If you're writing on Music Row, it's often the more the merrier when it comes to songcraft — maybe three co-writers, two producers, an engineer. Then add or subtract (let's be honest: mostly add) until the album is complete. But not for Bully frontwoman Alicia Bognanno, who is so hands-on with her music that she mixed, produced and performed her own songs — all at the same time.
"Collaboration in Nashville is fucking insane in mainstream and country," she tells the Scene via phone, en route to a show in Omaha, Neb., supporting California dreamin' indie rockers Best Coast. "All the different hands things go through to finish a song — it's a totally different world. I could never do that."
The Nashville band lets nothing leave its grasp on their highly anticipated debut LP Feels Like. With '90s-inspired poppy grunge-punk tunes that meld dead-honest lyrics with pitch-perfectly dissonant melodies, there was no effort to ride the wave of a major label deal with Columbia Records imprint Startime International to an "in" with an A-list producer, no farming out tracks to a field of engineers. Bognanno, an audio engineer who cut her teeth interning for legendary Pixies and Nirvana producer Steve Albini, tackles those duties herself. That was a big concern for the band — which includes drummer Stewart Copeland (not of The Police fame), guitarist Clayton Parker and Stone Fox booker and bassist Reece Lazarus — when signing on that fabled dotted line. would the label force them into traditional submission?
Nope.
"I was paranoid that if I didn't do a good enough job they would be like, 'Oh, maybe we should have someone else take over the mixes,' " Bognanno recalls. "It was a big part of why we signed with [Startime International founder] Isaac [Green]. He made it clear that he was really totally cool with me producing and engineering. It was pretty much like, 'I believe in the band, I trust you to make a good record.' He was a fan."
Minnesota-born Bognanno, who studied audio engineering in school and worked at Nashville studio Battle Tapes, has the experience and résumé to reign such authority over her own recordings, but there are plenty of people who, armed with an iPad and bootleg GarageBand, think they are also so entitled. It doesn't bother her — as long as the end result doesn't sacrifice quality for ease.
"You are going to spend all that time recording it and playing it," she explains, "so if you really believe in that song, the music deserves quality, at least. But it's weird how accessible it is now. Everything is visual. Though it can also be a really good thing, because people that do have interest in audio engineering, it gives them something to learn off of and work off of, and they don't have to pay 'X' amount of money to rent out a studio or buy a $350 reel of 2-inch tape to track their record."
When Bognanno was working at Battle Tapes, she'd often see smaller indie bands do just that — rent the studio and then bring in some "big shot" producer even before they'd had a chance to define their own sound. That always perplexed her. Bully's songs are raw and visceral, full of lyrics that detail the most personal of insecurities. Having another voice in the creative mix would feel like hiring a ghostwriter for a diary.
"The whole producer thing is so weird to me," she says. "You work on those songs and they mean something to you, and they are so personal, and you put so much in them. It seems odd to have someone walk into the studio and be like, 'I think this goes here.' How would you know? You wouldn't know what I felt when I wrote it."
The same thing goes for that time-honored Nashville tradition of the co-write. "I don't know how I could hand off the rest of [Feels Like's] 'I Remember' and be like, 'Here, you finish this,' " she says. "I don't know how you're gonna, because that didn't happen to you."
"I Remember," in its succinct, under-two-minute glory, charts a flashback to a love affair with lyrics that reflect the inner workings of Bognanno's brain, urgently expressing the aching cloud of memory we all experience from the early shadows of a relationship, through alternating sing-talk and screams: "I remember my old habits /I remember getting too fucked up /and I remember throwing up in your car."
It's narrative, confessional writing, mixed with the kinetic explosions of a punk spirit, rough-hewn but with sticky vamps and melodies that conjure up Albini's most famous partnership, producing Nirvana's 1993 classic In Utero. But most comparisons point to females, picking out Bognanno's most feminized lyrics like, "I'm been praying for my period all week," from "Trying," and running parallels to the Breeders (fair) or Gwen Stefani (not fair), though Kurt Cobain, The Replacements, Silkworm or a poppier Black Flag might make more appropriate analogs.
But, alas, they're less frequent, because there's that gnawing, undying gender cloud already hanging over Bully. Spend a little time reading the band's recent press and you'll find several articles calling Bognanno a "badass," the word thrown around in a way that subtly applauds her candor and aggressiveness despite her sex. You'll also find the band on lists of "10 Female Punk Songs" and answering questions about where Bognanno buys her jeans, something that would be rather ludicrous for any rock frontman. There's also a mildly patronizing air about the applause Bognanno gets for producing and engineering the LP — there's often buried surprise at the fact that, wow, a girl managed to do this, and all by her pretty self.
"I get asked questions about gender all the time, and it's really annoying," she says. "Oh my God, it's so crazy to think that if we were an all-male band we wouldn't have that genre weight on us. You just know you are going to be asked about it. To think it could be the other way ... "
If any band will break through the gender barrier, Bully's got the chops to do it. Just ask Ryan Adams, who tweeted this about the band's artfully aggressive single "Milkman": "In my opinion Bully are the best band in the world at this very moment. This song makes me wanna get up and live." Not "best female-fronted band." Just the best.
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