The flames shoot two, maybe three feet into the air, and Alicia Bognanno’s face lights up from the hot orange blaze.
“This is why I wanted to come here!” she says, delighted by the dramatic result of the hibachi chef spurting oil onto a hot griddle at West Nashville’s Ninki Japanese Bistro.
It’s late September, and Bognanno’s band Bully — which also features bassist Reece Lazarus and guitarist Clayton Parker — is one month away from releasing Losing, their follow-up to 2015’s critically acclaimed full-length debut Feels Like. Though she’s admittedly a bit nervous about the release, Bognanno, Lazarus and Parker are all relaxed and happy, and not just because the chef is now entertaining us by heedlessly juggling an egg with his metal spatula.
At this point, a few of Losing’s first singles — “Running,” “Feel the Same” and “Kills to Be Resistant” — have already been celebrated by fans. Bognanno’s days have been filled with phone interviews for U.S. and British press, as well as a photo shoot in New York’s Chinatown. Earlier this afternoon, before meeting the Scene for hibachi, Bully received a shipment of freshly printed winter tour posters created by one of Bognanno’s favorite poster artists, Jay Ryan.
It is, as they say, all happening.
But as you might gather from its title, Bully’s sophomore effort isn’t the sunny, feel-good record you might expect from a local grunge-pop band on the brink of world domination. Losing sucks — whether you’re losing touch, losing innocence, losing focus or losing yourself — and on Losing, Bognanno explores a lot of loss, diving headfirst into the complicated emotions associated with death, heartbreak, isolation and more.
The result is an especially personal effort, a batch of songs that are blistering and angst-ridden, but which still boast a wink toward playful pop. Bognanno’s not wrong when she says it tops Feels Like.
For a minute there, though — after parting ways with drummer Stewart Copeland (Casey Weissbuch, formerly of Diarrhea Planet, played drums on Losing, and Wesley Mitchell will join them on their upcoming tour) and their label, Columbia Records imprint Star Time International — the band had to wonder if a second album was even possible.
Dinner at Ninka
When Bully broke onto the Nashville music scene in 2013, the band was almost immediately a hit. Bognanno — an MTSU grad who studied under seminal record producer Steve Albini at his Electrical Audio in Chicago and also engineers and mixes all of Bully’s music — was revered for writing buzzy rock songs with measured amounts of pop hooks and punk angst. Their debut EP, released in 2014, came with a heavy dose of ’90s nostalgia thanks to the singer’s penchant for analog recording methods, and fans were mesmerized by the band’s live performances. Onstage, Bognanno effortlessly unleashes thick and fuzzy guitar noise while showcasing acrobatic vocals that shift from a sweet, soft croon to a gnarled Cobain-esque scream in one breath.
It was clear Bully was destined for greatness, and greatness came quickly. The EP received high praise from respected national outlets like Pitchfork, New York and NME, and that same year they played Bonnaroo and CMJ Music Marathon while also scoring coveted local opening slots for adored acts like Superchunk and Those Darlins.
In 2015 they signed to Star Time International, a subsidiary of Columbia Records — so, in a sense, they were labelmates with Beyoncé — and Feels Like was released that spring to even more critical acclaim.
That’s when the whirlwind really began.
Much of that year was spent on the road. March and April brought a West Coast and Canadian tour with JEFF the Brotherhood. In May they went to Europe, and in June they toured the West Coast with Best Coast. The summer was peppered with festival appearances, including SXSW, Lollapalooza, Pop Montreal and Pitchfork. In August they performed the song “Trying” on Conan, then they hopped around the U.S. and Canada again through September and October before crossing the pond once more for another European tour in November. 2015 ended with half a dozen Australian dates in December.
Whew.
When Bully finally came home to Nashville — back to a city that, perhaps, had changed as much as they did while they were on the road — Bognanno struggled to find her place.
“It’s very shocking,” she says. “You go from nonstop traveling and constantly being around people to just isolation. When we came home, our job was to write the second record — I write [at home], we practice [at home], I record the demos [at home] — so there aren’t really any boundaries or lines of when I need to cut it off and maybe chill out or talk to another human being.
“Stopping to make the second record was something we had to do,” she continues, “but with that going on, and the election and just other things in my personal life, it was weird. It was a whirlwind. A lot of that comes through on the record.”
Bognanno is reluctant to go into too much detail about Losing’s lyrical inspiration — “I’m not gonna talk that much about my personal life because I shouldn’t have to, I shouldn’t have to give that sort of information up,” she says. Even so, it’s impossible not to at least partially decipher the source of some of her frustrations.
Opening track “Feels the Same” buzzes with the maddening restlessness that settles in late at night while fighting the losing battle of forgetting an ex: “Cut my hair I feel the same / Masturbate I feel the same … Feed my dog I feel the same.” Bognanno’s lyrics echo attempted escapes from unwanted thoughts.
“Guess There” is a bit more lighthearted, with Bognanno projecting that post-tour haze over a noodling, distorted Built to Spill-ish guitar riff, but “Blame” takes a sharp, dark turn. Though it sounds like one of the brighter songs on the album, with its perky, playful guitar dancing over a bouncing bassline, the lyrics recall a heavy relationship that appears to be wrapped up in pain, booze, guilt and blame. “Either Way” is another undeniably heavy tune, wherein Bognanno grapples with the thought of someone’s eventual death. “I want you either way,” she howls in the charging chorus, “even if you can’t stay.” But the song that stings the most is “Focused.” It’s Bognanno’s favorite, and it’s the song that, when the band first heard the demos, left a lasting impression.
“I could tell right away it was something different,” says Parker.
“It got me out of a songwriting rut,” Bognanno says. “That was the first one, that moment of, ‘Oh, cool, I’m not totally fucked. I can do this. We can do this. We can do the second record. It’s gonna be OK.’ ”
The song has a lingering persistence — a patient, rubbery bass line steadily marches on for much of the song while Bognanno recalls a loaded moment in an old friendship. “And I still remember / what you went through when we were 16 / You explained it to me then but / a few years later I felt what you mean.” The song has an eerie tranquility before it furiously climaxes, with Bognanno unleashing whatever rage has been pent up, maybe for a decade, screaming out, “I’m trying to stay focused! I’m trying to stay focused!”
It all culminates into one shattering howl that rivals Live Through This-era Courtney Love: “I’M GONNA KILL HIM!”
“I didn’t really want this record to get as heavy as it got,” says Bognanno, “but I don’t feel like I have a lot of control over it, because if I ever sit down to write a song, I’m not ever gonna write about something that’s not bothering me. That’s just the nature of the way that I write. Out of that comes a lot more things that can be on the bummer spectrum. Because it’s harder for me to be like, ‘I’m happy, I love my dog,’ you know?”
She’s quick to point out that Losing isn’t a total killjoy.
“There’s lighter stuff, like ‘Guess There,’ which is just an anthem for everybody who wants to stay at home and be antisocial, or ‘Spiral,’ which is pretty, ‘Whatever,’” she says with a laugh. “ ‘You Could Be Wrong’ is lighthearted, [about] watching somebody succeed at a much more rapid pace than you, and being happy for them and trying to not be envious at the same time.
“But there is a lot of stuff, like, ‘Seeing It,’ which is clearly a very heavy song that kind of touches on sexual assault,” Bognanno says. “And ‘Hate and Control,’ which is obviously about the political climate and the election.”
When it came time to name the record, Bognanno sat down with the final list of songs and listened for a common theme — it was undeniable that Losing is littered with the concept of losing, even if at first she didn’t want to admit it.
“I think [the title] just tied it all together. At the time, or at least within the year I was writing it, I felt discouraged often, and flipping through the record, I was like, ‘This could be a somewhat accurate representation of some subliminal message in each song.’
“I don’t want it to sound so disappointing, or so discouraging,” she continues. “It’s not supposed to be like, ‘Wah, we hate life!’ [Laughs] We probably should have gone with a different album title.”
Losing album art
Bognanno is friendly, even goofy at times, especially when egged on by her bandmates — “Girl on the Road is my secret blog, and it only happens in the van,” she says about just one of the ways the band members entertain themselves during hours of driving. But she also has a very commanding presence. She dominates the conversation over dinner, but she isn’t pushy or precious about it, and she’s not reluctant to take control — she does the bulk of Bully’s songwriting.
It’s not surprising to hear she knew from a young age — even in a big family lacking other musicians — that she wanted to be a musician, and she wasn’t taking no for an answer. But there wasn’t much of a music scene where she grew up in Rosemount, Minn. “I knew one band, and the guys were seniors when I was a freshman,” she says. “That was it for our whole high school. So if it was going to happen, it was going to be elsewhere.
“When I brought up the idea of wanting to do music, my parents were just like, ‘What the hell are you thinking? There’s no way. You don’t know shit about music.’ And I didn’t.”
Bognanno felt pressure from her parents to get a degree, and one of her high school teachers, Jeremy Bartelt, told her about Middle Tennessee State University, which offers a Bachelor of Science degree in audio engineering.
“I was really thankful for it,” she says, “because that was his way of teaching me how to present this idea to my parents with them still being cool with it, and that’s how we came to an agreement. They were like, ‘OK, you can go do stuff for music if there’s a four-year degree.’ That’s how I ended up there.”
It was in college that Bognanno discovered her preference for analog recording, which is a big part of what makes Bully’s sound on record distinct from a lot of the band’s peers. Recording to tape means there’s no digital compression, making for a more genuine presentation of Bully’s grunge pop — a sound that has garnered comparisons to ’90s faves like The Breeders, Pixies and Nirvana.
“I was going through college and starting to get to my upper-division classes, which was really cool because it was actually the first time in school that I was doing well,” Bognanno says. “But I remember being so frustrated with the software — a lot of the answers were to restart your computer. To me that was so frustrating.
“You have to know how to work [recording software] Pro Tools if you want to be an engineer, and I totally get that,” she continues. “It’s more affordable than tape, and it’s easier for students, but once I did some research on Electrical Audio, I realized they had the tape machines, and I really wanted to learn more about them. I love it — it’s much more of a physical process. You can see what’s going on, you’re pressing ‘play’ and ‘record’ on the actual machine instead of in the computer.”
In 2011 Bognanno continued her analog education with a student internship in Chicago at Albini’s Electrical Audio — where The Breeders, Pixies, Jawbreaker and The Mountain Goats have recorded, to name just a few — and her skill and dedication impressed the notoriously misanthropic Albini, who’s known for his work on Nirvana’s In Utero, P.J. Harvey’s Rid of Me, Pixies’ Surfer Rosa and countless others. In 2015 Albini told NME: “Alicia is maybe the top student intern we’ve ever had. Her work ethic was tireless and constant. She was a fucking joy to have in the studio. If everybody in the studio worked as hard as Alicia, then everybody’s records would be Number One hits.”
Both Feels Like and Losing were recorded at Electrical Audio with Bognanno at the helm, but leading a pack isn’t always easy, especially for a woman in a male-dominated industry. It can come with a lot of unjust speculation and discredit that can lead to doubt and shame. Bognanno, like any talented woman, is not immune.
“When I first heard about imposter syndrome, it was in a Throwing Shade podcast, and I was like, ‘This is my life, described to me — this is blowing my mind right now,’ ” says Bognanno of the syndrome, a persistent fear of being exposed as a fraud. “I know exactly where mine came from, because it is part of why I have a really hard time giving myself so much credit — because so many things that happened when Bully was starting, someone would say, ‘You got that because so-and-so wanted to fuck you.’
“I’m lucky that now I know better, and there’s so many awesome female musicians who have called bullshit,” she continues. “It’s just a shitty thing that I think women have to deal with. I don’t think men — it doesn’t faze them. They can get up and play. No one’s judging them, no one’s gonna say shit like that to them.”
Though much of Losing’s material is culled from the dread of feeling defeated, there are moments when Bognanno finds the strength to fight back — it’s just her nature. She’s been fighting to get where she is for most of her life, after all, and that relentlessness most notably makes an appearance on album-closer “Hate and Control,” in which she lulls softly but assuredly, “You can’t define my meaning / Who are you to stand me still / You don’t like it when I’m angry / Tough shit, learn to deal.”
Maybe it’s not that Bognanno is losing — it’s that she’s refusing to play at all.
Bully with Mezzi, Alicia’s dog
With the album recorded, there was still the question of who would release it. Bands don’t usually escape a major label without a few scars or horror stories — artists have lost rights to their own music or been forced into long-lasting, momentum-killing limbo with binding contracts — but Bully got lucky with Star Time.
“We definitely felt the slowness of a major label,” says Bognanno. “It’s a huge company that’s the main source of everything for us, [and] we were a smaller indie-rock band. We had the choice to leave and be somewhere where we could be more of a success, compared to something like a subsidiary of Columbia, where Beyoncé is a success. We approached them and voiced our opinion, and they were really cool with it. [They said] ‘We’re not gonna trap you here.’ It was really nice.”
Wait ... nice?
“When we were on Star Time we really only worked with two people, and they were awesome,” says Bognanno. “And they gave us 100 percent creative control — I don’t regret it. I mean, we needed to sign with them. Honestly, we did — we wouldn’t have gotten a van.”
Now Bully is on Sub Pop, the Seattle label lauded — or blamed, depending on who you ask — for the Northwest’s early-’90s grunge explosion, and currently home to a diverse roster including Sleater-Kinney, Downtown Boys, Shabazz Palaces and Father John Misty. It’s a perfect fit, really. Not only is Bully sonically a band that Sub Pop would’ve courted in the ’90s, but the label, too, has long identified as a group of losers. “LOSER” has been emblazoned across Sub Pop’s T-shirts for decades, and in 2007 they established a scholarship fund called the Sub Pop Loser Scholarship. The band laughs when the coincidence is pointed out.
“We did not think about that,” says bassist Lazarus of the album-name coincidence. “The tantalizing part about Sub Pop, and signing with them, was the possibility of the Bully and Sub Pop ideas that would make something that was greater than the sum of the parts.”
“How rare is it that the label following in itself is greater than the band following?” adds Bognanno. “That’s a really rare situation.”
Plus Sub Pop, perhaps better than any other record label, would know how to best handle a band that has drawn comparisons to its own early-’90s artists … despite the band’s intentions.
“I had no intention of resembling a ’90s band,” says Bognanno. “I was born in 1990. I did not grow up with Nirvana. They were at their biggest in ’94, right? I was 4.”
“I grew up in Seattle, and I used to say I hated Nirvana as a kid because they played them on the radio station all the time, and you hear people busking it,” says Lazarus. “ ‘Why do people like this band? I don’t understand.’ I wasn’t old enough to get it. I had to sit down and actually listen to Nirvana records to try to figure it out.”
He laughs and hangs his head. “Embarrassingly late.”
“I mean, Pod by The Breeders was one of my favorites,” adds Bognanno. “I wasn’t thinking of it as an era as much as a couple of bands I really like that came out of that time period. Honestly, if we’re gonna be put in any category, I’m glad it’s that one. A lot of badass bands came out of that time. But I think a lot of it has to do with us [growing up] in a time where electronica was really big — there’s a ton of slapback and reverb hiding vocals, which isn’t a bad thing. But when I was in college, most bands I heard, that was what was going on. We’re two guitars, bass, drums — the vocals are pretty direct. They’re not really covered in a lot of effects, and they’re up front. I think that reminds people of music that’s coming out of that time.”
One notable fan reminded of yesteryear? Patty Schemel, former drummer for Hole (and current drummer for L.A. pop punk band Upset), who wrote Bully’s new bio for Sub Pop: “I love Bully the way I love Sebadoh, Dinosaur Jr. and The Breeders,” Schemel writes. “Their sound takes me back to the stripped down and thoughtfully engineered songs that haunt me long after they’re gone and never get old.”
As dinner wraps up at Ninka — without even a single onion volcano, but whatever — the members of Bully say they’re more excited than nervous about putting Losing out into the world. They’re unfazed by the barrage of hurdles that came at them over the past year, and they’re looking forward to finally hearing what people have to say about the culmination of their hard work.
Well, at least Lazarus and Parker are.
“I feel like we made the record we wanted to make, and yeah, obviously I would really love for people to love this record, but I think we love this record,” says Lazarus. “It’s not out there to be pandering.”
He laughs.
“I know Alicia does not feel that way. But I want people to fucking hear it. That’s all.”
“I am a nervous wreck,” adds Bognanno. “I just panic. I just want it to be out. I know we all worked our asses off and really worked hard for this one. In the end, I can’t beat myself up too much. I truthfully think it’s a lot better than the first record.”
A few weeks later the waiting game was finally over — Losing premiered a week early as part of NPR’s First Listen feature. Not only did NPR give the record a glowing review, but fans immediately loved it, too. “Face and brain, fully melted,” wrote one listener on Bully’s Facebook page. “SOOOO FUCKING GOOOOOD!!!” wrote another. Other fans, chiming in from as far away as Italy, Chile and the U.K., filled their comments with heart emojis. Tickets for shows on Bully’s winter tour — they’ll hit the East Coast and the South through November and December and the West Coast in February and early March — are already starting to sell out.
After all of the doubt and the heaviness and the hard work, it looks like Losing might be winning.
