Interview: Tracy Bonham - musician

Published on Thursday 11 February 2010 08:42

TRACY Bonham was nearing the home stretch of one of her newer songs when she tripped over the lyrics, cracking herself up and waving her band to a halt.

• The duality of living between rural Woodstock and the hustle and bustle of Brooklyn is central to Tracy Bonham's first album in five years. Picture: NYT/Complimentary

The song was We Moved Our City to the Country, and the mishap came just after she had tweaked a line, replacing a common curse word with a broadcast-friendly "beep". For the distinctly family-oriented audience at the first Beacon Riverfest, in a waterfront park 60 miles upriver from Manhattan, it was a well-meaning stumble in an otherwise sure-footed set.

For Bonham, 43, it was, among other things, a reminder that self-censorship can come back to bite you in the, you know, beep. She is still laughing about it a couple of days later, on the patio of the stone cottage she shares with her husband, a cat and two black Labradors, on three wooded acres in Woodstock. As for the song, a tongue-in-cheek critique of relocated urbanites, Bonham herself drifts back and forth between Woodstock and the Boerum Hill section of Brooklyn.

That duality is central to Masts of Manhatta, Bonham's first full-length album in five years. Released this week, it's rootsier and more relaxed than her previous work, with her vocals and violin set against Smokey's Roundup, a Western swing band based in Brooklyn led by the guitarist Smokey Hormel. The album reflects changes in Bonham's personal life – falling in love and getting married, moving upstate and studying yoga – as well as her embrace of music making on a human scale, removed from old pressures, both industry-driven and self-imposed.

Mixed by the veteran engineer Tchad Blake, it is a modest but rewarding album, easily the most personal of Bonham's career. "I have a tendency to go into a cocoon and then come back out," she says, recalling a time, several years ago, when it was uncertain whether she would return to the life of a recording artist. She started writing songs, and those songs, artful but unguarded, signaled a new freedom. "I realised I didn't need to hide feelings within my music," she says. "My lyrics were so intentionally veiled on my first and second records – my second record especially, because I was really self-conscious after the success of the first one."

That debut, The Burdens of Being Upright (Island), from 1996, earned her two Grammy nominations and sold more than 500,000 copies. Its cathartic lead single, Mother Mother, a late blast of grunge, topped the alternative chart and earned her comparisons to Liz Phair and Alanis Morissette.

At the mention of Mother Mother and the momentum it brought to her career, Bonham exhales deeply. "It happened so fast," she says, as if describing a car accident. "I had just started to write music. And I had just put a band together. My goal was just to play around Boston and do well there."

She had moved to Boston from her hometown, Eugene, in Oregon, at 20, attending the Berklee College of Music and falling into the local music scene. By her account there was dissonance between the prevailing aesthetic in alternative rock and her background as a classical violinist and voice performance student.

"My first record was a deconstruction," she says. "I was poking fun at being a trained musician. I really feel like I dumbed everything down back then. I wasn't allowing myself to sing to my best ability, because that wasn't cool, in my mind. That was like trying too hard."

Still, Smokey Hormel was struck by her musicianship the first time he saw her in the mid-1990s, when he was touring in Beck's band, and Bonham was an opener. "She's such a powerful performer that it was a little intimidating actually to have to follow her," he says.

Bonham found it tricky to follow up her hit debut. There was insecurity, the need to prove herself. And there were changes at her label. When the album, Down Here, finally arrived in 2000, it met with a less than hospitable environment. "Limp Bizkit and Korn and all these heavy male rock acts were in," Bonham says, "and I think the radio programmers made a massive about-face. Like, 'OK, we've had enough of that chick stuff'. So that to me was the door shutting."

The most memorable chorus on Down Here involves what sounds like a slogan: "Behind every good woman lies a trail of men." Within 18 months of the album's release, Bonham was divorced (after three years of marriage to Steve Flingeneyer of the band Soulwax), was dropped by her label and moved to Los Angeles. Her next opportunity came from Blue Man Group, which asked her to collaborate on an album, and join them on tour (Bonham now teaches music at the group's Blue School). "We like intensity," says Phil Stanton, one of the group's founders, "and her music has always had that edge."

Five years ago, around the time that Bonham released her third album, Blink the Brightest, she became romantically involved with Jason Fine, the executive editor of Rolling Stone. She moved from Los Angeles to Brooklyn, and they were married, buying the house in Woodstock. Bonham earned her yoga teacher certification, with thoughts of changing her career. Still, in 2007, she self-released an EP with covers of Beyonce, the Shins and the Beatles, along with live versions of her own tunes (including One Hit Wonder, a wryly titled track from her debut).

The name of the EP was In The City +In The Woods, which in retrospect seems like a tip-off. But Bonham says that Masts of Manhatta, which derives its title from a line in a Walt Whitman poem, came as a surprise. "These songs, when they started coming out, I didn't really expect them to be on a record," she says. "I didn't know who was going to listen to them other than him" – meaning Fine – "and maybe some close friends. There are some things in there that are absolutely literal and totally personal."

Examples abound. In The Moonlight, a country two-step, chronicles a trip Bonham took with her mother, driving home from college for the summer. Angel, Won't You Come Down? was inspired by the waiting game of an international adoption, which Bonham says was expected to come through by this autumn. Your Night Is Wide Open is a ballad turned stomp whose title comes from a text message sent by Fine, back when they were just friends. (It was a turning point, she says, the moment when she knew.) And When You Laugh the World Laughs With You is a sweetly ruminative ballad full of other relationship details, like the fact that Fine once lost his wedding ring in a swimming hole.

Like much of Manhatta, it's contented rather than angst ridden, open instead of cagey. That's a new mode for Bonham, and it may work in her favour. Waiting for the start of Beacon Riverfest, Bonham reflected on her situation. "Being a working musician – that's what's the most exciting thing right now," she said. And her actions backed that up.

She sat in on violin with the festival's opening act, a Brooklyn band called Yarn, and after her own set she rushed to Woodstock for a sound check with the country singer Elizabeth Cook, who was opening for the Levon Helm Band at Helm's home-studio showcase, the Midnight Ramble.

That evening Bonham, violin tucked under her chin, deftly annotated Cook's songs, some of which she had never heard before.

"I feel so fortunate that I still have opportunities," she said earlier in the day. "I look at my life, and my husband and I going back and forth between this beautiful countryside and Brooklyn, where I'm absolutely in love with our neighborhood." She smiled.

"I just feel like right now is a really, really good time."

• Masts of Manhatta is out now.