Bully joins us for the latest episode of Consequence and Lagunitas’ Six-Pack Stories. Watch above or via YouTube.
Despite the rarity of her recent solo performance at Consequence’s CoSign Sessions at Live at Lagunitas, Bully’s Alicia Bognanno would actually prefer to work alone. “What I like about writing is I get to kind of not have to think about what other people are thinking about what I’m doing,” she says from the Lagunitas couch. “I find peace in that — and I don’t ever wanna tell somebody what they should do with their art.”
Sitting with our own Jonah Krueger ahead of her first solo show in years, Bognanno notes that writing alone doesn’t mean writing a little. In fact, she’s writing constantly — just not in a Notes app, preferring instead to have a text thread with herself filled with words she likes. She’s also been readying plenty of music since her last LP, 2023’s Lucky for You, even if it’s not all intended for the public. “I’ll be writing albums even if I don’t release them,” she says. Thankfully, she also reveals there is another LP getting mixed for release, likely in the spring.
Even when there is someone she’d want to hang with on the couch, she hedges; she names poet Mary Oliver as a major writing inspiration she’d want to have a conversation with, but admits it’d be too “nerve-wracking” to meet “someone I idolize”: “I wanna be like, far away. I can look out a window and see them, but I don’t wanna talk to them.” But when the occasion calls for it, she’s got just the music to set the communal mood: Morphine’s “Cure for Pain” or her own “Days Move Slow.”
The company she’d prefer, given her druthers? Pets. She’s a frequent dog foster parent, and she’d encourage anyone who’s able to foster to do so as well — with the full acknowledgement that you’ll get your heart broken when they get adopted. “You have to know that going into it. You have to just know, like, ‘This is gonna be painful,’” she says. “But the other side of this is that the shelters don’t have any more space. You just gotta take on that adorable burden.”
(Fitting that her CoSign Sessions at Live at Lagunitas benefited San Francisco Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.)
Watch Bully’s edition of Lagunitas’ Six-Pack Stories above or via YouTube. Then, sit back with a cold one and some good tunes before we crack open some more episodes soon.