Bonnie brings at least three of her signature Fender Strat prototypes on tour to accomodate the open slide tunings she uses on different songs.
Photo by Sioux Nessi
You picked up your first guitar—a Stella
acoustic—at age 8. What made you stick
with it?
I grew up in a very musical household, with
my mom playing piano all the time for my
dad’s rehearsals. So there was a role model
for me, with my dad singing these great
Broadway scores. Him being a Broadway
star was a great gift for us to be able to see
what that world was like. And the message
of playing music and getting paid for it—
doing something that you not only love,
but that doesn’t even seem like work—was
not lost on me. I must’ve tucked it away
and then remembered it when the opportunity came years and years later to play
music for a gig.
… ELECTRIC GUITAR, FOR ME, HAS
THE RAUNCH AND THE BEAUTY THAT MORE
OPENLY REFLECTS THE RANGE OF EMOTIONS I
WANT TO GET WHEN I’M SINGING AND PLAYING.
You’ve said before that electric guitar
burns inside of you. What still turns you
on about the instrument?
It really sounds like a human voice. The
electric guitar will sustain a note, especially
a single note, much longer than an acoustic
will. And then when you play slide—which
is so much like a human voice—you can
work the amplifier and the overdrive. Now
I use a compressor when I play slide, and
with that you can sustain a note as long
as your emotions will hold. It’s like surf-
ing—you can ride that wave of emotional
