“I wish it were, but no, it’s a sample.” The question, constant reader, went something like this: “Is that an honest to god red-blooded heartbeat that underpins ‘Life Is But A Dream’, the opening song on Beautysleep, Tanya Donelly’s second solo album since the demise of Belly (and before that Throwing Muses)?”

The inquiry was strictly academic: off the rack heart or not, it’s a sly start to any record – the original subliminal rhythm. Given that recording of Beautysleep commenced while Tanya was heavily pregnant with her first child, one wonders if the effect was inspired in some way by an ultrasound scan.

“It was part that,” she admits, “but also when you’re hugely pregnant you can hear your heartbeat all the time, everything is really intense and you’re carrying so much weight and there’s so much more blood volume, so I could hear it all in my ears, and that’s kinda why I did that.

“I booked the studio time in the second trimester (when) you get that burst of energy,” she elaborates, “but by the time we got in there I was heading into my third trimester and I got increasingly exhausted and cranky and huge. We ended up actually having to cancel the last three weeks because my daughter’s feet had lodged themselves into my diaphragm and they just stuck there so I couldn’t sing. And then it got put off until two years later when we picked it up again.”

The hiatus doesn’t seem to have affected the record’s continuity or clarity, never mind Ms Donelly’s vocal performances on tracks like ‘Wrap-Around Skirt’ and the Jane Bowles-meets-Flannery O’Connor of ‘Moonbeam Monkey’. Here she displays more range and more grain than she ever did with Belly.

“I think that part of that is I recorded all the vocals for this in the control room,” she says, “and so I was singing more quietly, less strident, and I realised that that’s what my strength is. For some reason the type of throat that I have, when I try to project, everything gets compressed, and when I open up my throat and sing softly, it projects. So I finally figured that out at the ripe old age of… I was 32 at the time.”

Beautysleep features among its personnel a kind of all-star Boston line up, players like David Narcizo, Rich Gilbert (Frank Black), Dean Fisher (Juliana Hatfield 3), and also the late Mark Sandman of Morphine, all recording in Cambridge, MA. Donelly admits that the Massachusetts meld of proscribed liberalism meets old-world puritanism makes for a peculiar creative environment.

“That New England dichotomy is very powerful,” she says, “and it’s hard to even recognise that it has affected you at all at first, until you start to travel and then you bring it with you and realise that you do have that. And there is a certain sort of Frankenstein form of spirituality that happens in New England, culling things from the world wisdoms and creating your own big monster theory. There are so many alternative churches in Boston it’s funny…”

What, as in: I’ll take two shots of Hinduism, a New Age mixer and a pint of Catholicism please?

“Yeah. But don’t try to fence me in!”