the ones Donelly wrote. But new songs like “Gepetto” and “Slow Dog” (the latter will be Belly’s next video) pretty much defy interpretation.

Donelly, whose talk is open but spliced by nervous giggles, isn’t averse to offering authorial guidance for her songs, if asked.

“Slow Dog” was prompted by an article Donelly read about how women accused of adultery in ancient China were forced to go around with the carcasses of dogs strapped to their backs.

“Gepetto” is about children and how mixed up their worlds are.

“Adults make them and put them out in the world and forget how strange it is to be a kid,” Donelly said.

(A Disney buff, Donelly not only drew on “Pinocchio” for her own song, but also has been covering “Trust in Me,” from “The Jungle Book,” in Belly’s shows. The band doesn’t play any of her Throwing Muses songs, which would make her feel “like wearing old lingerie with somebody new.”)

“Feed the Tree,” the album’s most affirmative song (and the MTV hit that has spurred Belly’s early success), speaks symbolically of transformations in which heartaches are turned into something generative--a process that mirrors Donelly’s own ability to turn dark thoughts and experiences into appealing songs. The song also alludes to her own resiliency and her determination to be treated with respect.

“In every performer, there’s part of you that wants to be respected and admired. But fame is not important to me,” she said. “I think it’s a relatively unnatural relation to have with the world, and bad things happen because of it. I don’t want people to know me and think they have a shortcut to intimacy with me because they know the songs. But I love playing and watching people have fun at the shows.”

A whole lot more shakin’ figures to be going on at Belly concerts than at Muses shows, which are focused on Hersh’s fixed intensity. Donelly says she has begun to move more on stage as she takes over the front-woman’s role--partly to keep up with Greenwood, a vivacious bopper who used to front her own band on the Rhode Island rock scene before auditioning to win a slot in Belly.

After initially launching Belly with three men, Donelly said she insisted on having another woman in the band. “I didn’t like that feeling of being a woman up front with guys around me. It’s too traditional. Something about it makes me feel like a princess. Also, I needed backup vocals” to do justice to songs that on album are rich with her own multitracked harmonies.

Donelly discovered her protective angel not in church, but in college books.

“I was interested in anthropology and went to school for a year at the University of Rhode Island. A lot of my religious sensibility came from that year. I started to believe in angels. (They are) things that run through every culture and pop up everywhere, and that’s proof enough for me. I feel like I have one. I don’t presume to know what they are, whether they are messengers of God or just inside you.”

Donelly’s angel is female, and part of its job seems to be tweaking her conscience.

“I can tell when I (tee) her off. I can tell when she leaves the room because she’s (teed) off. I have one with a kind of Tinkerbell personality, feisty and kind of nasty.”

Donelly’s other moral barometer is her belly. Along with the word’s association with fecundity, she said, she named her band Belly because she feels compelled to pay her own stomach close heed.

“Whenever I make a mistake in my life, I stop eating. My body never lets me get away with lying or hurting people. It starves me.”

“It’s only when I make dramatic mistakes,” she added, which means that she doesn’t have to be a complete saint to survive; her morally attuned belly gives dispensations for routine peccadilloes.

Belly’s success also gives Donelly an occasional pang.

According to a spokesman at Warner Bros. Records, parent company of the Sire/Reprise label for which Belly records, about 220,000 copies of “Star” have been sold in America since its release three months ago. That’s already more than triple the sales for “The Real Ramona,” Throwing Muses’ most popular album. The Muses never eked their way onto Billboard’s chart of the top 200 albums. This week, Belly is No. 71 and rising.

Donelly says she takes no special pleasure in having outdone the band she bailed out of.

“If anything, I feel kind of guilty sometimes. I’m happy, but I wish the Throwing Muses had done well. We were good. Sometimes I feel kind of (bad) about that.”

Mike Boehm covers pop music for The Times Orange County Edition.