Bonnie and the Beard are Back and Thriving
by Tim Wenger
Bonnie and the Beard are kicking into full gear for the Spring and summer. And by full gear, we mean they’re going to be spending afternoons drinking patio beers and evenings rocking clubs in Denver and beyond, bringing their eclectic brand of indie-infused gypsy funk to the masses.
Their first Denver gig of 2014 was a Valentine’s Day throw down with Roniit at the Larimer Lounge.This was their second annual Valentine’s Day Masquerade and Carnival. It was actually the band’s first Denver show since last year’s Underground Music Showcase and the band took full advantage, putting on a dance party to remember. “It was really fun to expand on what we did last year,” said vocalist/guitarist Megan Fong, aka Bonnie. “Have a bigger space that we could have more things going on. It felt good.”
“It made sense for us to just take a step back and regroup, rething about what we wanted to do and what we wanted to sound like,” said Tony LoVerde, aka The Beard. “I was making a movie over the summer. We hadn’t written any new songs in so long, and I feel like you get burned out, like you’re just spinning your wheels and doing the same thing. It was good, it allowed us time and we’re writing again. It’s a new life and new material.
“We were all in and out of town, too,” said Fong.
The break lit a fire under the five piece, and they have taken to songwriting with a new vigor. “This is the first time that we’ve started writing as a group,” said horn player Wesley Watkins. “Which, for me, is an exciting thing.” Instead of one person writing a song and presenting it to the band, they are collectively sharing input and ideas and writing what they feel are the band’s best songs to date.
“The story that I’ve told a million times is that we were driving through Colorado coming up from Santa Fe trying to come up with a name for the project,” said LoVerde. “Megan suggested Talon and the Taint. I was like, ‘Well, I don’t want to explain to my grandmother, whose name was Bonnie, what a taint is. So I was like, what about Bonnie and the Beard.”
It stuck, despite Fong’s initial despair, and fittingly so. LoVerde’s grandmother was fighting cancer at the time, so the name is in a way a tribute to her. LoVerde and Fong also thought it sounded carnivalish, and their live show. “It fit for us to have these personas,” said Fong. “It fit with the songs that we were writing, that we are almost a carnival side show.”
Their live performance is something that has gained the band wide notoriety, as it is a full show involving the crowd from start to finish. “You go to a Bonnie and the Beard show, and the first thing you’re going to notice is that there is almost a physical energy that is happening,” said Watkins. “That sound almost spreads out to everybody else, all these people are dancing, and partying.”
Whether traveling or just playing locally, Bonnie and the Beard has watched their fanbase grow and are pleasantly surpriesed at their appeal. “What is surprising to me is that the spectrum of people that like us in unbelievable wide,” said LoVerde. “Little jam band hippie kids will like us, all the way to old ladies. We don’t have a niche in what our demographic is.”
Their show features banter with the crowd and is very interactive, and they are very proud of that. “We don’t do shoegaze music, and we don’t do music that I feel you need to have experience with our type of music in order to enjoy it,” says LoVerde. “You just need to be a person that likes to smile and likes to shake their ass a little bit.”
Coming up, the band will be releasing a single this Spring and is in the process of writing a new album, possibly putting out singles along the way as they come. They like it that way, dropping music as they write it, instead of once in a great while when there is enough material for an entire album. “It feels really good, since we had that little hiatus, to take all the things that we experienced during that time and bring it back together,” says Fong.
Keep posted on them at facebook.com/bonnieandthebeard. Both of the band’s previous albums are available on iTunes.
Category: localnews2
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