Years after releasing her sixth album, Modern Burdens, in 2017, Tracy Bonham found herself in a personal limbo. Between her divorce in 2021, followed by health issues after being diagnosed with stage 1 lobular breast cancer, which was caught early, and financial issues, everything had collided at once. Pre-pandemic, Bonham had already started writing and later decided to revisit a few songs that gelled into her seventh album, Sky Too Wide.
“I start thinking about it, and I almost cry because it’s been such a long time coming,” said Bonham of making Sky Too Wide, and the journey she’s been on throughout the past eight years. “There were so many obstacles: life, health, divorce, and then finances, and not being able to fund the album.”
In early 2025, a Kickstarter campaign helped Bonham get the funding needed to complete Sky Too Wide. The album also allowed Bonham to reflect on what brought her to music in the first place, jazz and classical works, and the music of French composers like Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel. All are marked by heavier piano-led pieces on Sky Too Wide, including Bonham’s reworking of “Naked” and “Whether You Fall” from her 2005 album Blink the Brightest. The latter is a song Bonham wrote post-9/11, and is one that still connects with fans.
“I’d have fans come up to me after concerts and say that song saved their life,” shares Bonham. “It’s touching to hear those kinds of accounts, and thematically, lyric-wise, it was something that kept me going as well. I wrote it just after 9-11, and everything was happening in that time of my life. But the longer you live, the more chances you have to get back up after being knocked down.”
When “Whether You Fall” was written, Bonham was also at a personal crossroads, and realized she had to leave her first marriage, which was a more complicated process since they shared a son. “It was years and years and years of trying to make it work,” she shares. “So that theme is what ties these songs together. There were mountains to climb, and the valleys were deep and low, and often I found myself depressed.”
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Bonham cites one of her newer tracks, one of five on Sky Too Wide, “The Uncertain Sun,” as another elevation. Her Beatles-melodic tune is another memo-to-self, for Bonham, to keep going—I’m having a hard time / Knowing what’s casting all these shadows … But I’ll never look away / No one even looks at the real thing anymore.
“Those are words from my inner higher self to get through one more day: ‘You can do it,’” says Bonham. “You have another chance to make things right. It’s as if you’re looking in the mirror, talking to yourself. It’s also about aging and how you can change your perspective. If you’re looking at something and it just seems very awful, you can also question that and ask yourself, ‘Is it really that awful? What makes it awful? And then try to change your perspective, and that was very helpful for me to get through the really hard times.”
To help bring new life to some of the older songs, including the opening “Give us Something to Feel” and her anti-patriarchal anthem “Jumping Bean” from Down Here in 2000, Bonham is backed by jazz bassist and Sky Too Wide co-producer Rene Hart and drummer Alvester Garnett.
“I call these redos, like everybody gets a chance to do a redo,” jokes Bonham. “And these songs really stuck with me. I’d been playing them in my set, and they’d been morphing over time, and as they started playing more piano, they just grew with me. And it was just obvious to me that I wanted to rerecord these and put them in this body of work.”
For Bonham, “Jumping Bean” was one older “redo” that still resonates now, but more from a place of empowerment than vulnerability. Released 25 years earlier, Bonham wrote “Jumping Bean” about the mostly patriarchal music industry, a marginalization, she says, that still surfaces in alternative forms today. Accompanying the new arrangement of “Jumping Bean” is a music video featuring members of the Eugene Ballet Company in Oregon, choreographed by Suzanne Haag.
“The lyrics were very relevant to my life—probably always,” says Bonham. “‘You’re not the boss of me’ is basically what I’m trying to say. I’m really happy with the new version, because it feels more mature. There’s more space around things.”
She continues, “Sometimes when you listen back to your old stuff, you think ‘Oh my God, why was I rushing? Or where was it going? Why was I needing to fill the space?’ It’s great when you get older, because space is where you want to be.”
On Sky Too Wide, Bonham also gives a glimpse of what’s to come with new material. Along with “The Uncertain Sun” is a spunkier march of “Dear God, Should I Hit Send,” and more piano filling her penultimate “Don’t Dick Around With My Heart” and closing “Safe With Me,” which Bonham released in 2024.
The orchestrated “Damn the Sky (For Being Too Wide),” is filled in with strings and a empassioned message of perseverance—It’s not supposed to be gentle / The trick is just dusting yourself off. It’s one of the older, new songs on the album, which Bonham originally wrote and started performing pre-pandemic.
“Just after Covid, it was pretty clear to me that it was a cathartic process for myself, about connection and community, and I had been so lonely for a very long time,” shares Bonham. “I think that’s when I knew I needed to connect with other people with this music.”
For Bonham, working alongside Hart delivered something else unexpected. Both share a love of jazz and classical music, and the more they began playing live together, touring, and recording, their relationship flourished. “Working with someone so intimately, it’s just become this beautiful thing,” shares Bonham.
With Sky Too Wide out, Bonham says she hopes to release more new music sooner rather than later, without the near-decade-long wait period, and celebrate the forthcoming 30th anniversary of her 1996 debut, Burdens of Being Upright.
“It’s [‘Sky Too Wide’] finally birthed, but I do plan on looking forward to a new release sooner than 10 years,” she says. “I want to honor and celebrate [‘Burdens’] with my fans, but I also want to put new material out. I’m a little bit behind the ball with new material.”
Now, Bonham thinks she’ll follow a classical-jazz lead on the next album, which may get political. “I’m so angry at the government,” says Bonham. “Maybe I’ll do an album on some of those composers who were dissenting, the ones that had to persevere. I thought that’d be a cool theme, but then still keep the rock … because I do really enjoy rocking out as well.”
Whether sorting out political irritants or personal rock bottoms, nearly 30 years since the release of Burdens of Being Upright, songwriting is still Bonham’s best remedy in life.
“Writing is therapy,” she says. “It’s me figuring out what’s going on inside. I can get way caught up in the external, with other people’s energies and feelings, and I tend to absorb them, and then I get overwhelmed. So when I go within and I start writing music, lyrics, it’s my way of sorting through things.”
Writing Burdens was a different period in life when Bonham says she had a “beautiful beginner’s mind” to everything. “I try to get back there, but it’s not always easy,” she says. “But I do try to keep that innocence and that playfulness, lyrically. Back then, my songs were more veiled, and I would make the listener work for it a little more, but I still listen to those songs occasionally and feel like it was a great moment in time where I was trying things—and I was pretty pissed off. So I’m tapping into that pissed off energy more these days, which is kind of fun.”
Drawing from some “youthful anger” and other sources for Bonham, the songs still come from within.
“I’ve drawn from the inner,” shares Bonham. “I was insecure for quite a long time because I thought I didn’t write about other people enough, or I didn’t write in the third person, or I wasn’t a storyteller.”
She laughs, “But it was all about ‘My feelings.’And that’s just the kind of writer I am.”
Photos: Shervin Lainez
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