Nashville. The home of country music, situated in the deep south of the USA. If you sift through the leagues of cowboy-hat-wearing, acoustic-guitar-toting country singers, you’ll find Alicia Bognanno – the backbone of the punk/grunge outfit known as Bully.
With just a week until Bully’s eclectic third album, SUGAREGG, releases, I caught up with Bognanno, keen to find out just where the perplexing title of SUGAREGG came from.
“The title actually comes from a podcast called Radiolove that I was listening to, it doesn’t have anything to do with the music I just thought the story was really sweet,” she explains. “It’s about a guy who was given a sugar egg when he was seven and essentially kept it his whole life until it broke when they tried to replicate it for the podcast. I just thought that it was really sweet that he kept something for so long and it still held its meaning. Normally, I feel like we kind of get rid of little trinkets and memorabilia as we grow and they end up losing their significance – it made me really happy to hear the way the title sounds, and it’s meaning for me.”
Discussing tracks on the album, Bognanno noted that her favourite was probably perhaps the lightest Bully track ever, ‘Let You’: “I feel like that should’ve been one of the singles, it’s so poppy! It was recorded in Palace Studios in Toronto and it was one of the ones I wrote on bass. It’s about insecurities and trust issues sabotaging any possibility of being in a relationship.Im pretty stoked to play that one.”
For Bognanno, this is more than just a record: it’s a fuck you to both herself and the people who underestimated her. She’s no longer worried of what people think or how the album will be received. She’s just excited to get it out there.
“I was in a really shitty place when writing Losing, so I thought I needed a big change when writing this record. I recorded it on my own as far as the musical parts go and I got a sound engineer for the first time and just really took my time with it when recording. When I sat down to write this record I’d got a lot of my confidence back, and I decided I was gonna write this record 100% for me; I let go of any voice that was trying to tell me to think of how it’ll be received.”
I dream of the day when I’m older and I don’t need to have any social media.
By removing herself from this bubble of thought regarding other people’s opinions, Bognanno allowed herself to open up, now creating deeper, more open music by removing herself from the confines of the thoughts of others.
“I remember that when I first started writing I wrote in drop D as a way to switch things up – when I was bored, I’d switch the tuning. I remember these dudes looking at me playing in drop D and laughing and saying, ‘You’ll grow out of that fast’. Then I wrote ‘Milkman’ in drop D so I look back and think, ‘Fuck you guys, that made me some money, motherfuckers’. Just voices like that from past experiences have been in my head and now I’m like who cares; [I’m not] as bothered as I’ve been on past records.”
Despite adapting to a new and more confident songwriting approach, Bognanno has had to adjust to promoting an album solely from the confines of her own home. Since lockdown started she began to do semi-frequent instagram lives, showcasing new music and playing some fan favourites. Completely new to this side of the music industry, Bognanno felt quite alien in this social media fueled landscape.
“Having to switch the focus to social media and moving everything online has been really hard, because that’s really the only means we have to promote the album. Being such a live band that’s now had that taken away, there’s no pictures or videos going around from shows etc – it’s [been hard] trying to stay relevant without that. It’s kind of stressful for me because I don’t really like social media and I think if I didn’t have an obligation to do it I probably wouldn’t have anything to do with it; I dream of the day when I’m older and I don’t need to have any social media.
There’s also been a lot of things that i’ve had to do but never thought I would, like solo live streams or cover stuff – things that I would initially say no to because it’s intimidating and it’s out of my wheelhouse,” she continues. “Having to say yes to that and pushing myself to do those things has really forced me to grow a lot… actually, now I look back, I’m really glad that I got to do those things.”
It’s always good to have an outside perspective of what’s going on away from me.
Unlike a large majority of now despairing musicians, Bully luckily didn’t have any shows set in stone: “We were lucky because we had things mapped out but not locked in,” chuckled Bognanno, before dawning on a more serious side of the pandemic’s repercussions. “I realised I will be unemployed and have no income for the next year. As an indie artist, you make your living from touring. Record sales make nothing anymore compared to what they used to, so we’ll see – hopefully little things we do like livestreams will keep us going.”
In this age of constant promotion and stimulation, Bognanno told me she’d also had to rack her brains to think of new music video ideas. Upon praising the style of their latest video for the track ‘Prism’, she enlightened me on the relatively unorthodox process behind it.
”We needed a visual for that track to release with that. It was a very last-minute single and we only released it to keep things going. Our assistant manager asked if I had any ideas for it, so I just googled stock footage of a prism and we just bought some for like $75. It’s become a huge inside joke where we’d say, ‘Oh the music vid turned out really well!’ and then we just looped the footage… but I like it, glad you did too!”
Just like the rest of us, she’d been trying to find things to do to keep herself busy during lockdown, but rather than learning to knit or speak a different language, Bognanno has turned to helping those who need it most.
“I started fostering dogs but then ended up keeping the first one I fostered, so that was kind of a failure,” she laughs. “But I’ve also been going through the process of becoming an emergency foster carer. I live alone, I have a spare room and basically when a kid gets taken away from their home they’ll come to stay with me for the first night or two until they find a more permanent foster placement, so I’m excited to do that. I was a volunteer at the women’s shelter for like five years with the kids and then when covid happened that stopped. That was kind of my break from music, so I had a couple of hours twice a week to not think of myself or music. It’s always good to have an outside perspective of what’s going on away from me”.
Bully create music to scream to, to cry to and to dance to, successfully adapting the punk genre to suit them and to say what they want to say. There is no summative definition of Bully, but Bognanno described it best by saying, “It’s a never-ending circle that comes in waves. I’m just excited to see what happens with the next record and the doors it’ll open”.
Listen to Bully on Spotify and Apple Music. For more exclusive interviews, grab a copy of our latest print magazine, with cover star Declan McKenna – Vol 10 available HERE.
