In 1996, Tracy Bonham, a rebellious, classically trained violin-playing singer-songwriter, expressed the frustration and dissolution of countless women on her debut album, “The Burdens of Being Upright.”
“Mother Mother,” the album’s most successful song, bottled the angst of the era, shook it up and let it explode in screamed choruses. Thirty years later, the album is still asking the same questions, with a re-recorded take called “LIFT,” out on Friday.
Revisiting the songs, Bonham says, “opened up an entire world for me.”
“I didn’t expect it to bring up so much stuff and to really be a whole process of healing,” she says in a video interview. “I just was setting out to maybe make something cool for my fans for the 30th anniversary. I wanted to do something cool, sell some string quartet versions at shows, not really thinking much beyond that. And then I start arranging for strings — and that’s really fun, because I love it — but then I’m like, ‘Oh, I’d really like to have more instrumentation,’ and then all of a sudden, as I’m digging back into the songs and the lyrics and who I was 30 years ago, this is where it just opened up an entire world for me, where I thought, ‘Well, the songs are still very relevant for other people.’ Songs about a misogynist ex-boyfriend, mostly it’s about this ex-boyfriend who was very abusive and it gave me so much fodder to kind of document that, and also moving out on my own and calling home and not really wanting to explain how bad things were, my inability to really express myself, especially if there’s conflict.”
Bonham continues: “I’m still working on that, and thank God for therapy. But now I’m 59 years old and I’m still working on expressing myself authentically without fear. It became this, like, excavation project, and then I really believed that it was less about me and more about giving a voice to other women, people who feel dismissed, who feel diminished, and I think it’s kind of a good time for us to be talking about that.”
In addition to the reworked material from the twice-Grammy-nominated 1996 record, “LIFT” featured three bonus tracks: “Sunshine,” “I’m Not A Waif” (both originally recorded on “The Liverpool Sessions,” the EP that preceded her debut album) and a cover of PJ Harvey’s “50 Ft Queenie,” a longtime staple of Bonham’s concerts; a live version was the B-side of the “Mother Mother” single.
“Sunshine,” she says, “was a cute little ditty on the EP but now is an actual fully arranged song and probably one of my favorites because it sounds big and beautiful. And that song was about when you start to become popular or quote, ‘famous,’ as I was in in Boston in the mid-90s, I did not know how to handle the rumors or people wanting to cut me down.”
She recalls playing her “flaming fiddle,” her violin that she painted flames on, to perform “50 Ft Queenie.”
“It was just such a fun, explosive cover to perform, and my memory of playing some of those bigger festivals in the ‘90s, like Reading Festival and in Holland, where people were throwing mud everywhere and mosh pits and stuff. I remember the feeling of like, you know, OK, here I am, this small-statured girl with a violin and people are throwing mud at me and it’s confusing. And I just think of that moment where I’m like, ‘You know, screw them, I’m just going to shred.’ I want to encapsulate that. It’s like I want to bottle that energy. And so that’s why I’m doing that song now too, because I feel like I really need to bottle that energy and use it as inspiration.”
That such feelings that were part and parcel of ‘90s pop culture have re-emerged with younger people, thanks in part to phenomena like Olivia Rodrigo’s Daisy Chain Fields, a quasi-reboot of Lilith Fair, is validating for Bonham.
“It feels good,” she says. “I think for me it started with having ‘Mother Mother’ in the soundtrack for ‘Yellowjackets,’ the HBO series, and a lot of younger girls, especially, were super into that show and all of the artists were like female rockers from the ‘90s, so it was really cool to be included on that. And I started to notice a little bit more attention from the younger folks. Then ‘Mother Mother’ was also performed and arranged for another show in Canada called ‘Fem,’ about a transgender person who is trying to break into the music career.
“So, there’s just more younger people kind of digging around. I also think what I’m really excited about is the younger people that I’ve talked to are just really into the ‘90s because it’s kind of right before things kind of went to shit with cell phones and people not being present, and they’re looking for those experiences and everyone’s like, ‘What were you like in the 90s?’ I’m really psyched. I didn’t even realize we had it so good in the 90s, but now I realize we did.”
Before she released “The Burdens of Being Upright,” Bonham toured as a violinist for Robert Plant and Jimmy Page of Led Zeppelin, a group that has not been held up as paragons of feminism, to put it mildly.
“I didn’t love Led Zeppelin like a lot of my friends did, because it did seem very like ‘cock rock,’” she says. “However, I would play ‘Kashmir’ during my set on the violin, just kind of a nod. It was 1995 and I was just starting to kind of get a buzz, and I was placed in the string section. I wasn’t like on stage like, ‘Hey, Jimmy, what’s going on?’ but I did have some moments backstage with them and there were some pictures in Random Notes from Rolling Stone.
“My experience with Jimmy was just like take a photo and then he disappeared, he went into his, like, Wiccan room with his candles and shit. But Robert hung around and he was flirtatious. He was kind of smug. We took a picture. I said something really stupid, like, ‘My last name is Bonham, and I just feel a connection to you’ or whatever, and he pulled me close. He’s like, ‘Well, there’s not.’ And then we took a picture and then he’s flirting with another younger girl. But I think at the time, I was young, I was excited to be kind of thrust into this world, and I loved playing the string parts on some of those songs, like ‘Four Sticks’ and ‘Kashmir’ and ‘Black Dog’. I mean, that was really fun, to be on the stage with them.”
Tracy Bonham will perform with Calder the Destroyer at Drom (85 Avenue A New York, NY 10009) on Saturday, Nov. 14. Info here.
Leave a Reply