Tanya Donelly is a myth. To me she's right there beside Bigfoot, and Nessy - an unidentified female object that once appeared on the cover of the Rolling Stone as the leader of Belly. This girl has indie cred galore, as an integral part of her half sister's band Throwing Muses and also a founding member of Kim Deal's Breeders - you'd think that would be enough to win you a place in the pantheon of modern music, but somehow the gorgeous siren - whom I consider to be the best female rock and roll talent to ever strap on a guitar - managed to fall through the collective crack and into the realm of the fringe cult artist. Quite honestly I think that's where she's most comfortable.

Tanya Donelly doesn't rush much, after her first non-Belly solo record Love Songs For Underdogs flew above or below everyone's radar, she settled down and had a baby. Sad that Love Songs didn't receive more attention, because that record as much as Belly's Star is a chronicle of the transcendent glory of female power pop. Beauty Sleep was no dozer, and though it did find Tanya occasionally waxing maternal about her new child, it was those songs that were the meat of the record and a fine record it was as well - making my best-of list in 2002.

With Whiskey Tango Ghosts Tanya turns her talent in a more laconic, I hate to use the word Norah Jones so I'll say Jolie Holland, direction. A Nashville sunset collection of languid, country-tinged ballads that actually seems like the most fitting next phase when you step back and observe her career trajectory. She's always had a penchant for the countrified, even though she always served it up with an electric twang even as far back as "White Belly" and her subsequent cover of Gram Parson's "Hot Burrito # 2." Thus her newest foray into this melancholy country romanticism certainly comes as no great surprise and is an unqualified delight.

Teaming here with her husband and occasional co-writer Dean Fisher, they have set the needle at the scratchy beginning of an album of swirling, slow-burning brilliance that moves like the trees in the late-evening breeze and endears itself with every successive spin. The secret ingredient is of course Donelly's breathy voice - a voice that has traveled the world and is just now quietly spinning it's delicate report of every matter of the heart that it's analyzed and can speak to in truisms and metaphor. There is a unifying lyrical theme to these dusty treasures, an open dialogue with the supernatural forces that underscore her romantic explorations. Spirits that skitter and flit about the world providing an ethereal element causing the ordinary to float just centimeters off the ground and infuses the mundane with magic and hope.

Obvious influences can be noted from Emmylou Harris, to NoJo and the aforementioned Jolie Holland - yet she falls into this mold so naturally that listing influences seem unnecessary. Listening to this album, while thinking back over her past - her choppy and jagged guitar work with Throwing Muses, her visceral and fragile masterpiece Belly's Star and even her recent reunion with half-sister Kristin Hersh for last years Throwing Muses redux - it seems that these were all just milestones to where she's at now. I suppose it's true that I'd follow Tanya anywhere and anywhere she is, she belongs. Who am I kidding I think the sun rises and sets because of Tanya Donelly.