Brett Anderson could look back on her early experiences with the Donnas with a jaundiced eye, and nobody could blame her. Sure, the ‘90s was when “the fun generation” flourished, as she characterizes it. But for girls and young women, its music landscape could be a viper pit.
“We never went to the bathroom, or anywhere, alone, ever, on tour,” the former “Donna A.” tells GRAMMY.com, while commuting home from her job as a social worker at Long Beach Memorial Hospital. “There was some understanding that bad things happen when you're alone.”
“And I hate to even Voldemort this into life,” Anderson says later — and goes on to recount a shocking article that salivated over the band members' bodies.
Yet Anderson betrays no bitterness: her love for the other three Donnas, and the music they made, permeates her words. Her head’s full of memories of recording their scrappy, precocious punk songs at a Bay Area Mail Boxes Etc.; some of them, like “High School Yum Yum,” “Let’s Rab!” and “Da Doo Ron Ron,” seem to spring from an interband, invented language.
Now, you can hear those tunes anew, via Early Singles 1995-1999, which dropped March 1 via Real Gone Music. It’s a monument to the friendship between Anderson, guitarist Allison Robertson, bassist Maya Ford, and drummer Torry Castellano.
The band they formed as teenagers went on to be signed to a major label, rock the late-night circuit, perform on MTV and even appear in the 1999 teen comedy Jawbreaker. In 2012, after seven albums, the Donnas, unceremoniously and undramatically, “wrapped it up.”
For now, Anderson’s fixed on their beginnings, when anything seemed possible.
“When you're that age — or, really, any age — it's easy to be self-conscious, but I always really looked up to the other three girls and a hundred percent believed in them,” Anderson says. “When we were together, we definitely felt like a force to be reckoned with.”
This interview has been edited for clarity.
I’m very curious about your job as a social worker. But if you’re burned out after a long workday, you don’t have to talk about it.
I don’t think I'm going to be burned out for a couple of years, at least, because I'm on the palliative care team. And it's always been a passion of mine ever since I learned about it, because no one really understands it.
And I'm always attracted to things that are a little bit off the beaten path and not understood, and I want to explain it. So the idea just in general, that hospice and palliative care are not the same thing, if I could just address that, that would be a major victory.
Can you tell me the difference? I didn’t know that.
Yeah, I would love to. So hospice is end-of-life care, and you need a prognosis of six months or less to live. Palliative care is this much broader, much lesser known extra layer of care that people can get if they have any life-limiting illness.
So, anything chronic, anything that you could, not be dying from it, but you might need help with difficult decision-making or uncontrolled symptom management — things like that.
What spurred this life change?
I think part of it was how ageist the music industry is.
Wow, tell me more.
I think I just saw it all around me. People just complaining about feeling old and being out of touch and calling other people old and internalized and externalized ageism. And just so ridiculous, because I feel all -isms are bad.
And I feel that the reason that ageism is bad in particular, is that our age is one of the least informative details about us, because it's constantly changing.
From when we started, it was like we were working against something, so I was like, Oh man, why is it like this? And then I was like, Oh, right. I chose this. I identify as a person who's working against something, OK.
*Photo courtesy of the Donnas.*
I’m looking at a very early photo of the Donnas right now. Does it feel like you were reincarnated into a completely new life or something? Or are you super connected to that version of yourself?
I feel like even at the time, I wasn't super connected to it. I mean, especially with the Donnas, it was a persona, because we started the Donnas as a joke band — like a side band. And our real band was called the Electrocutes.
When we were doing the Donnas, it was a shtick — tongue in cheek. And I think some people didn't know that we were in on the joke, because we're too young and there was an older man who could have been a Svengali involved. They assumed that we didn't understand the context with which we were living.
Sounds pretty misogynistic to me.
It's crazy, yeah. It is actually really funny that you said, because I'm watching “Mad Men” for the first time, so it's getting me all riled up again about just the s— you have to do to get by in a world where the rules are not made for you. And I realized so clearly that I'm really only talking about one identity, and that's gender. But yeah, it was hard.
What do you remember about the emotional or psychological atmosphere back then, being as young as you were?
There’s one thing I did not remember until the drummer, Torry, and I just did this interview for some archive in Texas not too long ago. She always remembers things that I would never, ever remember, and it was such a huge part of our existence.
We never went to the bathroom, or anywhere, alone, ever, on tour.
Whoa. What was up with that?
I don't remember the specific incident or incidents that started that, but whatever it was, there was some understanding that bad things happen when you're alone — whether it was when we were on Warped Tour, or when we were just on tour.
And the smaller clubs didn't seem that bad, because you usually know those people. But when the clubs started getting bigger and it was more anonymous — yeah, you don't go anywhere alone.
Just out of general safety concerns?
I think it was multilevel. It was just your general safety. And then there's also the reality of the things that people said to us from when we were in middle school and high school. They would literally say, "Go home and play with your dolls, girls can't play rock and roll."
And I mean, we thought it was funny. We weren't personally wounded by it, but people will say things to you when you're alone that they won't say when you're with another person. Usually, sexual harassment doesn't happen on stage; it's backstage.
It was ‘93 when we started, so we were 13.
That’s really young.
Yeah, I know. And I mean, I hate to even Voldemort this into life, but there'd be articles that would say something like our "bouncing nubile breasts." And we're like, "F—." I wore two bras for a year after that — like, This is not what I want to be putting out there.
To drill into the Early Singles collection: what do you remember about these sessions? These are pretty scrappy recordings.
We were recording at Mail Boxes Etc. after hours. So we would just throw the equipment up on the counter. That was when we were doing the Donnas with [producer] Darin Raffaelli, and he worked there, so we could get in there after, at night. We would smell them baking donuts next door.
I'm still like this when it comes to creativity. I'm so much more creative at night when everyone else is asleep, because there's less external noise distracting you, and you're not missing anything; you can be in your own world. The whole world fell away when we were doing that. We were just us, in that Mail Boxes Etc.: in heaven.
What was your interband friendship like? Were you like a Beatles-style four-headed monster?
In a way. Actually, it's funny. I think about things like that a lot, and I haven't applied it to our band ever. But yeah, I mean, when you put four people in a vacuum, everything's relative, someone's the most like this and someone's the most like that.
I think as compared to other bands like the Spice Girls or things like that, where people have really defined identities, we didn't pigeonhole each other or ourselves as much, I don't think.
Despite the tongue-in-cheek, Ramonesy conceit — everybody has the same name, we’re a happy family — it sounds like you were all very serious about the band. It sounds like you were driven to do something substantial.
I think there are a lot of people who are dying to be famous and to make it. And those were never words that we used or feelings that we felt.
It wasn't that we wanted to be big and famous for no reason. We wanted to be as committed as possible to the band, so that we could go as far as we could with the band, because we believed in what we were doing.
The content was the driving force, the fact that we were with friends playing music that we loved. That was the important part, not the ultimate scope of the thing.
You believed in the songs and each other. Plain and simple.
Yeah, yeah.
Do any moments or tunes from this collection stick out in your memory?
Well, the first one that pops into my head is “I Don't Wanna Go to School No More.” Which is funny, because I think we all ended up going back to school, but it's different when you're older. It's a whole new game.
We had a couple of songs, “Let's Rab” and “Let's Go Mano!” They were made-up words, which I always love. Rab, it's so random, was what this one guy in school called this other guy in school. His name was Rob, but he called him Rab, and then we made it into slang for partying.
I’m just thinking about believing in the songs and in each other. When you're that age — or, really, any age — it's easy to be self-conscious, but I always really looked up to the other three girls and a hundred percent believed in them.
So, whenever I was self-conscious about myself, I was never self-conscious about our band. It was fun to walk into a new venue and be able to feel confident.
I just know that we were bringing something good, even if I sometimes doubted myself. And I think everyone may have doubted themselves too, in a singular way. When we were together, we definitely felt like a force to be reckoned with.
What was up with “I Wanna Be a Unabomber?”
That was from the before times. Every once in a while, I'll have a shame wave thinking about that. I mean, it was just a different world…
Personally, I love it. That’s the best title in the entire thing.
Well, that's the thing about humor, isn't it? It's like what's funny on a certain day in a certain context, it's horrifying in a different one. So, there you go; that was an extreme statement.
Any other anecdotes pop up?
Another amazing thing that we got to do was, when we were 16 — I think between junior and senior year of high school, or maybe it was between sophomore and junior, we got to go to Japan for a week and play five shows.
Wow, what was that like?
It was just beyond our wildest imaginations. It was 16-year olds in a band flying to Japan. There were people waiting at the airport when we got there. And we felt like what the Beatles would feel like, a little bit.
The clubs that we played at were so cool. One of them [was] four stories underground and just completely thick with smoke — and as a singer, that's horrible. But just as a memory, there's just nothing like it.
What do you remember about how these sessions — and your early success — flowed into the next stages of your career?
I think one thing we are really lucky about is that everything grew very gradually and incrementally. So, we never had that big spike. And I think often when someone does have a big spike, then they have a huge drop that's just as steep. And for us, it was like we just gradually grew and grew and grew.
And then, it made it nice on the other side, when we just gradually stopped saying yes to as many things and wrapped it up. But without having some big blowout, break up, farewell tour or anything.
While you were saying that, I was remembering seeing the Donnas open for the Hives at the Fillmore, in 2008. You played “Smoke You Out” and green lights came on.
Oh, I love that song so much. “Everybody’s Smoking Cheeba” — that’s another early one.
I mean, it does seem so quaint, and such a different time. Because now, I'm thinking about our photo shoot for the cover for [our self-titled 1997 debut] The Donnas.
I don't remember where we were, but we just went to some school with a camera and took some pictures and that was it. It was just so very simple. And also sometimes it felt like it was almost not real. We were like, "Oh, we're going to do a photo shoot, because we're a band and we're going to make a record." Because there was no one watching.
And I'm just so glad we got to grow and spend all this time learning our instruments and our positions without that critical eye so much. Because I don't know that any of us would've enjoyed it.
How would you compare the music industry when the Donnas began versus when they ended?
I don't want to sound negative, but I think it was amazing in the '90s.
I mean, all of MTV and Sub Pop and Kill Rock Stars and Maximum Rocknroll and Spin and Rolling Stone — there was just so much good content, and so many authentic bands that were actually independent and actually alternative. And it just felt so inspiring.
And then towards the end of it, social media was coming into it and you had to be creating content all the time. And for me, that blew the mystique on both sides as a band and as a fan. I do remember thinking when I first started listening to Sonic Youth imagining Thurston Moore having breakfast, and thinking about stuff like that was exciting, but I don't actually want to see that. I wanted it in my imagination. It was better in my imagination.
I realize that that probably ties me to a certain generation. But maybe you just like whatever's happening when you're in your teens and twenties better than when you're in your thirties. But I don't know, I'm not sure about the reasoning behind that.
But I feel like there was just a lot of room for growth and people could get into it, younger, smaller bands could. There was a place for people to enter the industry.
Are you still playing music?
I do things here and there. I don't pursue anything, but sometimes things will pop up. Like, “That ‘90s Show.” I did the theme song for that; James Iha's doing the music for the show. He had my number from when we were on Lollapalooza 20 years ago, and just neither of us changed our numbers.
It's just so cool when things happen like that, where it's like you plant this little seed two decades ago, and then it sprouts in 2023. So I'm always up for stuff like that.
I've been playing with some Irish bands in L.A., which has been really fun. There's a band called The Ne'er-Do-Wells that I've done stuff with. I had a couple of side projects. And I don't know, also still writing music on my own for nothing and no one, which is always fun.
That’s a nice counterweight to your professional life.
It's nice to be able to pursue another thing. When I first went back to school, I started studying psychology, and I finished my BA, which I started in 1997.
It took, what, twenty-something years? I just went to one semester in '97 before we went on the first tour, and then went back to school in 2012. And I finished my BA in 2019.
I can see how your music career blossomed into your love of helping human beings.
Oh, yeah. I think in the band, there was an element of helping people. After every show, when we would meet people, they would say, "I listen to your music to feel confident, and feel better about myself, too, as an example that girls can play rock and roll."
We had these two shows in Joshua Tree called Desert Moon at Pappy and Harriet's, and they were fan club shows. And after one of them, someone told me that they flew for the first time in their life to get to that show, so it was a motivating factor. Another one: someone told me that they listened to our music before they came out to their parents.
So it's the idea that music can be empowering and liberating and give people permission to feel a certain way, I feel is something very similar to what I do now.
I mean, social work is all about empowering people, and respecting their agency, and trying to figure out what motivates people — and to activate that, and advocate for that.
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