Bully frontwoman Alicia Bognanno was always drawn to music, but it wasn’t until she enrolled in a sound-engineering class her senior year of high school that she felt it was really something she could do. She enrolled in Middle Tennessee State University’s audio-engineering program, and was surrounded by music for the first time. It was there that she picked up guitar and taught herself to play by simply being around other musicians. After finishing school, she moved to nearby Nashville, joined a local band, and met Stewart Copeland. But she quickly found that singing someone else’s lyrics wasn’t what she wanted to do, so she and Stewart decided to star their own band. Bully was born.
With a new album that came out June 23rd. Recorded at Electrical Audio studios in Chicago . Alicia says, because I’d interned there in college and loved it, so I knew I would feel comfortable recording there. I wanted to mix the album myself, and I knew that I would have all the support I needed. We recorded everything on tape so every sound is just as it was recorded. There’s no pitch correct or anything like that—all of the sounds are real, and they were a moment that happened. I hope that people can appreciate that. And I hope that when people listen to the album they can connect to it in some way, that they’ll hear a lyric and say, ‘I’ve been there.'”
BULLY: “At first I was kind of nervous to share my songs with the band, especially when I wrote ‘Trying’ and with that line about waiting for my period. After I played that for them I said, ‘What do you guys think of that?’ and they said, ‘Definitely leave it in, it’s cool.’ And that kind of set the bar for how personal our music was going to be. It has been really positive.”
“I think we’re different from a lot of other bands, in that we don’t have a trendy sound— we don’t sound like other music happening right now. Not that we sound like we’re from another era, we just sound like Bully. And I think we take chances as far as being honest and getting really personal with our lyrics, which isn’t easy to do. It used to be easier to hide behind lyrics and write things that are more abstract, but it takes guts to be direct and say what you mean.” Check out Bully’s electrifying performance of “Trying” at SXSW.
The Fat Angel Sings 