Chords for Whatever Happened to TRACY BONHAM (Mother Mother)?

This is a request I had from one of my subscribers and funny enough I was thinking of doing a
story on her.
Who am I talking about?
Tracy Bonham would be best known for the 1996 hit Mother Mother, but whatever happened to her?
Well I think the answer might surprise you and that's what we're going to explore in today's video.
[C] _ _ [Bb] _ _
_ [Cm] _ _ _ [F] Born in Eugene, Oregon, Tracy Bonham would have a mother who was a music teacher and
her father would be an editor at the Eugene Guard Register.
Sadly her father died when she was just 2 years old and her mother remarried 5 years
later to a mortgage broker who had his own children.
I should also address the question that a lot of people are probably wondering.
She has no relation to John Bonham of Led Zeppelin and in various press interviews she's
had to address the question.
However she would take the violin chair playing with both Robert Plant and Jimmy Page in the mid 90's.
At the age of 9 Bonham started playing violin and was taught by her mother four chords on
guitar and it was at the age of 16 she attended the well renowned Interlochen Arts Camp in Michigan.
Recalling to the LA Times
There was one time that I was kicked out of music school for smoking a cigarette and I
was so angry that I practiced four hours a day.
When I'm challenged or hurt, I try to turn it around into something powerful or positive.
Spite is a good motivator.
[C]
Music would soon become her main focus in life with her leaving home to attend USC,
majoring in violin on a full scholarship.
Her initial career plan was to join the Boston Symphony Orchestra, but life had something
else in store for her.
It was during her time at USC she became recognized more for her singing voice than her violin playing.
In addition to [E] that she soon took a liking to guitars and at the age of [Bb] 20 in 1987 she
would transfer to Boston's Berklee [Fm] College of Music to focus on singing.
But unimpressed with the program at the college she dropped out and spent the next several
years playing the clubs around Boston using her roommate's guitar.
She would only play one bar chord not remembering the other three chords her mother [Bb] taught her.
Recalling to Spin, I was so happy with this bar chord because you can play it up and down
the neck and write a whole [Cm] song on it.
She would support herself by working multiple jobs including working at the Atlantic Fish
Company, working at Xerox Place and most interestingly cutting jingles for car makers Toyota and Pontiac.
[Eb] It was by the early 90's her musical taste changed from classical to rock telling [Bb] Billboard
gradually my taste changed to pixies and buzzcocks.
I took up rock and roll around 92.
I got in touch with my feelings in a way [Ab] I never could have with classical music [C] where
you bury things for the sake of discipline.
But she also saw a disconnect between what was being taught in school and the local music
scene's prevailing [F] attitude.
It wasn't cool to be a trained [Ab] musician and it was an attitude that carried over to her [Eb] first record.
She would tell the New [F] York Times, My first record was a deconstruction.
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.
She would put together an 8 song demo that soon caught the attention of Island Records.
To build up some credibility and backstory around their new artist Bonham would put out
an EP in 1995 titled The Liverpool Sessions on a label called Cherrydisk.
While it turned out Bonham wasn't signed to an indie label, the plan seemed to work
as she grew pretty quickly getting local accolades including Best New Artist, Best Female Vocalist
and Best Indie Single categories of the Boston Music Awards.
She would tell Songfacts Back in the 90s, especially early [G] 90s, it was all about being
cool and not being a sellout, according to whoever decided.
It would have been detrimental to look like you cared and you wanted to be plastered all
over the world with your major label money machine behind you.
So the cool thing to do was to have a cool independent history, which I did not have.
I had the major label contract from Island Records and a lot of [F] money behind me.
She would release her first LP in 1996 as The Burdens of Being Upright, which came out in March.
The LP would be a testament to 6 years of working as a struggling musician and failed
relationships the later of which would be perfectly captured on the album's breakout
hit Mother Mother.
Bonham would tell Billboard how she came up with the song.
Actually, I wrote Mother Mother when I was 24, but it felt more and more appropriate
as time went on.
I left the song off the 6 song EP I did for Cherrydisk, although it was on the 8 song
demo that got me signed to Island.
I avoided playing the song for my mother until I re-recorded it for Island.
I didn't want to hurt her, but when she saw tapes labeled Mother Mother in my bedroom
during a trip home, she got scared, so I let her hear it.
She was relieved it was about me and not her.
The song would be frequently misinterpreted as a song about a woman's displeasure with her mother.
It's instead about Bonham's life being a people pleasing person, calling home and hiding
the darker aspects of her life.
She would add to the LA Times that the song was written in the aftermath of a relationship
that left her feeling and I quote helpless, pitiful and pathetic.
Adding I'd gone through this horrible time in my life, really a dark period.
I stayed in bed all day because things were so bad, let alone my mom, especially my mom.
Elsewhere on the album she sings about failed relationships and Navy Bean while Every Breath
deals with the isolation [Gm] she felt [F] when her boyfriend moved from Boston to Syracuse.
Her debut record The Burdens of Being Upright would [Bbm] earn her two Grammy nominations, spend
25 weeks [Gb] on the Billboard 200 [Cm] charts and go gold selling more than half a million copies stateside.
She soon drew comparisons to other popular female artists at the time including Liz Phair
and Alanis [F] Morissette.
The success of her debut LP took her by surprise telling the New York Times
It happened so fast.
I had just started to write music and I had just put a band together.
My goal was to just play around Boston and do well there.
Bonham would feel the pressure to repeat the success of her debut record.
The instability at her record label would result in her taking two years to write her
follow up album.
Bonham would tell Billboard how from the start there was friction in the studio saying
There already [Bb] was some friction before Island [Ab] Chairman David Sigerson [Eb] left.
The record company wanted to know what the hell we were doing in the studio.
We were trying not to be influenced by the things around us, but of course with all that
comes paranoia about whether we're making hits or not.
It was a real conflict time.
In January of 1999 Universal would merge with Island Records parent label Polygram further stalling things.
Bonham would look back at that time period telling Billboard
I was [F] constantly meeting new CEOs who would sit me down and tell me they'd have to push
back my record or what kind of record I needed to make.
In hindsight, I wish I had [G] just gone off and done my own thing.
It was during this time Bonham got married to fellow musician Steve Slingeneyer of the
group Soul Wax.
Her second LP titled Down Here would be released in 2000, but it was dead on arrival.
She would tell the New York Times how the music scene had changed.
Limp Bizkit and Korn and all these heavy male rock acts were in and I think radio programmers
made a massive about face like ok we've done enough of that chick stuff.
So that to me was the door shutting.
The album failed to chart or produce any notable singles and within a year of its release Bonham
found herself dropped by her label, her marriage would be over and she soon packed up and headed
out to the west coast.
In a strange twist of fate she [N] landed a job with the Blue Man Group playing on one of
their albums and touring with the act.
[F] Phil Stanton, one of the act's co-founders would tell the New York Times
We like intensity and our music has always had that edge.
In 2003 she would release an EP and the following year she would appear on the Aerosmith album
Honkin' on Bobo.
In 2005 she returned with her third record Blink the Brightest and it was following the
release of the album her personal life and professional life also saw some changes.
She would marry Jason Fine, the executive editor of Rolling Stone magazine and Bonham
soon found herself moving back to New York and getting her yoga teacher [Eb] certification.
Despite pursuing other career interests [Cm] she had considered leaving the music business
altogether, but she returned in 2007 [Eb] with an EP she self-released consisting of covers
[F]
and a mix of her own material.
She would reveal to the New York Times how by 2010 she was pretty subtle in her life recalling
Then I look at my life and my husband and I are going back and forth between this beautiful
countryside and Brooklyn where I'm absolutely in love with our neighborhood.
I just feel like right now is a really, really good time.
It was also during the 2010's Bonham and her husband adopted a child from Ethiopia.
Then in 2015 she would release the album Wax and Gold whose title would take inspiration
from her Ethiopian child.
It would receive positive reception from critics and in 2017 she released Modern Burdens, a
re-recording of her debut record which was funded through a kickstarter campaign.
In 2023 a Brooklyn paper would write a profile on her and how she was now a music teacher
at the Brooklyn Preschool of Science telling the paper
I feel like this is my calling.
Bonham still plays live shows every now and then with her last one taking place in late 2021.
That does it for today's video guys.
Thanks for watching and we'll see you again on [Bb] rock n' roll true stories.
_ [Cm] _ _ [N] _