There are artists who grew up around music and spend their whole careers trying to prove they belong. Alyssa Bonagura is not one of them. She already knows.
The Nashville songwriter and multi-instrumentalist has just released America's Backroads, her fourth studio album, and it arrives a full decade after her last record. That gap is not a sign of drift. It is the point. The album is, by her own account, the story of the last ten years of her life: songs played live, songs held back, songs that only made sense years after she wrote them. "Sometimes they're perfect for that moment," she says. "At other times they meet you years later and you're like: Oh my god, now that's for me! That's the magic of it."
Raised on a tour bus, shaped by Liverpool
Bonagura's background reads like a country music origin story that took a sharp left turn somewhere over the Atlantic. Her parents are the founders of hit country trio Baillie and The Boys, which means she grew up on a tour bus, surrounded by musicians, absorbing all of it. By the time she was 10, she was duetting with Kenny Rogers. At 16, she was opening for Marty Stuart. The trajectory looked obvious.
Then in 2006 she won an overseas scholarship to study sound technology at the Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts. Playing the Zanzibar Club one night, she caught the attention of Pete Wylie, who asked her to join his band on the spot. "To be honest, I didn't know who he was," she admits. She joined The Mighty Wah! anyway, spent two or three years playing with them, and credits that entire period with turning her into a real songwriter. The experience fed directly into her 2010 debut, The English Diaries.
That willingness to follow something without fully knowing what it is, or where it leads, feels like the throughline of her career. She grew up listening to Bonnie Raitt, Sheryl Crow and Alanis Morissette. Her music sits somewhere in the space those artists carved out: rock-driven but rooted, sweeping choruses built on real experiences rather than borrowed ones. Since The English Diaries, her songs have been covered by Steven Tyler and The Shires, among others.
The priority is the music, full stop
America's Backroads is built around a title track that Bonagura describes as being about her, her mum and her dad playing in New Mexico, and what it meant to grow up on the road. "I also wrote it because I don't want any of those memories to go away," she says. "They put miles on your soul."
There is a harder edge to the album's emotional core, though. Her parents were dropped by their label while holding a number two record. That experience, she explains, taught her something she has carried ever since: "The ebb and flow of the business will always be there, but music still has to be the one priority in life. You have to love it enough to just keep going."
That is not the language of someone chasing a comeback or calculating a moment. It is the language of someone who was always going to make music, whatever the industry decided to do about it.
If you're after rock music made by someone who has genuinely lived the stories they're telling, [America's Backroads] points you in the right direction. For more on where rootsy rock and country collide, [Dirty Honey's approach to the same territory is worth your time](/uprise/music/rising-stars-dirty-honey-announce-third-album-catch-my-butterfly).