Tanya Donnelly spent time in Throwing Muses and the Breeders before forming her own trio Belly, and that resume is enough to establish her as one of the greatest alt-rockers of the ’90s. Last year, she released Swan Song Series (Vol. 1), an EP of collaborations. Today, she’s teamed up with the LA-based Brazilian musician Gabi Lima to release a new song called “Golden Cut.”

Gabi Lima contacted Tanya Donnelly with the basic idea for “Golden Cut,” and then the two of them wrote the song together. It’s a twangy, shimmering midtempo jam, and it makes great use of Donnelly’s voice. Here’s what she says about it:

A little over a year ago, Gabi Lima sent me the music for this song with the line “recessive gene swimming upstream”, accompanied by a beautiful description of her concept for the song. We got on a zoom call, and she held up a pine cone as an example of the Fibonacci sequence, and the golden section (golden ratio, golden mean, or Gabi’s choice: golden cut). She envisioned the pinecone as an analogue for the continuum of family, and more specifically, the matrilineal spiral of mother/daughter/mother/daughter. (The golden section is apparently present in a DNA molecule in this way: it measures 34 x 21 angstroms for each cycle of the double helix spiral ~ 34 and 21 being part of the Fibonacci sequence.)

Having held an amateurish interest in the golden ratio for a long time, I loved this idea, and the image of a rogue recessive gene attempting to make a break for it. From that first conversation, we traded lyrics back and forth, tweaked structure, and then invited some of our very favorite people to play ~ Gail Greenwood, Magen Tracy, Melissa Gibbs, and Tamora Gooding.

Some of the words in this song are pulled from our texts to each other ~ the possum in the fig tree, the swan feathers on duckweed. Gabi and I are both literal tree-huggers and will occasionally send each other pics of the plants and creatures we come across on our walks, and we included some of those snaps in the lyrics.

Gabi had the idea to release the song around Mother’s Day, a loaded and layered weekend for many. The luckiest among us are able to describe family ties as “complicated”, and this song covers some of that, I think. The navigational decisions made around these relationships, whether for peace, for love, for support, for escape, sometimes for survival ~ and the shifts made as we go and grow. Speaking for myself alone, it’s both hard and healthy work teasing out the patterns and scripts of family, and it’s ever ongoing.

Anyhoo. This is our song! We like it a lot and hope you do, too. I am dedicating it here to my own beautiful mama, who I love very dearly and who contains multitudes, and also to my deeply missed grandmothers, amazing daughters, and beloved Bub.

Please check out Gabi’s BC page ~ if you don’t know her yet, she is a crazy-talented multi-intstrumentalist, singer/songwriter, and producer/engineer.

Listen below.

Read our We’ve Got A File On You interview with Tanya Donnelly here.