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All Music Guide:
Like Alanis Morissette and Liz Phair, Tracy Bonham made her name during the alternative boom of the mid-90s. Unlike those two songwriters, she did so by merging post-grunge with elements of classical music, drawing upon her violin skills in the process. The combination helped push her 1996 debut, The Burdens of Being Upright, to gold sales, and Bonham closed out the year with two Grammy nominations. Although her later albums didnt fare quite so well, Bonham continued expanding her sound into a hybrid of folk, rock, and ornate pop, replacing the record sales of years past with critical approval.
Bonham began playing the violin at age nine, while growing up alongside her eight siblings in Eugene, OR. Although she received a scholarship to study classical violin at the University of Southern California, she dropped out after several semesters and moved east to attend the Berklee College of Music, where she took classes in jazz and vocal music. Her tastes shifted to rock music during the early 90s. While recording jingles in order to pay her rent, Bonham began playing shows in the Boston area to showcase her emerging style, which combined her classical training with a growing appreciation for bands like the Pixies and PJ Harvey.
Bonhams first EP, The Liverpool Sessions, was released in 1995 by the Boston-based label CherryDisc. The One and Dandelion both enjoyed local airplay, and Bonham took home three prizes from the Boston Music Awards later that year, including Best New Artist and Best Female Vocalist. After signing with Island Records, she courted a much larger audience in 1996 with the release of her full-length debut, The Burdens of Being Upright. An autobiographical album that emphasized her rock influences, it spawned a chart-topping single with Mother Mother and eventually sold more than 500,000 copies. Bonham also received several Grammy nominations. Despite her sudden success, Bonham didnt release the sophomore album Down Here until early 2000, a year dominated by teenage pop stars, rap acts, and R&B artists. The album sold poorly despite receiving several warm reviews, and Island Records -- which, due to a recent acquisition by UMG, was in the middle of its own set of problems -- dropped her from the roster in December 2001.
Now a free agent, Bonham issued The Bee EP on her own dime while touring alongside the Blue Man Group, who had recruited her to sing on their 2003 album The Complex. She also moved to L.A., where she used the money generated by The Bee EPs sales to begin work on another full-length album. The result was Blink the Brightest, released in 2005 by the Rounder imprint Zoë Records. Another self-financed recording, In the City + In the Woods, quickly followed, and Bonham decamped to Woodstock, NY, to work on a self-produced fourth album in 2007. Recording sessions wrapped up in late 2009, and Masts of Manhatta appeared the following summer.
Wikipedia:
Tracy Bonham (born March 16, 1967 in Boston, Massachusetts) is an American alternative rock musician best known for her 1996 single "Mother Mother".
Raised in Eugene, Oregon, Bonham is a classically-trained violinist and pianist. She received two Grammy nominations in 1997 for Best Alternative Album and Best Female Rock Vocal Performance.
Biography
Life and early music career
Raised in Eugene, Oregon, Bonham began singing at age five and playing the violin at nine. As a teen she received a full scholarship to the University of Southern California for violin, but she eventually transferred (and moved) to Boston, Massachusetts in 1994, where she attended the Berklee College of Music to study voice instead. While there she started writing songs and in early 1995 she released her first EP, The Liverpool Sessions, and the single "The One" won best single in the Boston Phoenix reader's poll.
Also that year, based on a performance in a local club in Cambridge, Massachusetts called Toad, a representative from Island Records signed her to a record deal. She immediately began work on her first album.
The Burdens of Being Upright
After recording at Fort Apache Studio in Cambridge for several months, in 1996 Bonham released her debut full-length album The Burdens of Being Upright. Magazines such as Rolling Stone and People noted her bold approach to rock music. The album went gold within six months and later that year she was nominated for the Grammy Awards for Best Alternative Music Performance and Best Female Rock Vocal Performance (for "Mother Mother"). She then went on an extensive tour in support of the album.
The first single, "Mother Mother", went number one on the Billboard Rock Charts for a month in late 1996. The second single, "The One" (taken from the 1995 EP), was a minor hit and peaked at #23 on the Billboard Hot Modern Rock Tracks chart, and two different music video versions of the song were briefly in heavy rotation on video music channels MTV and VH1. The third and final single, "Sharks Can't Sleep" failed to chart in the US.
Down Here
After the mild success of her first album, problems emerged during the recording of her next album from her own label. In 1998, all of the Island Records as well as Polygram Records and other associated labels were purchased by Seagrams, as the various labels now were under the umbrella imprint of UMG, or Universal Music Group, LLC.
Although Tracy had recorded a second album for release (in possibly 1998) titled "Trails of a Dust Devil" (with promotional items having even been sent out), the new label delayed the release until mid-2000, re-titling it Down Here. The newly-titled album - and the only single released from it, "Behind Every Good Woman" - failed to chart, despite scrambled attempts to do interviews and tour for an album that was given a half-hearted release. She then took a small break after promoting the album while quietly searching for a new label.
Bee EP
In late 2001 she divorced Steve Slingeneyer (of the band Soulwax) after three years of marriage. At the same time, as Bonham began to record new music for her third album, Island Records cited they were going in a different direction (they were now favoring mostly male bands such as Korn and Limp Bizkit) and she was released from her recording contract.
She then left studio recording behind and began to tour in support of other groups such as the performance group Blue Man Group and even rock band Aerosmith. In 2003 she recorded and released an independent EP titled Bee. It included early versions of "Shine" and "All Thumbs" and a live version of "Freed" (from the "Down Here" album), and a cover of Led Zeppelin's "Black Dog", where she substituted violin solos for the signature lead guitar line in the original.
She had only pressed 1,000 hoping to sell 500, but she eventually sold over 12,000 of the EP's while on the various tours. With the money made from the EP she returned to the studio to start work on her third full-length LP in Los Angeles, California. (The "Bee" EP was later re-issued in Europe as the "Something Beautiful" EP with the addition of a track titled "Blink the Brightest" and a bonus DVD with live performances.)
In 2004, she signed with Rounder Records, whose CEO, John Virant, was a longtime fan and spent over three years convincing Tracy to trust a record company again.
Blink the Brightest
In 2005 she released her third album Blink the Brightest through the more pop-oriented Zoe label of Rounder. It was recorded in L.A., where she has lived part-time since 2003. She co-produced the bulk of the album with Greg Collins (U2, No Doubt, Matchbox Twenty); Joey Waronker, who has drummed for R.E.M. and Beck, co-produced four tracks.
Along with Bonham, the players included drummers Waronker and Butch (of The Eels), bassists Sebastian Steinberg (from Soul Coughing & Neil Finn) and Davey Faragher (having performed for Elvis Costello, Sheryl Crow), guitarists Joe Gore (from Tom Waits, P.J. Harvey) and Dave Levita (Alanis Morissette, Jewel) and keyboard player Mitchell Froom (Paul McCartney, Los Lobos).
She performed on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno and The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson, and her new songs were featured on XM Radio's The Loft Channel.
In The City + In The Woods EP
While in upstate New York in the late fall of 2006 Bonham released the EP In The City + In The Woods, her second self-funded EP. The 11-track disc featured two studio tracks, a cover version of Beyoncé Knowles's "Crazy In Love" and an original titled "In My Other Life". The rest of the songs are live tracks, which include some older favorites - "One Hit Wonder" and a new version of "Navy Bean" - covers ("Blue Jay Way" & "Kissing The Lipless"), and previously unreleased material ("Your World Turns Upside Down", "The Idiot In Me").
Masts of Manhatta
From 2007–2009, Bonham recorded songs for her new album in Woodstock. The 2010 album, titled Masts of Manhatta, was produced by Bonham and mixed by Tchad Blake, and was released under the New York City indie label Engine Room Recordings in the United States and on Lojinx Records in the UK.
Personal life and about her music
Bonham currently splits her time between Woodstock, New York, and Brooklyn, New York. She is married to Rolling Stone executive editor Jason Fine and in 2010 was planning for an adoption. Bonham has said of her music, "I think I stopped trying to prove so much to people. I went inward and realized that being honest and not being so veiled and cryptic can actually touch more people. In the past, I wanted to be deep, but then I went too far and was over-thinking everything. Now I just write from the heart."
She is also a self-taught guitarist. She once said, "Guitar-wise, I have a certain style that I can't seem to get any guitar player to mimic, and it's because they're good and I'm bad," she has said. "And I don't mind. There's a way I want to hear it, so I just do it myself."
