It's Indian summer in Providence, Rhode Island, and Tanya Donelly is fixing up her new apartment after Belly's world tour. She has just moved onto this beautiful, tree-lined street full of historic houses, right next door to the mayor. The members of Throwing Muses, the band Donelly played with for 8 years, all live in the area. It's a small town, she reminds me.

Donelly grew up in nearby Newport as a painfully introverted child. "I was a wreck when I was little. I could barely talk to people. I was really afraid of other children and I just wanted to be invisible, so I did whatever I could to maintain that."

Invisible? An invisible woman in rock? We generally think of performers as exhibitionists, ready to expose themselves, to bare their guts (and anything else), to flaunt their desires. Donelly is as graceful, as videogenic, and as natural onstage as any star. But ironically, she describes herself without hesitation as "wicked guarded," wearing her reticence and seemingly normal girl-next-doorness like armor.

The child of hippie parents, Donelly perversely dreamed of conformity, of wearing a uniform and being a Girl Scout. She never made it that far, though. "I was kicked out of Brownies for guarding the door while two of the cool girls raided the cookie jar and took all the money. I was too afraid to tell my parents, so I would wear my Brownie uniform on the days I was supposed to go, and walk around after school for about an hour." She shakes her head in mock wonder.

Of course, with such demanding activities as making butter and shrunken apple heads, Brownies prepares girls for nothing except life as an arts and crafts instructor. Donelly knows that now. She has no illusions about how differently girls and boys are raised to think about themselves. "We had a 'sex education' class where they separated us," she says indignantly, "and the girls learned about menstruation while the boys learned about hard-ons. Their thing was focused on dicks getting hard and ours was focused on bleeding! What is the lesson here? This is what you use, and this is what you endure."

Donelly was the kind of girl who listened to Kate Bush and read books about witches and magic, looking for ways to transcend the restraints of her reality. She shifts on the sofa and smiles. "I used to make talismans and perform rituals in my room, burying things in the backyard at midnight! It was very Stevie Nicks. I'm glad I went through that stage. Basically what that is is female power."

When they were fourteen, Donelly and her step-sister Kristin Hersh got guitars and started writing songs. What emerged from this partnership was Throwing Muses. Their music was female adolescence made audible; harrowing and shattered, it often sounded like the heart of darkness. Donelly wrote one or two songs per Muses record, and they generally shimmered with an optimism in short supply on the rest of their material. Frustrated with her second-fiddle position in the Muses, she eventually left to found Belly (with a stint in the Breeders along the way). Even now that she's out on her own, Donelly still gets pegged with condescending tags like "the underground's hippest little sister." People tend to respond to Donelly's physical appearance --- short, delicate, small-boned --- with the assumption that she's helpless and vulnerable. She resents it.

"I have a problem with the cuteness thing, and sometimes --- how can I put this without sounding like a victim --- there's a taking-care-of-me thing that men do. Even the sweetest, most PC man in the world still looks at me and thinks, 'I will take care of her.' First of all, I take care of myself very well. And second, it bothers me that because of my physical appearance, I get shit from all sides. I get nurturing that I don't need from men, and hostility from women that it's something that I do on purpose."

We have moved from Donelly's cozy couch to the lounge of the local Holiday Inn. A few yards away from us a jumbo-screen TV is blaring some game or other. Seconds after Donelly complains about the coddling she receives at the hands of men, she pulls out a cigarette. Before it reaches her lips, a guy in a leisure suit appears at the foot of the sofa with a lighter. Donelly visibly shrinks from him. "Light?" We stare at each other, stunned.

I ask Donelly a question I've thought a lot about myself: How would your life be different if you were tall? "Oh, I ask myself this question everyday! First of all, I'd probably get to see a lot more bands. But I think I'd be an uncomfortable tall person, because I have carried that invisibility thing with me, and even when I was an absolute runt, even the pain of that, having people pick me up and pat me on the head and stuff like that --- even through all that, I always knew I had a better deal than the tall girls, 'cause they couldn't hide."

Belly's music is often described as pure pop, and on the surface it is some of the most upful, effervescent stuff around. Dig deeper, though, and you'll find more than a hint of the Gothic (in the Brontë sense of the word). You can see it in the dark lullaby quality of "Someone To Die For"; in the honeyed stickiness of "Dusted," which is belied by morbid lyrics about a junkie ("she's just dusted, leave her"); and in the sing-along chorus to "Slow Dog" --- not exactly gleeful when you actually hear the words ("that slow dog is hit again"). "it's a strange thing," says Donelly, "because my hands want to play pop songs, and my head is attracted to despair."

It's surprising how many of Belly's songs, on close examination, feature junkies and killers, disintegrating or disembodied women. Yet danger is always kept at a distance, crystallized into tiny vignettes. Donelly nods thoughtfully. "The songs that I wrote for Star are definitely, with a few exceptions, about other people's pain."

She stares into space for a moment, and then, as if trying to nail down her thoughts before they skitter away, says deliberately, "I am obsessed with the thing that makes somebody hurt somebody else. It's something that I will never be able to resolve, and it upsets me to the point where it's bad for my life sometimes. I don't understand the drive to be hurt; I don't understand the drive to hurt. And it's everywhere."

Belly's bassist Gail Greenwood arrives and introduces herself: "I'm Gail, I stink. Really, really bad." She's just been at the gym and is worried about going to a restaurant in her purple hooded sweatshirt. The rest of the band, brothers Chris and Tom Gorman (drummer and guitarist, respectively), shows up moments later, and I get to see Belly in action. They are a funny, laid-back bunch. "Irony doesn't go over well in print," Tom worries. "Can you put a laugh track on this?

Things I learn about Belly: All of them grew up in the Newport/Providence area, and Greenwood and the Gormans played in various local hardcore bands. Chris is a wonderful artist and does a lot of Belly's cover art. He also sleeps with his eyes open: "People are always going, 'Dude, that's creepy. I thought you were dead,' " he says. Greenwood has been "straight-edge" for all 33 years of her life: no drinking, drugs, or cigs. But she does say yes to rock'n'roll, sex, and candy.

Conversation is gritty: parasites that swim up urine and burrow in the penis, Bart Simpson vs. Beavis and Butt-head. At dinner, we notice that the table behind us leaves without having eaten much. "Did we ruin their meal?" Chris asks with mock innocence.

The members of Belly have bonded so thoroughly that they refuse to tell tales on each other. But Donelly, one of the sweetest people I've ever met, is teased affectionately; jokey "How nice is she?" stories are bandied about all evening.

"This is how nice Tanya is: We shared a room for six months on tour and she would never tell me I snored," says Greenwood. "One morning I wake up after her and I see her little cosmetic pad ripped to shreds on the night table. I'm thinking, what the hell was she doing last night? And then I see some little ear-wedged shaped pieces. She's too nice too wake me up but she's going, 'Arrrrgggghhh! I can't take it anymore!' "

"That was an unusual night. Normally your snoring is very ladylike." True to form, Tanya Donelly just cannot stop being kind.