Bonham breathes new life into ‘Burdens’
MUSIC
One of the stranger moments in Boston rock history was the night in 1995 when Island Records president Chris Blackwell, the man who had signed Bob Marley and U2, showed up unrecognized at Kenmore Square punk hot spot the Rat. He was there to sign Tracy Bonham, the edgy young songwriter whose radio tapes had suddenly made her a hot property.
“He flew out in his private plane and walked in with his flip-flops on,” Bonham recalled. “It was super-heady, and I’d really only just begun, even if I’d been a musician all my life. I wasn’t sure, completely sure what I was doing, whether I was upfront or I was in the band.”
These days, Bonham is a lot more sure what she’s doing. And when she plays Passim on Wednesday, she’ll be reinventing a lot of her songs from the ’90s. Her latest album is a complete re-recording of her debut, “The Burdens of Being Upright,” now titled “Modern Burdens.” The arrangements of the songs (including her national hit, “Mother Mother”) are all notably different, and on Wednesday, she’ll be reworking the songs once again, stripping them down to play solo on guitar and piano.
Her initial plan, she said, was to re-record the album faithfully so she’d own all the songs for licensing purposes.
“That would have been a smart idea financially, but artistically, it was painful. My producer, John Wlaysewski, and I looked at each other and said, ‘Boring! Been there!’ So we decided to breathe some new life and see if the songs would stand up. When we did the recording in 2016, the conversation was about misogyny and about the election. A lot of my old songs are about an old boyfriend who was a complete misogynist, so maybe I could express the same feelings but make it more about the issues in general. And I hoped that the younger girls could hear those songs in a different way.”
In most cases, the new versions of the songs are slower and torchier.
“They have some sexiness now. I feel like I’ve stepped out of that ’90s mentality of music, where everything was on the beat and very rigid, without much swing or sway — Nirvana had a lot to do with that. I do miss the songwriting from that era, like when I heard Liz Phair and it made me rethink the way I wrote lyrics. But some of those tricks we always used, like the quiet verse and the loud chorus, aren’t so interesting to me anymore.”
She also reconnected with some of her Boston music peers, including Tanya Donelly and Kay Hanley, who both contributed to the new “Burdens.”
“It felt right to lift up these women that I was pitted against 20 years ago. There may have been some unspoken barrier back then, but now I just want to celebrate them.”
She thinks of the current tour as her “Tracy’s Back” tour, even though she’s never really been away.
“That’s what happens when you become a mother. Your brain gets hijacked for a while. My life has completely changed, but I’m not going anywhere, and I want this Tracy 2.0 to look like I really mean it.”