December 12, 2025

How much importance can we attribute to fifteen minutes in a child's life? Looking at my son's life, I have to say a lot, especially when the same fifteen minutes occupy most days of his life.

Lincoln started in day care at a pretty young age, and my wife and I alternated getting him to and from a local Livonia day care. Since I was a faculty member, often teaching nights, I might have had more flexibility, but I know she stressed many an afternoon fighting the Detroit traffic to get to him for PM pickup. For the first few years of his life, that day care was probably a 10-15 minute drive from our house, depending upon traffic. Later the day care would move to a facility only a mile from our house, and we felt quite spoiled.

So, what about this infamous fifteen minutes? Not long before his birth, one of Pix's and my favorite musicians, Tanya Donelly, had released her first solo CD: Lovesongs For Underdogs. The band, Belly, that she had fronted and enchanted us with had disbanded, but when she released this solo effort in the late 1990s, we fell in love with it, Pix so much so that she took it in the car frequently for her drives to and from Wayne State University. (Remember when cars had CD players! Lincoln's car, since it is a hand-me-down, is our last one with a CD player, and I know he is already cursing that potential loss.)

Donelly has now released multiple solo CDs, a bunch of songs, reformed Belly for a comeback album, and reunited with them again for a recent tour (which we all saw).  As much as Morrissey, Donelly is one of Lincoln's favorites, but when push comes to shove (and he loves these hypothetical pushes), he will claim that "Pretty Deep," "The Bright Light" and "Mysteries of the Unexplained" are his three favorite Donelly solo songs. They just happen to form three of those first four songs on Lovesongs for Underdogs, running about sixteen minutes total in length.

How many mornings did he sit in his car seat while his mother waited at the corner of Stark and Plymouth listening to Donelly's soaring vocals proclaiming, in "Pretty Deep," "I wish I could fly up in a helicopter/I'd shine a blinding light on your escape/better to show you I sink pretty deep"?  How many times did he sit at the light at Plymouth and Merriman internalizing "the bright light begins it and I get sucked into it again"? Most significantly, how sad was he to see her pulling into The Learning Tree parking lot wishing he could hear the final reiteration of the chorus of "Mysteries of the Unexplained": "sometimes it rains fish from the sky/and the statues all start to cry/and someone writes a beautiful song"?

This wasn't just a phase, for Lincoln or Pix. Lovesongs for Underdogs may bear the most beat-up jewel case of any of my 1200 CDs. It must have exchanged hands (and cars) hundreds of times. The booklet is also pretty tattered, but the CD itself, thank goodness, is not scratched. I like to think Lincoln has learned the most important rule of music acquisition.

So for much of the first 18 years of his life, Donelly and these songs were a backdrop to Lincoln's life, a soundtrack. When he went off to Central Michigan University to finish his college degree, that is when he broke free and really discovered Donelly's brilliance, including the classic Belly tunes "Gepetto" and "Feed The Tree." I suspect some of that came from the fact that her lyrics can be mysterious, eluding obvious interpretations (what does one do with "so he's lying on top again/just like Gepetto and his doll"?), until isolated with the music in a college apartment (alcohol and/or weed perhaps an accompaniment).

More than anything I most appreciate that Lincoln has taken from me the love and respect for a beautiful song. Few do them better than Donelly, and as with Morrissey (or a couple other musical entries I anticipate next in this series), there are dozens of her songs that I could associate with Lincoln's growth, maturity, personality, quirks. However, there would be little that could fit more appropriately than that stretch from "Pretty Deep" through "Mysteries of The Unexplained." 

Lincoln's own love for writing and ideas probably can be traced to a lot of his dad's sins, but I am convinced it started in a car seat in Livonia, Michigan, being exposed, without even knowing it, to some stuff pretty deep.

As he has become an adult, I have been able to provide him with live concert experiences for his favorite bands, but until this year, I figured Donelly was off that wish list. She, for perfectly good reasons, I am sure, rarely travels outside of her native New England to do shows, and while I could think of lots of good reasons to go to the Boston area if she was playing, I wasn't even sure I would know when she was scheduled. Then she reforms Belly and they perform in Chicago. No solo stuff, which we didn't expect, but still that opportunity to experience some of her songs and her voice and her talented bandmates in Belly.

"Mysteries of the Unexplained" suggests that all of humankind has been corrupted and that some natural disaster might be needed to help us rethink human experience. The key lyric, certainly for Pix and me, has always been "all of your heroes are whores," but Donelly has yet to sell herself out. Maybe that's because the coda of "Mysteries of the Unexplained" is the dream she embodies: "a shining bright city perfect and clean/ [with] a wish for a sky full of fish." The unexplainable is all the more applicable than ever, especially for Lincoln with a recently evolved sense of faith that puts mine (or lack thereof) to shame. If there is a God in heaven, people like Tanya Donelly are the gifts he (or she) provides.