Indie rock band Bonny Doon wants to spread the good-vibe gospel.
“We just want to make simple music that makes you feel good and makes you excited to listen to rock and roll again,” said Bill Lennox, co-singer/songwriter and guitarist of the three–piece Detroit outfit.
“Music where you hear it, and you feel something immediately.”
On Friday, June 30, and Saturday, July 1, Bonny Doon will bring its mission to Tucson’s Club Congress and Phoenix’s Valley Bar, respectively. The tour, which is for their 2023 record “Let There Be Music,” will mark a decade since the band’s inception. In a phone interview, Lennox affectionately recalled the early days.
On a 2012 weekend trip to Chicago, Bobby Colombo filled in on bass for Lennox’s band. The latter moved to New York a week later, but the two kept in touch.
“He and I were sending each other demos and stuff we were working on,” the musician said. “And then time passed, and eventually I moved back to Detroit, kind of with the idea that he and I could start something.
“We ended up getting a rehearsal space studio where we were working on our solo stuff together, and over the course of a summer we decided to start the band.”
Once the two quit their parallel play, it wasn’t long before Bonny Doon’s first project, 2014’s self-titled, four track EP, hit the scene.
The record, a noisy, DIY marriage of Lennox and Colombo’s diverse influences, pulled from everything from lo-fi folk legends (Silver Jews, Jeff Tweedy, Woods) to the classics (Neil Young, The Rolling Stones) to the musical zeitgeist of 2010s Detroit.
“It kind of came as a reaction to our previous bands and the DIY punk scene that we came out of. We kind of wanted to bring it down a little bit and play toward what our tastes were at the time, but also mixed with our punk roots,” Lennox said.
“It just sort of became its own thing, which was beautiful. I think it was refreshing for some people in the scene at that time to have something a little different. At that time, it was the punk and garage rock days, but I think it was a welcomed sound.”
Through the three albums that Bonny Doon has put out since that 2014 EP, the band has dealt with plenty. Namely, drummer Jake Kmiecik’s struggles with Crohn’s disease, and singer/guitarist Bobby Colombo’s dealing with Lyme disease and a serious concussion.
None of it affects the three’s unwavering friendship, though. On the contrary.
“That’s been something that has also brought us closer together, just helping each other and being patient with each other’s needs,” Lennox said. “Our personal lives are important, and it’s just always working out that we keep wanting to do the band.
“I was 23 or something when we started. Now I’m 33 and married, so we’ve grown a lot. Our relationships have grown stronger. I think we’re just lucky that we want to be friends.”
The band’s glass-half-full mentality toward adversity rings out infectiously through their songs, but the singer describes the good vibes as a cycle. Bonny Doon’s music is both product and producer of positivity, a machine that turns their unmistakable joie de vivre into even more delight.
“In a way it is therapeutic,” Lennox said.
“But I think it’s also the opposite, where it’s the music that helps us live that way. Live with more joy and more excitement, because we have this thing that can take us there.”
The pleasingly stripped back and effortlessly tuneful “Let There Be Music” is a testament to the band’s zeal for songwriting. Experimenting for the first time with acoustic piano-driven melodies, the band approached the record as an “exercise in restraint.”
“We came into it with very simple ideas, rather than whole songs ready to go, like ‘Get in there, track them, overdub them, and that’s it.’ This was more like, ‘We have a good amount of ideas, let’s put them down as minimally as possible.’”
“We barely used any guitar pedals or effects. I’m plugged into the board and getting whatever amp sounds we like,” said Lennox.
The target while recording was to “do justice” to the songs they’d compiled over the past five years of living apart, the band becoming a long-distance project after Colombo’s moves to California and New York.
That kind of separation is demanding for bands, many of which have tried and failed. But for Bonny Doon, distance only makes the heart grow fonder.
“It’s been really good, I think. It’s given us space, and then when we do come together, we’re super excited to hang,” Lennox said.
“It’s taken a lot of the pressure off of the grind of being a band, where you just get together twice a week to practice, and it kind of feels like a chore. It gives our creative process some room to breathe, and when we come together to write, there’s just a wealth of ideas coming from different perspectives and experiences. Rather than us always being together in the same world, drawing from the same inspiration, now it’s a more holistic pool to draw from.”
The band brought that peace of mind with its distance to the record, which concerns itself with the inevitability of change. The candid “You Can’t Stay the Same” serves as both an appreciation of life’s transience and a comforting reminder of a spare key under the doormat.
Natural images abound throughout the album, painting impermanence as an organic affair (check out “San Francisco” and “Crooked Creek”); the trees dancing, sunshine and rain replacing one another, everything in motion.
But while there’s moments of unapologetic alacrity (“Let There be Music”), there’s also moments like “Fine Afternoon” and “On My Mind,” ones of quiet uncertainty, of having to really reach for that sort of tranquility. Bonny Doon tells the whole story: The bitter melancholy of saying goodbye, the euphoric bliss of hello.
“This was the answer to the question of, ‘How does it work,’ the long distance thing,” Lennox said. “This was that experiment in action. And I think it worked out for us.”
Bonny Doon w/Anna St. Louis
WHEN: 9 pm. Friday, June 30
WHERE: Club Congress, 311 E. Congress Street, Tucson
COST: Tickets start at $15; 21 and older
INFO: bonnydoontheband.com
