The Burdens of Being Upright by Tracy Bonham

The Burdens of Being Upright, Tracy Bonham's debut album, came out on Island on March 19, 1996, a year after the Eugene, Oregon musician signed with the label. She was a classically trained violinist and pianist who had taught herself guitar, and she cut the record in the summer of 1995 at Fort Apache Studios in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with Paul Q. Kolderie producing. Looking back in 2015, she called it her experiment with the guitar: rebellious, raw, a dare to herself to get behind a microphone and scream.

You can hear that dare in "Mother Mother", a sweet-then-savage blast that topped the Billboard Alternative Airplay chart in June 1996; no female solo artist did it again until Lorde in 2013. The album climbed to number 54 on the Billboard 200, went gold that November and earned 2 Grammy nominations. George DuBose shot the cover as a nod to August Sander's "The Bricklayer", and in 2017 she re-recorded the whole thing as Modern Burdens.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.