Tracy Bonham, an enterprising newcomer to the alternative music scene, is winning the hearts of everyone who listens to her major label debut, The Burdens Of Being Upright. Bonham has a quirky voice that is smooth and beautiful one minute and screeching desperately the next.
Bonham has a striking edge to her music and an unusual grounding to her songs and lyrics. The songs themselves are a complete motley of emotion, each one being its own incorporated capsule loaded with meaning, both darkness and light. It is immediately realized that Bonham is a talented musician, but after closer inspection of her music, it dawns on the listener that they have stumbled onto an artist who is creating music that is suitable today yet will be revelant tomorrow.
Bonham is a twenty-seven year old Boston resident who attended both the University of Southern California and the Berklee College of Music, and who originally hails from Eugene, Oregon. As a small child she embraced classical violin and continued on as a classical violinist until adulthood, when she chose to study guitar and voice. Almost instantly, she became a staple performer in Boston's club scene, and was awarded Best New Artist, Best Female Vocalist, and Best Indie Single at the 1995 Boston Music Awards.
The first single off her latest album is "Mother, Mother," a song riddled with the angst one experiences growing into themselves, and into the space they want to occupy in the world, all the while craving to tell their situation to those closest to them, yet knowing they cannot.
Not everyone is going to find meaning in Bonham's work. The song "Brain Crack" takes the concept of minimalism to new heights as she chants "that's the sound of your brain cracking" throughout much of the song. The subtext here is one of "psychic disturbance." Bonham's second single, "The One," is an oddly upbeat and catchy song that recounts a lover who seemed perfect up front and wound up to be everything but: "You're the one/ that froze the sun/ say you love me as/ you pull the trigger/ better today/ rather than/ tomorrow." The lyrics here are pointedly clear: they examine the devastation a toxic relationship can bring to an otherwise healthy individual. What goes around hopefully comes around, as she ends with "You should enjoy the weather/ soon you'll burn with what you've done...you'll hurt no one." Who hasn't wished that at least once in their life?
