The Donnas have no Greatest Hits

By Erin Lyndal Martin
Published: July 14th, 2009 | 7:00am

Super rockers, the Donnas, have just released Greatest Hits, Volume 16 on their own label, Purple Feather. Not a Greatest Hits album so much as a collection of B-sides, alternate versions, live recordings, and some new material, the joke is extra funny considering the band maintains that they have no hits — greatest or otherwise. Many would argue that the Donnas have too many hits from which to choose.

Guitarist Allison Robertson realizes that the band's genre-spanning ways have always divided their fan base, making assembling such a compilation difficult. "We constantly try to reinvent ourselves. So we have the group who likes this album, and the group who likes that album," she acknowledges.

Drummer Torry Castellano agrees that fashioning the collection was an unusual effort. "We really wanted to do a compilation, and we would always call it a compilation. It feels weird to put out a 'Greatest Hits,' and we wouldn't even call it that for a really long time. It started out with, 'It's going to be a double album! It's going to have 50 songs!’ And slowly but surely became, 'Let's just do 25 songs.’”

More than a collection of singles, Greatest Hits, Volume 16 will please even die-hard fans with its offerings, including two rare songs from the Donnas' early days. "This guy that owned a record store in Japan was going to bring us over to Japan and record a 7-inch, and we did. And every now and then we would talk about them, like, 'Remember those songs? That was funny,’" says Castellano. And now that unusual piece of Donnas' history is available to all.

The band has come a long way since those songs, recorded in ‘98, the same year as their self-titled debut. Since then, there has been a lot of hard work, mostly in the form of touring and acquiring necessary business skills. Fortunately for the band, the members have remained close and enjoy life on the road together. Asked whether, like R.E.M., they all pee in a bucket together backstage between the first set and the encore, Castellano laughs. "We don’t all pee in a bucket together, but getting ready together backstage is important. We've definitely had some dirty situations with Communist compounds in Italy where I wished we had a bucket."

"It's a built-in party. You don't have to wonder what you're going to do that night," bassist Maya Ford tags onto the subject of touring, as she recalls her own phases. "I was addicted to stealing flowers. It started with artificial flowers from restaurants, but then I moved onto the real deal, and stole these huge, tropical flowers. Then I would put them in my hair and go to the airport, and the stewardesses would treat me like I had a mental problem, like, 'Do you need some water for your flower?'"

"I like to walk down the hallways of hotels and say, 'WAKE UP!' really late at night," adds vocalist Brett Anderson.

While the band admits many shows blur together, some stay fresh. " I vividly remember the first guy that got on stage and took his pants off. That was in Belgium, and we were playing, and this weird-looking troll jumped on stage," says Ford. " I don't understand why hot guys can't jump on stage and slowly strip for us in a Chippendales’ kind of manner."

Clearly, the payoffs of being a woman in rock are not as great as one might think. Plus, there are more hefty burdens, Robertson point out, such as "the visual being such a bigger deal if you're a female than if you're a guy. It makes me feel like that's all people see when they see girls. There have been so many shoots where we were one of the bands and all the others were all guys. They just came in their own clothes and shot in their own clothes and, for the exact same magazine, they made us spend all day [getting hair and makeup done]."

"When you're a girl band, you have to pick one or the other. You have to be super-extreme, and hate makeup, and fucking shave your head. I remember being in San Francisco and people making comments to us like, 'People only come see you guys because you wear short skirts on stage.' You should be able to be in the middle," Robertson asserts.

Facing an image-obsessed media is only one of the obstacles that the Donnas have weathered since they released that first, eponymous album. Luckily, their down-to-earth sensibility existed even then. "We really wanted to have a nice progression, because you hear all these horror stories about bands playing small clubs, and then they get signed by a major label. And the major label tries to push them, and it works for a while, and then they're dropped and don't have anything to fall back on. So we wanted to make sure we had a core group of fans that we could fall back on — no matter if the major label was there or not," says Castellano.

Anderson includes that she feels a responsibility to make songs that are both radio-friendly and complex. "My biggest goal for this record was for the songs to have two layers — to be immediately catchy and then to have another layer, so that, when you're wearing headphones and listening for all the details, you can hear extra layers." However radio-friendly their music is, the band has always "fought really hard to be played on rock radio," says Castellano.

Fortunately, the Donnas take this as a musical challenge. As Robertson states, "I think it's our duty as people in a band, and also being female, to show you're not just one-trick ponies — that you don't just do stuff because it's easy or popular. Try stuff 'cause it's hard. Try stuff 'cause it might offend people."

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