On her new album, Lucky For You, Alicia Bognanno, AKA Bully, throws herself completely into every song, shredding her vocal cords and guitar on track after track. Bully’s big riffs have been the source of catharsis for listeners and Bognanno since the start. Over the siren of her guitar she calls out, “I wanna feel the way I used to” with the conviction that she can get there if she just yells the feeling loud enough. They are songs for her, and for us, to get lost in. So it makes sense that when we came to her to put together a playlist for Nashville Artist of the Month, she said, “Can I do ‘songs that consume me?'”
She then elaborated, “I feel like universally everybody has those songs that they can put on that move them in such a way you can almost physically feel it. I’d say that feeling affects and inspires my writing more than anything else.”
Like the songs on Lucky For You many of the songs on the playlist match the big-guitars, emotion-filled delivery of a Bully song, with artists like Breeders, Minutemen and PJ Harvey. Even the songs that aren’t necessarily guitar-forward — like LCD Soundsystem’s “I Can Change” dominated by synths — are full of that gut-punch feeling that Bognanno described. “Whenever I find a song that brings out that response in me, I listen to it over and over and over again.”