Alyssa Bonagura taking off on “New Wings” and “Paper Airplane”
Hands up everyone who received their college diploma from Sir Paul McCartney? Anyone? Anyone? Step forward Alyssa Bonagura. Attending the Paul McCartney Liverpool Institute of Performing Arts – and having the diploma placed in her hands by Macca himself – is just one of the notable moments in the unique career of Nashville-area native Alyssa Bonagura, an accomplished singer-songwriter, multi-instrumentalist and producer. Her current release, “New Wings” is being followed by her newest song, the evocative “Paper Airplane.” “It was three of the best years of my life,” said Alyssa, recalling her time in Liverpool. “I was looking for a school that specialized in music production, but I didn’t really find any in America that I was excited about. One day I was at a Christmas party with my parents and we met the English singer-songwriter Siobhan Kennedy who is from Liverpool. We were talking at the party and Siobhan said, ‘Have you heard of the Paul McCartney School?’ I said, ‘Are you kidding me? Paul McCartney has a school?’ She told me about it and the next day I applied. I told myself that if I was accepted that I would go. Well, I got accepted and I received a full scholarship from Sennheiser, the German audio electronics company. It was such a blessing.” Alyssa has been surrounded by music since her birth, spending much of her childhood on a tour bus with her parents (Baillie & The Boys) and singing a duet, at the age of ten, with Kenny Rogers on his album, Christmas From the Heart. “I’ve always been into music production ever since I was a kid,” she notes. “My dad had these 8-track minidisc recorders that I would start to layer harmonies on. I was writing songs at, like, eleven and had all these parts and ideas in my head and wanted to record them. We started building a studio in our attic when I was in high school and I’ve always been fascinated with music production. It’s fun for me because I am able to get ideas out and record them myself and it gives me more freedom to be creative.” Alyssa talked about her two most recent releases. “’New Wings’ was written during the pandemic. After the world kind of stopped in the very beginning of the pandemic, I was writing a ton of songs with other artists and songwriters over Zoom. I started to really dive into Nature and go on hikes. Every day I spent my time outside and tried to just be present in a weird, scary time. My whole way of healing is writing songs.” She explained the story behind “New Wings.” “I’d found this legend by Paulo Coelho called The Lesson of the Butterfly. In it, a man sees a cocoon hanging from a branch and a butterfly is struggling to emerge from it. He watches it for a long time and feels bad for the butterfly and decides to help it so it can stop struggling. He gets a pair of scissors and cuts open the cocoon, but the butterfly falls to the ground because its wings are undeveloped, and it is unable to fly. The lesson of the butterfly is that what it goes through is actually what makes its wings strong enough to fly.”
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