COVER STORY | Bully Grieves Through the Noise

I’ve spent many years writing poetry, which means I’ve also spent many years watching my peers debate over how much one person should buy into the truth of any given poem they read. A vessel built from the pillars of vulnerability, it’s rare to see a poetry connoisseur truly embrace the “separate the poet from the poem” mantra that has sparked so much Twitter discourse—especially within a world that hardly anyone beyond it cares about. But, I have often known it to be true that—regardless of what embellishments or white lies endure—a poem is, down to the bone, sourced from an intimate place deep inside the soul of its writer. And that generosity and truth arises again when I tap into the work of Alicia Bognanno—who performs under the stage name Bully and just put out Lucky For You, the best rock ‘n’ roll album of 2023 so far.

The poetics of Bully reside in a language crafted by Bognanno, the 32-year-old Nashville native adored by alt-punks and Pavement disciples far and wide. Since her 2015 debut Feels Like, she has magnified light atop her piercing confessionals. What she offers her listeners on every album is simply the truth as she lives through it. “I have tried and pushed myself to write about stories that I’ll have made up or riff on an idea of somethign that a song could be about,” Bognanno says. “But, for me, songwriting has always been 1,000% an outlet for [grief and trauma]. It’s very easy for me to tap into; I laugh at how unavoidable it is for me. It’s like: ‘Relax, Alicia. Can you just not be so emo for a second?’ It’s my way of communicating. I feel like, with a lot of things that I write about, I can’t really find the right words to communicate with somebody face-to-face or have these conversations.”

While we talk, Bognanno sits in her music room, as a family of guitars ensconces her beneath the unnatural glow of a ceiling light. It’s her happy place. “My favorite thing to do in the world is sit [in here] alone and mess with everything I have and figure out the best sounds. A lot of the satisfaction, to me, comes with discovery, what new pieces of gear can do,” she says. Lately, the buzz around Lucky For You has been swelling online, as journalists who’ve been made privy to the 10 tracks early are quick to send their reverences into the void of doomscrolling algorithms and 280-character block texts. The warm reception doesn’t go unwarranted, though. I’ll say it right here: Lucky For You is a triumph of many shapes and colors that was well worth the three-year wait.

Bognanno is a self-proclaimed slow worker, which plays a role in why it took so long for her to follow-up 2020’s SUGAREGG. After releasing three albums in five years, folks became hungry for what she would cook up next. The potential was limitless for Bognanno, who’d started treatment for bipolar-II around the time she wrote and recorded SUGAREGG. With a new lifestyle that welcomed a crucial regiman of medication and self-care, she reinvented herself through a prismatic, sobering and sometimes-euphoric documentation of recovery and survival. And, rather than moving on to the next thing immediately, Bognanno carved out the space to give as much kindness to Lucky For You in the studio as she was giving to herself behind closed doors.

“There was pressure I put on myself, where I was really stressed that [Lucky For You] was taking a long time when I first started [making it]. But, I also start records before the one before it even comes out. I was writing Lucky For You for the past three years. All I can do is just release records and then immediately keep working and accept that when it’s ready, it’ll be ready. Another thing that I’ve really come to appreciate a lot more with all of this is what space can do. I’ll write something, and, in my head, I’m like, ‘This is great, I love it.’ And then I will not listen to it for however long I can get away with—maybe a few weeks—and then I’ll come back and it’ll be like, ‘Oh, this sucks’ or ‘Oh, this is actually kind of good.’ That kind of space and time is now pretty invaluable to me. I would take forever [to make a record] if I could, just because of what happens when I’m reflecting back on it. Maybe it still sucks, I don’t know, but that time is definitely more important than cranking out material.”

For the last eight years, fans and writers have speculated and debated over what to refer to Bully as—is the project a band, or Bognanno’s own immediate musings? During our call, she sets the record straight: “I had never written with anybody before. There were long touring members, but it’s been the same way this whole time,” she says. Before the release of SUGAREGG, the folks who played with Bognanno went their own ways, whether it was starting college or pivoting to another music project. Done in less than a month, her sketches of the album’s vision were nearly identical to the final product. “That record, for the most part—minus a couple of things—was to the T of the demos,” Bognanno adds. “There wasn’t any working it out in the studio, I knew exactly what I was doing. It was more so just engineering, but also with a supportive aspect of ‘Do you like this lyric or that lyric?’ [with producer John Congleton].”

Lucky For You, Bognanno’s fourth Bully album, arrives today, after a three-year period of immense trauma, grief and personal transformation. Once SUGAREGG came out, she quit drinking and found more clarity and meaning in her writing. “I’m forced to really see things though in a way that I wasn’t before,” she says. “I’ve only grown as a writer by not drinking, and as a person in general.” In that new headspace, Bognanno began to realize how badly the industry idealizes addiction—especially in conversation about performance and songwriting—and how offensive and destructive that attitude is towards people undergoing renewal and rehabilitation. “I was really nervous that that [clarity] would go away, because there is not another option to ‘get[ting] off of everything and see[ing] what art you can create.’ That idea, to me, is like, ‘Okay, cool, so I wouldn’t be here anymore.’ That idea that they plant, or even back when people were writing about rock shows and they were like, ‘I was so fucked up and it was so cool.’ It’s like, they were really struggling, and that is entertainment for you? That’s not fucking cool.”

Bognanno categorizes the work of her first three albums as “morning afters,” in which a lot of her creativity would kick in during the comedowns after nights of heavy using. “I would feel copious amounts of guilt and shame and heavy depression, because drinking really triggered that for me. There were so many songs that I had gotten from the next day, when I just felt so weighed down by it all that all I could do was write,” she explains. The Lucky For You song “Hard to Love” examines those moments, especially when Bognanno sings the bridge: “Downing the weight of shame / Deep breath baby, it’ll be okay / And if it all falls and they can’t stay / Their loss, you don’t need them anyway.”

Anyone who has ever tapped into Bognanno’s world online likely knows that, in March 2022, she lost her beloved pup Mezzi. A month after her passing, Bognanno posted her first teaser of what was to come: A photo of her and Mezzi running through a yard, with the caption “Lucky for you.” Nearly a year later, the single “Days Move Slow” arrived as her roaring, tender tribute to the 13 years she spent with Mezzi—where, across the track, she pieces together the agony of learning how to live without her closest companion through a hopeful outlook on what might await her on the other side of grief: “I’m living in the same black hole / But there’s flowers on your grave that grow / Something’s gotta change, I know / And I’m stuck somewhere in-between / Your death and my lucid dream / I’m no help lately, I know,” she sings, as the chorus soars into the second verse.

“It’s really weird—and it’s gonna sound super dramatic—but I feel like I had been grieving Mezzi’s death a year before she passed, just because I was so distraught by the thought of it. We would just go outside and I would sit with her and I would just look at her and start tearing up, because I knew that, inevitably, she would. She was getting older, so, even before she passed, it was very heavy on my mind. “What is this going to be like when I don’t have her here?” I was writing about the thought of it happening, and then it actually happened,” Bognanno adds.

“Days Move Slow” was the first thing she made during the aftermath of Mezzi’s passing, when she finally got to a place where she could begin working again. “Whenever I was writing, she was always right next to me, all day, everyday. She was all that I saw while I was writing, so, after she passed, I was really avoiding coming back into this room,” Bognanno says, gestuing to the space of instruments behind her. “When I was able to do that, it was the only thing that felt right. I was taking steps towards healing.” Though opener “All I Do” and “How Will I Know” existed before Mezzi crossed the Rainbow Bridge, much of the album came after, when Bognanno wrote “A Love Profound,” “How Will I Know” and “A Wonderful Life,” the latter of which features some of the most-gut-wrenching lines on the entire album: “My heart’s breaking on the bathroom floor / Begging for time, I want a little more / I miss you waiting outside the door / And I want my baby girl back / If you ask me, she was gone too soon / I’m left writing in an empty room / Searching for her in the moon.”

Something that struck me so quickly about Lucky For You were these instances, where Bognanno was eulogizing Mezzi in such open ways. As someone who also lost a dog—who I loved and grew up alongside for more than a decade—during the pandemic, I’ve kept this album and its triumphs and its griefs close to my heart more than any other release this year. So often, the records that grace my inbox chronicle interpersonal, mortal romances, heartbreaks and connections. There is no shortage of any of those themes going around, and it’d have you believe that reflection and mourning and falling in love is limited only to human bodies tumbling into other human bodies.

I can’t quite say that what Bognanno is doing in these songs is of lyrical brilliance, because I don’t want to abridge this huge loss of hers into some kind of career benchmark—nor should anyone else. Lucky For You is not ours to diagram. But what I can say about it is this: Bognanno did not have to give us this record and share how she feared she would not have a life after Mezzi’s passing, but I’m very thankful that she did. The cycle of grief does not end on record release day.

Many of the songs on Lucky For You maneuver through a combination of trauma that has already materialized and the worry of what sorrow is on the horizon. “Lose You”—a track Bognanno sings in tandem with fellow Nashville alt-star Sophia Allison, aka Soccer Mommy—was written about a loved one in their final days while she was also considering what losing Mezzi might look like. “Barely moving, I’m still here / And the shades of blue that remind me of you are everywhere / To know you is a dream that / I’m lucky to be at / But you’re getting older,” Bognanno and Allison sing together.

The two musicians—perhaps unintentionally—teased their forthcoming collaboration when they joined forces with Sad13 (Speedy Ortiz’s Sadie Dupuis) and Snail Mail to perform a rendition of Pavement’s “Grounded” at the band’s pop-up museum in Manhattan last fall. Allison is one of the first artists to ever accompany Bognanno on a Bully album. “I had the bug in my ear to bring somebody else in, and I had never really done that,” she says. “When that got brought up, I was like, ‘Yeah, let me just see if Sophia will do it.’ I love her voice, it’s so good and so uniquely her own. If I could pick a voice to be on [Lucky For You], that’s the voice I would love to have.”

Lucky For You sees a return of collaboration beyond just singing with Allison for Bognanno, who called upon J.T. Daly, a visual artist and Grammy-nominated producer and multi-instrumentalist who lived five minutes away from her in Nashville. After sharing files back and forth, she recorded the album with Daly at MMK Studios in town—and he lent contributions of bass, synths and drums to the songs, along with a beautiful cello piece from Emily Nelson Rogers, which appears on “Ms. America.”

“It was definitely the first time that I was the most-open to taking someone else’s input and getting closer to collaborating,” Bognanno says. “That was a very different, new step/obstacle for me, because I had totally just come up from this mindset of ‘fully do everything yourself so you never have to rely on anybody else.’ It was completely different than any other record I’ve done, in the way that this happened over eight months versus any other record I’ve made, which is ‘in-and-out in two-and-a-half weeks and the record is done.’ Because we were close and because we had time and we had lots of breaks and a bunch of things happened in-between those breaks, there was room to create in a way that I hadn’t really had before.”

Bognanno’s work gets likened to ‘90s relics often, so much so that Alex Ross Perry tapped her to score the work of a fictional pre-Y2K band in his 2018 film Her Smell. Of course, she did once intern at Steve Albini’s Electrical Audio, but she doesn’t buy into how the aesthetics of Bully get pigeonholed as grunge or pre-nu-metal alt-rock. Her reaction to it all comes across plainly: “Grunge was a marketing scheme,” she says, laughing. Bognanno’s voice has been labeled “coarse” and centered in the same conversation as Kurt Cobain’s, but I think music writers struggle to consider the universe of Bully as something modern and original. Rather than plugging in a buzzword that’s had more than enough days in the sun, I’m fine with not having a definitive label for Bognanno’s work—and she’s cool with that, too.

Whatever bricks the Melvins, Wipers, Screaming Trees or Green River may have laid over 30 years ago have not yet turned to dust, and Bognanno is a student of articulating her trauma and grief and survival through powerful riffs and quaking percussion—a method that is as timeless as it is always changing—though she is fully aware of how heavy Bully records tend to get. “Songwriting, for me, has always been triggered by grief or emotional distress. I think about it a lot, too, because someone was [saying], ‘Oh, you never write about anything happy?’ And I would say that’s true, because, when I’m geeling great, I’m not writing a song. That’s more driven by grief and shame.”

From coming out on “Trying” eight years ago (“I can’t get out / There’s no flawless education, just a stupid degree / The feeling of growing so far from myself / I can’t reach, I can’t reach, I can’t reach”) to feeling helpless in the wake of a trustless romance and cruel damage on “Hard to Love” in 2023 (“Few things are bleaker than / Impermanence when joy begins / But I can show you low if you’d like / ‘Cause I can’t see the sun no matter how far I run / There’s something else that’s blocking my eyes”), Bognanno’s lyrics have never blurred the line, as she is very comfortable in her public-facing articulations of her own faults. But that spirit didn’t harden overnight.

“After I put out ‘Trying’ when I was younger, I had a pit in my stomach. And then I had some awkward conversations, but I felt like I could mostly write anything after that,” she says. “My least favorite part of the process of putting something really personal out is having people expect you to explain everything. To me, it’s already there. It’s always awkward to talk about it, but not in ways that people would think. I’m worried that might diminish the connection somebody might have with it. Personally, what I like about music is the mystery that it’s open for interpretation. You can hear something that I went through, but relate it to a way that works for you and hopefully connect with it in that way. And I love that.” In what is maybe her most emotionally accessible project yet, there’s a home for all of us in these songs.

Album closer “All This Noise,” sonically, stands out from everything that precedes it (which Bognanno attributes to being because the track is a 50/50 collaboration with Daly), as all of the misery and torment and frustration wraps up into one ferocious final number—which says a lot, because Lucky For You is a pure rock record that blisters; you can feel every spike in magnitude deep within your cells. At a 1:50 runtime, the song—after nine chapters lamenting death that’s yet to come or is still being grieved—finds Bognanno tapping into an emotion place she worked from on Losing six years ago—when she projected her anger onto the music industry creeps that she’d endured (and still endures) sharing a profession with.

The tune, even in its brevity, was written in response to the still-climbing death toll of violence occuring during the same era in history as Roe V. Wade getting overturned by the Supreme Court, which hit especially close to the bone for Bognanno, given that she lives in Tennessee—one of the leading states in the charge behind banning abortion nationwide. The song’s third verse gnaws at it best: “This pain is too draining / I’m tired of waiting for hope and for change and / I’m sick of extinction each time that we blink and / I won’t let a man choose my own body’s plan / I’m tired of waiting for change and debating.”

“I wrote it while we were recording after one of the fucking million school shootings. It felt like all I could write about at that time, and it just wouldn’t be a Bully record without something like that in there. It’s kind of unavoidable for me, because it’s always in my brain, like most other people. There were so many moments when we were making that record where we would just get in the studio and be like, ‘What the fuck?’ The abortion stuff, the continuous mass shootings—I’m pretty speechless when it comes to it. It was so prominent and I knew there was nothing else I was going to write about, because it was completely consuming my mind,” Bognanno says.

“All This Noise” is a coda of catharsis that makes complete sense in its placement on Lucky For You. It’s another painful way of deconstructing a wound left by violence, whether that arrives through an assault weapon, a poisonous ban stripping back reproductive rights or the inescapable tragedy of a beloved companion’s exit. Going out kicking and screaming through Final Girl-style howls and a mountain of jagged distortion is Bognanno’s way of translating what energy and outrage is rushing through her body and her head when it all comes to a boil. And, after nearly 10 years, she’s damn near perfected it.

At the end of our conversation, I ask Bognanno how—when looking back on a decade of Bully—her vision for the project has changed. She pauses for a moment, before offering up some blunt honesty: “I wish that I was [playing] in bigger rooms.” What struck me about her answer was that she rejected any inclination to shine it on for my tape recorder—and too often, that is not a prerogative that others adopt. It’s refreshing, even in the sadness of its truth, to hear an artist open up about what their career has—or hasn’t—become since its inception.

But Bognanno’s reponse doesn’t come from a place rid of gratitude. No, it’s wholly the opposite: To want to be in bigger rooms and play to more people every night on tour is a generous, symbiotic want. I do think about that Pavement Museum event last fall, when Bognanno was surrounded by her fellow indie rock royalty and was, somehow, not the most famous name in the room. But that was then and this is now, and Lucky For You has more than cemented her place in the zeitgeist of our hearts and the algorithms of the most-treasured music circles.

The last couple of years have tested just how much turbulence Bognanno’s heart can endure. On “All I Do,” she reflects: “I can see the city from a thousand miles / It doesn’t ring the same when I go to dial / Because everything’s been colored a new shade of you / I wanna feel the way I used to.” Lucky For You presents us with a cycle of mourning from one of our most-confessional, fearless songwriters. The arrangements are rewarding in their dense, digital walls of overdrive. And, even in the aching trenches of the tracklist, Bognanno’s inflection flirts with playfulness. The hurdles on this perfect Bully album may appear steadfast and unshakable in their heaviness, but, so often, relief only arrives once you start becoming present in the everyday joys that surround you again. And that is when you can finally start rebuilding. Last summer, after finishing Lucky For You, Bognanno began fostering dogs in need of forever homes. It’s likely we’ll never get an album detailing those small delights, but she wouldn’t want it any other way.

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Matt Mitchell is Paste‘s assistant music editor. He lives in Columbus, Ohio, but you can find him online @yogurttowne.