Why Bonnie with Joey Nebulous

Why Bonnie

When Blair Howerton brought bandmates Chance Williams and Josh Malett together to work on Why Bonnie’s sophomore LP, the first song she showed them set the tone for what was to come. “Fake Out” is about “trying to be authentic in a world that makes it impossible to be so,” and fittingly, it’s the loudest song on Why Bonnie’s bold new album, Wish on the Bone. On the chorus, 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.”

The revelation has clouded Howerton’s mind in the two years since Why Bonnie released their debut, 90 in November, an album praised for its nostalgic depictions of wide-open spaces that earned comparisons to Waxahatchee and Wednesday. That album 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 – but her self-conception is forever in flux. On Wish on the Bone, Why Bonnie is untethered from the particulars of landscape or genre, but a fixation on what it might look like to lead an authentic life grounds the record in place. “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.”

Curiously, that mercurial sense of personhood made Howerton trust herself more, both in personal relationships and in the studio. Though Howerton may change, her convictions are steadfast, as is her sense of moral responsibility. “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. “Hope, to me, is strength.” And to have it, one must develop a critical sensibility capable of subverting the charade of contemporary American existence. “Fake Out” puts it bluntly: “Something you thought/ Was only something that you heard.”