Why Bonnie

Why Bonnie — the New York-based project of Blair Howerton — announces their new album and Fire Talk debut, Wish on the Bone, out August 30th, and presents lead single “Fake Out.” Why Bonnie’s first full-length, 90 in November, captured who Howerton felt like she was at the time: a twenty-something living in New York, yearning for the Texas of her adolescence through rose-colored glasses. On Wish on the Bone, Why Bonnie is untethered from the particulars of landscape or genre, and instead fixates on what it might look like to lead an authentic life. “I’ve changed since that album, and I trust that I’ll probably continue to change,” Howerton says. “Maybe I won’t be the same person entirely two years from now.”

As first presented in last month’s “Dotted Line,” Howerton had no interest in adhering to genre standards throughout Wish on the Bone. Howerton and bandmates Chance Williams, and Josh Malett fleshed out these songs with help from Jonathan Schenke, who co-produced the album alongside Howerton. “We were trying on musical hats,” says Howerton. “There’s still some country on this record, but I wasn’t thinking about sticking to one thing. Personal experience of learning to be bolder and more assertive and trusting myself has carried over into my music.” 

The loudest song on Why Bonnie’s bold new sophomore LP, today’s “Fake Out” is about “trying to be authentic in a world that makes it impossible to be so,” and was the first song Howerton showed Williams and Malett when she brought them together to work on the album, setting the tone for what was to come. Howerton wails against a building wall of sound that overtakes her by the song’s end: “It’s not my face/ I imitate / It’s not my face/ I imitate.” 

“You owe it to the people who are experiencing the worst to just keep pushing,” Howerton says. That commitment to regenerating a sense of hope each new day was ingrained in her when she lost her brother. It happened just as Howerton was beginning to come into her own as a musician, finding her voice amidst the DIY scene of Austin, TX. To cope, she wrote song after song, built a catalog despite her suffering, and in doing so, developed a new relationship to spirituality. With Wish on the Bone, Howerton is wide-eyed and waiting, reminding herself, even on the worst days, that despair is not inevitable. “These songs were written out of hope for a better future. I’m not naïve, the world is fucked up, but I think you can radically accept that while still believing it’s possible to change things,” Howerton says