Tomorrow, singer-songwriter Alyssa Bonagura is set to release her new single ‘New Wings’ – her first solo single in 5 years. A songwriter, producer and multi-instrumentalist, she has spent the past year honing her songwriting, here we interview Alyssa about the past year and the evolution of her forthcoming releases. Pre-save the single here ahead of its release tomorrow.
Hey, how are you?
I’m good!
How excited are you finally have your single coming out and to be playing live music again?
Oh my goodness, so this is the first song from me in five years as a solo artist. So, I’m really nervous and excited and ecstatic all at the same time.
All the feelings basically! After all this time, why did you choose this song and why now? What was it about this track?
You know, I was in lockdown last year, I moved back to my parents house – I’m an only child. I grew up playing music with them on the road – they were in a band called Bailie & The Boys. It was so fun for me to tour on a tour bus – it was basically my playground. Moving back to my parents house really brought me back to who I was in a lot of ways and spending time with them. Through the pandemic, I was set up with some Zoom writes and a lot of things have changed in my life – my band fell apart, and we lost our record deal – and it was kind of like trying to figure out who Alyssa is again. Through my healing journey, I really went inward – which I feel like a lot of us did. During that year, I found this poem by Paulo Coelho called ‘The Lesson of the Butterfly’. Basically, it’s all about how this man is walking past this branch and he sees a cocoon and this butterfly about to fly out of it. After watching it struggle for a long time, he feels bad for the butterfly, so he goes and gets a pair of scissors, thinking that if he cuts the cocoon open, it will make it easier for the butterfly to just fly out. Unfortunately, by doing that, the butterfly falls to the ground and because of its underdeveloped wings is unable to fly for the rest of its life. The whole point of the story is that the struggle from the cocoon outwards is what makes our wings strong – that really hit home for me because I was thinking to myself that we can’t skip these struggles and these difficult periods in our life. It’s the nature of the world, you’ve got ups and downs and those ups and downs are what make you. I just loved the idea.
It’s funny that we all got stuck last year and I think that it was the one good thing that came out of it. We were able to look at ourselves in that way and just really reassess what’s really important to us and realise that those struggles are what strengthened us.
We all needed everything else to be stripped away in order to take a moment’s pause and think who am I? Obviously that’s so important in songwriting, it sounds like the timing worked out pretty fortuitously.
Music is so healing and I was listening to things that I hadn’t listened to in years – just back catalogue stuff – old Dashboard confessional records and stuff from when I was a kid that I was just like, ‘man, I miss listening to this’. I really started figuring out who I was again and the music that I’m making. Now, I’m just so grateful that I had that time to go inward and make it and that’s what ‘New Wings’ is all about. It’s all about transforming and not going back and realising that the only way is forward and you’re getting stronger with every step.
You’ve definitely been doing that in your connections with people on social media. It’s so easy to see social media as a negative thing, but I love that you’ve been using it as a force for good and positivity.
It’s interesting, I think what we ingest is like a diet you know? Whatever we see and hear and we can control that. I wanted to take the time to really connect with my fans on social media, because a lot of what we’re going through is the same. Everyone was like, ‘I’m so sad. I don’t know what’s going on. I lost my job’. I thought, ‘You know what, me too. You’re not alone’. I think that that was the most beautiful thing about this is that none of us went through it alone.
How did you find connecting with people over Zoom and doing the Zoom co-write thing? I know that a lot of people have hated it, but did you find that it was a good way to reconnect with people across the world?
Yeah, I actually really loved it in certain aspects. When I wrote ‘New Wings’, it was a first co-write with Tawgs Salter, he’s a Canadian producer and songwriter. He’s amazing and I’d never met him before. So, we met like this over Zoom and we just started talking about transformation and what was going on in the world. He brought this beautiful track that he had already started and I was like, ‘Oh, my God, I think I have a melody for that’. We started writing it and it was done in a couple of hours. It was one of those songs that was so healing, and I was word vomiting. It was really fun and for the rest of my project, I ended up writing a whole album, but I didn’t realise it until the end of lockdown.
What was cool is that a couple of my very good friends – Davis Naish, who’s a producer and Tom Jordan, who’s in Seaforth, the three of us have all been friends for a really long time. No one really knew what was going on and we were all in this holding pattern. I was playing a song on Instagram Live one night and Tom heard it. He was like, ‘mate, what are you doing with that?’ I was like, ‘I’m just producing it right now’ and he asked for me to send it to him – he wanted to add some stuff to it. I would send him stuff and he would add to it. Davis would help us, he would add to it and mix it and so that’s how I made a lot of my record, just making some music together and my friends started helping me co-produce the album. It was really special.
Has that always been important to you to have some control over the production side of your music? I know you’ve grown up with music in your blood.
Yeah, so I went to college LIPA here in Liverpool and it was so fun, I learned how to do music production and engineering. I just really wanted to understand that world, because when I was a kid, my dad and I started building a studio in our attic. HE said, ‘if you have ideas in your head, it’s fun to get them out in a production sense’. He got me this eight track mini disc recorder and I would just start recording and layering harmonies and putting down guitar parts and stuff. It is important to me, I guess, because when I hear a song, I hear it as a finished product. It’s almost not fun for me if I can’t get those ideas out. It’s a lot like therapy.
When you’re writing a song with someone and they’re producing it, especially over Zoom, sometimes you have different ideas of what you are going to come up with, sometimes you’re like, ‘wait, this is totally wrong’. It’s always been really important to me. I was the only girl in my class and so I think as a woman in music production, I think I just want to make sure that’s always a thing that I’m doing because I love it.
Historically, it’s been such a male-dominated part of the industry, so it’s refreshing to hear more female voices in production in Nashville. You’ve spent a lot of time in the UK too, how has that experience shaped your music?
Well, the Beatles were a huge inspiration of mine and that’s why I only applied to Paul McCartney’s school – if I got in, I would go and if I didn’t, I would just do music full time and I got in and honestly, the whole of England and British music and British culture, it’s so freeing to me. I grew up in the South in America, and we’re the rebels of the world. I came over to England and there’s a beautiful way of life here and a sense of community. I think it seeps into the music and the rebellion seeps into the music too. I love it, it’s really shaped my sound.
One band in particular that’s really shaped my sound is Coldplay, I’m obsessed with Chris Martin and Coldplay. I just think he’s one of the best songwriters and musicians of our time and I got to meet him last year before the pandemic. It was so awesome to talk to him about music and music production. He gave me some really good advice, saying to always write for yourself, never write for the label or what they tell you to write because that’s not authentic to who you are. It was funny that I took those words really to heart through my whole year, writing for myself. British music’s amazing and I’m so inspired by it – Liverpool especially reminds me so much of Nashville because it’s all different kinds of music in one place. London is so cool too – all these different venues and different types of music – you can go to Ronnie Scott’s and see jazz.
Music is so important and that’s why I am really grateful that I’m getting to put out this song, because it’s in a time where concerts aren’t up and running as much as other things are at the moment. Music is medicine and I think it’s one of the most important things in the world. I was like, I can’t give up, I’ve got to put this out and it’s okay if I’m independent. I’m just going to do it and get it out.
That’s one of the plus sides of being independent. You can put music out whenever you want. I also wanted to talk about your recent release, ‘Killing Me’ with Lawson. How did that song evolve – I know you’ve been friends for a while?
It’s a funny story, because John Fields who produced one of their records years ago – he’s a friend of mine, and they were in Nashville recording this album about seven years ago. John called me and was like, ‘hey, there’s this band and the guys are from Liverpool. I feel like you guys would be friends and we need background vocals. Do you want to come and sing?’ I was like, ‘of course, I’ll be there’. I drove down to Blackbird and recorded those vocals and we just stayed in touch all these years. After the pandemic in August, I thought how can I get over to England? All I had to do was quarantine for two weeks and so I hit up all my friends from college to come over and see them. So, I quarantined with a friend and then got to see a bunch of my other friends from college. Andy saw that I was in London and asked if I wanted to join a writer’s retreat? We went up and we did this retreat before the lockdown hit and it was so fun. We wrote three songs for their album and then ‘Killing Me’ was a song I had written years and years ago. Andy had liked the song and he asked to sing it with me. I was honored that he wanted to do that. So we did a new version of it and it’s on their album.
I loved it so much. I’m so excited to hear everything in your new chapter. Thank you for taking the time to chat with me today.
Thank you! I’m going to start doing a hashtag #mybutterflystory on my Instagram and I want people to share what they’ve been through and how they’ve gotten their new wings. Through this whole time, hopefully to make people unite.
