Bonnie Bishop

To truly understand Bonnie Bishop, you need to experience her music live. Everything else is just bullet points. She was raised between Texas and Mississippi, where she worked on the sidelines of Mississippi State football alongside her stepdad, legendary football coach Jackie Sherrill. After graduating from the University of Texas with a degree in sociology, Bonnie put a band together and got her start on the Texas music scene. She learned the value of being an underdog and fighting for a dream by booking her own shows and traveling from town to town, promoting her records at regional radio, releasing three independent albums between 2002 and 2008 (“Long Way Home, “Soft To The Touch,” and “Things I Know.”) in 2007, she signed a publishing deal with Writer’s Den Music and moved to Nashville to pursue bigger dreams. There she had songs cut by her musical hero, Bonnie Raitt, including “Not Cause I Wanted To,” a co-write with NRBQ’s Al Anderson for which Raitt won a Grammy in 2012. “The Best Songs Come From Broken Hearts,” a single off her 2012 independent album “Free,” was also featured in the hit TV show “Nashville” and voted one of the Top Ten Best Songs of the Year by the New York Times (Jon Pareles.) Then in 2015, she signed her first record deal with Thirty Tigers and went into the studio with multi-Grammy winning producer Dave Cobb to make “Ain’t Who I Was,” released the following year. However, Bonnie was feeling the call towards a new dream. She returned to her native Texas shortly thereafter, where she continued to tour and make her living as a singer-songwriter while also earning her master’s degree in creative writing from Sewanee University of the South. Over the next few years, she would work towards a lifelong goal of writing a book about growing up in the limelight and having a famous college football coach for a father figure (or infamous, depending who you were rooting for.) In 2019, she sought out drummer Steve Jordan to produce her sixth studio album, “The Walk,” which American Songwriter called “40 of the most poignant, stirring minutes you’re likely to hear this year.” During the pandemic, Bonnie moved to the Hill Country outside Austin and worked as a private chef while also teaching a course in creativity based on Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way, a book that greatly inspired her own artistic journey. As the world was coming back to life in the summer of 2021, she reconnected with one of her musical heroes, Irish singer-songwriter Foy Vance, and the two began touring together and collaborating on Bonnie’s forthcoming studio album “What If None Of This Is Real?” Two years and ten songs later, they returned to Nashville to record with Anderson East in the engineer’s chair and Foy playing the part of the producer (and every instrument on the record.) The album is set to release Fall 2024. In the meantime, Bonnie resides in Blanco, Texas with her chihuahua where she feeds too many stray cats, writes books, makes art, teaches creativity, and marvels at the fact that no matter how many times she tries to give up on music, it always calls her home.