BACK ON THE ROAD
Bully frontwoman Alicia Bognanno welcomes the ’constant feedback’ of touring again,
We’re not even a week into the fall tour in support of Bully’s new album, Losing, and Alicia Bognanno’s signature rasp already sounds . . . well . . . pretty raspy.
“It’s good. I mean, we were all really excited to get back on the road,” says the 27-year-old frontwoman, guitarist and studiophile, between a few audible yawns, from the roadside en route to a date in Madison, Wis., earlier this week. “The only thing that’s tricky is my voice not burning out, but I just have to keep it healthy.
“I can really feel it on this run. I think it’s because our set went from being half an hour long to an hour, and it’s just a lot more draining on my voice. I can definitely feel it. I just drink a bunch of tea and try to sleep whenever I can. I have a hard time not talking because I’m a loudmouth but, yeah, I try — it’s really just tea and sleep and, like, not a bunch of coffee all day throughout the day.”
So it’s not the expected regimen of whiskey and cigarettes that keeps the unvarnished, ultra-expressive voice at the heart of Bully’s pugilistic punk-rock confessionals sounding so sweetly scuffed-up all the time, after all. Who knew?
Don’t fret, though. It’s not time to tarnish the brewing Bognanno mystique with rumours that she’s a health nut or anything.
“Oh, I’ll do whiskey. I’ll do, like, a hot toddy,” she laughs. “But I can’t smoke. It just tears up my throat so I don’t even f--- with it.”
Let’s hope that voice holds up, regardless. Bully spent a good 18 months off the road after touring its head-turning 2015 debut, Feels Like, into the ground — part of that time off devoted to recording Losing, most of the time prior to that devoted to processing and channelling an intraband breakup (with former drummer Stewart Copeland, who’s not the guy from the Police) into the openhearted howls that would eventually become Losing — and excitement over the Nashville-based quartet’s return to the stage is such that it’s already booked solid through the end of next March. Toronto’s date with Bully this Thursday at Lee’s Palace represents just a first dip of the band’s toe back in the water.
Ideally, Bognanno would like to be out on the touring trail for at least the next year-and-a-half. Which is fitting, really, for a band sufficiently cognizant of its strengths to have tracked its first two albums live to tape in the studio — with Bognanno, who holds a degree in audio engineering and has the distinction of being “maybe the top student intern we’ve ever had” at crustmeister Steve Albini’s Electrical Audio space in Chicago, overseeing the proceedings.
Nevertheless, while Bully’s reputation and bubbling-under-to-justthe-left-side-of-mainstream success has largely been staked to date on its go-for-it live performances, Bognanno and bandmates Clayton Parker, Reece Lazarus and new drummer Wesley Mitchell are still chuffed to know that the kids still care enough to buy tickets.
“It is a really good feeling, especially after being off the road for so long,” Bognanno says. “We went out on this tour and we hadn’t toured in about a year and a half and it was kinda like, ‘What do we expect? Twelve people here or 600?’ And it’s been really great so far, very reassuring. You just naturally feel like you’re losing momentum when you’re not on the road because you’re not out there doing it and getting constant feedback, so I’m really happy with the way things have gone so far.”
In an odd turnabout of musicindustry convention, Bully is elbowing its way back to prominence in 2017 with an independent followup to a major-label debut, rather than the other way around.
The band signed to esteemed Seattle indie Sub Pop Records for Losing. It’s a fitting destination and an almost spiritually destined home for an outfit whose most recent bio was written by former Hole bassist Patty Schemel and whose catalogue glances off pretty much every awesome, “grrrl”-powered grunge-era mark you can name — the Breeders, Throwing Muses, Juliana Hatfield, Veruca Salt, 7 Year Bitch and, yes, Hole among them — but Bully bears no ill will toward Startime International, the major-label sub-subsidiary of Sony Records mega-majorlabel subsidiary Columbia Records that took an inspired gamble on Feels Like two years ago. It’s just harder to get anyone to pay attention to you when you’re on the same label as, say, Beyoncé than when you share a label with Beach House.
“You just naturally feel like you’re losing momentum when you’re not on the road because you’re not . . . getting constant feedback.” ALICIA BOGNANNO BULLY FRONTWOMAN
“We really like everyone at Startime, but it’s still a subsidiary of Columbia and, y’know, we’re a small indie band so I think it’s more desirable for us to be on a label that’s got other indie bands who are kind of doing a relatively similar thing,” Bognanno says. “I’d spoken with Sub Pop briefly for the first record and we kinda reached back out to see if there was still interest and they were definitely on board and so were we. So we just went ahead and locked it in and it’s been great so far. It’s really nice working with everybody over there. Hopefully it’ll stick for awhile.”
Now, it’s just a matter of keeping the hot-mess illusion of the first time up onstage for however long the Losing touring cycle lasts. That can’t be easy, given how much Bognanno gives of herself on the lyric sheet — “kind of just whatever was bothering me or on my mind that I didn’t feel like I could shake at the moment” — and in performance on a nightly basis.
“Usually, the mood just happens,” she shrugs. “If it’s a good show and it’s going well and the crowd’s into it, it usually just finds its way out itself. It feels cathartic for the most part, even singing about stuff that wasn’t making me feel the best when I had written it. It feels good to sing it every night and just kinda scream it out.”