Cult heroes: Tara Jane ONeil lives by her own truth, on her own terms

In 1994, the year I turned 19, the only thing I knew with any certainty was that I wanted to be Tara Jane ONeil. Her band, Rodan, toured the UK that spring and I stood at her feet and stopped myself blinking so I wouldn’t miss a thing. The way her feet – in scuffed clumpy boots – shuffled and tapped as she played. The way her poker-straight hair hung in front of her eyes. The way she made her bass – a cherry-red Music Man – murmur and growl and sing. She was three years older than me, rough around the edges, the epitome of cool.

In 1994, the year Kurt Cobain died, most of the music I listened to was American, alternative and made by men. Slint. Codeine. Gastr del Sol. Pavement. Palace. When I was up to the fight, Shellac. Each band had a different space and mood in my life; Rodan’s was the space of confusion, a roiling inside, (adolescent) longing, romance. Their one album, Rusty, was intricate, delicate, stabbing, fierce; listening to the 12 minutes of The Everyday World of Bodies, I would feel my blood pulse differently, and I would hold on to Tara Jane’s whispered voice at the heart of it the way I might cling to the safety bar of a rollercoaster. Tracing her basslines through a song was like trying to figure out the moves to a dance; I played enough incompetent guitar to know how lithe they were, how tricky. Unlike Kim Deal’s role in the Pixies, Tara Jane played in Rodan as an equal. That was important.

Rodan never had the cult fame of Slint or the mainstream success of Pavement, and that secretness was part of their appeal. Love for Rodan was code for adventure, a secret handshake. They broke up in 1995 and each member went on to other bands: I followed Tara Jane to Retsin, a spiky collaboration with her then girlfriend Cynthia Nelson, and the more classical-leaning the Sonora Pine. Retsin’s first record, Salt Lick, remains one of my most precious possessions: a 10-inch I cherish as much for its cover art – a glowing cityscape painted by Tara Jane, overstuck with bands of Scotch tape and scrawled over in black pen – as for its songs, which glow like fireflies. In 1994, the couple also collaborated on a book, Raven Days, with poetry by Cynthia Nelson and drawings by Tara Jane: small, scratchy, melancholy inks of electric bodies, lonely buildings, a swarming flock of birds.

In 1997, the year the Spice Girls published their book Girl Power! and took over the world, I had no idea what to do with my life, so I disappeared to America for three months. I spent a chunk of that time in Louisville, Kentucky, living next door to Tara Jane. I went to bars and parties with her, made friends with her friends, hung out in her flat, tried to drink bourbon like she did, failed. Raiding her bookshelves, I read EE Cummings for the first time. In retrospect, it was a profoundly weird thing to do, an act of obsession, but Tara Jane never treated me as though I were weird. At least, not any more weird than any other outsider living in Louisville and searching for something in life.

She’s still making music, mostly under her own name or her initials, more private and introspective than those earlier songs, with a slowness and stillness I love but can’t meet. As I’ve grown up, had kids, accepted I’ll never join a band, given all my time to writing and none of it to art, Tara Jane ONeil has quietly drifted out of my life. But she remains one of the most important role models I’ve ever had: a brilliant, questing musician, an idiosyncratic artist, a self-possessed woman who lives by her own truth, on her own terms. She is very like PJ Harvey in that way. Only with a fraction of the following.