Why Bonnie - 90 In November Review
Why Bonnie have been releasing music for a few years now, so it feels somewhat supersizing that their new album 90 in November is their first LP, and, honestly, it’s a low-key masterpiece! The band cite fellow Texans and country legends Townes Van Zandt and Blaze Foley as influences, and despite the band’s indie moniker, the strains of these musicians are audible, especially in lead singer and songwriter Blair Howerton’s nostalgia-tinged lyricism. Their love of bands like the Lemonheads, the Replacements, and Sparklehorse explains more about the music they wrap Howerton’s songs in.
Howerton left Texas for Brooklyn in 2019, where most of the songs for the album were written. The lockdowns of the following year, being stuck in her apartment, and her distance from the wide-open spaces of home exacerbated her exile and helped her zero in on what she was feeling - “I wanted to capture the bittersweet feeling of saying goodbye to the landscape that shaped you while still dealing with the anxieties of what lies ahead,” the singer said in a statement for the album. “Nostalgia always hits with a flash of disjointed memories - like speeding down the highway or sweating in the Texas heat.”
In 2020 the band—Howerton, keyboardist Kendall Powell, guitarist Sam Houdek, bassist Chance Williams, and drummer Josh Malett—headed down to Silsbee, a small Texas town with a population of 6,634, to spend two weeks recording with Tommy Read (Lomelda, alexalone) at Lazybones Audio and thank god, as this album sounds like it was birthed under the wide-open spaces of the Texas stars, a hazy sweaty love letter to the misunderstood state.
“Sailor Mouth”, the first song on the album, greets us with a wall of Cure-like guitar distortion laced with a guitar riff dripping in fuzz. Howerton’s voice appears like a warm desert wind, parting the distorted ocean like an indie Moses. She sweetly sings, “I’ve been learning new ways to curse, sure got a sailor mouth for someone who’s afraid of the ocean,” over chiming guitar chords and gentle rolling piano, a lyrical dissonance echoed in the refrain, “It’s a salty-sweet taste when I say your name/ And it always tastes the same.” All of this heightens the feeling of loss and nostalgia that runs through this album like a back road winding its way to a home slowly fading from memory.
Dusky distant memories provide the fuel for the chill road trip-shuffle of “Galveston”. We’re now in the car with Howerton on her road trip back in time, seeing the “Candy land beaches” with “water too salty to swim” and passing “all the dance halls and dive-ins”. She tells us that the place “looks just the same as it did back then/But we lost the pier to Hurricane season.” But like all memories, remembering is a fragile game, she tells us as she sings, “When I try to remember it I can’t /It’s slipping through my hand / it’s slipping like quicksand.” There’s nothing like a broken-down beach town to evoke feelings of that loss of something intangible, and “Galveston” captures that sadness. When Howerton sings, “If comfort is a killer then maybe I’ll die here / With cigarettes and old beer/ And the lazy boy and lawn chairs”, I’d like to imagine Rust from True Detective is listening to this song somewhere when no one is looking.
The car comes to a halt as the road-trippy vibe of “Galveston” gives way to the dark moodiness of “Nowhere, LA” - we’re now in “Louisiana / In a broken down car / Stranded in the bayou / lost in the dark / singing ‘Pictures of you’ ” she sings over the just-the-right-side of twangy guitars, the broken down car becoming the embodiment of a dying relationship.
On “Hot Car”, we drive further into Howerton’s psyche, a plaintiff dirgey song that really captures that mind-altering heat of Texas summers. The song flips through images like flipping channels on a motel TV full of static, snippets of pictures coming in and out of consciousness, “In the backseat/Interstate fast lane/speed on the concrete/in my submarine,” she sings over a ghostly guitar rift that is The Upside Down to the guitars on Pavement’s Range Life if they were Hawkins, Indiana.
We now arrive at the heart of the album with the very literally titled “Silsbee” (the town where they recorded the album), the ghostly Pavement guitar strains of the previous song becoming a living tribute, rising like the desert sun over Howerton musing about merging with her shadow self. And just like that, we wake up in the sleepy, dreamy title track “90 in November.” Howerton’s voice channels her inner Tuesday Music Club Sheryl Crow (Yes, this is a good thing), singing, “Still it seems like it doesn’t mean a thing”, and peppering the song with sweltering memories of Novembers in her youth. Images of “technicoloured sun” and “cardboard cut-out cowboys waving goodbye” surf over languid guitars that crescendo to a grungy climax with Howerton playing gas tank chicken, singing “pressing my luck / With a $2 fill up”, but it doesn’t matter she might not get far, because she’s fast.
On the quietly great “Healthy”, possibly a nod to the mind fuckery of lockdowns, we find the band living more in the zip-code of recent indie music, The Forth Wander’s (damn, I miss them) coming to mind with the winding arpeggio guitar chords of the intro and Howerton’s sombre-happy chorus declaration, “I drink water to stay healthy/I’ll only leave the house if you dare me/ But it’s sweet to be sedentary/Feels like my own blood sugar is against me”.
After all this searching for the past, the penultimate song on the album, “Lot’s Wife”, would appear to be a reminder that while a trip down memory lane might be cathartic, don’t move into the house you find there. Howerton encapsulates this beautifully when she sings, “I’ll leave one hand in the sun / Just to play with the light,” over the closing guitar riff of the song. Much like how the distorted guitars greeted us at the start of the album, the sweet acoustic guitar-tinged “Superhero” gently closes the door to the album. A lot of love has been put into this album, Howerton’s lyrics are some of my favourite of recent memory, and the band’s influences lovingly shine through the record but don’t suffocate it. Listening to it I found myself being nudged to many musical memories but never fully able to grasp all of them. What I did find was a truly beautiful record.