Alyssa Bonagura and Jesse & Noah co-bill in The Loft

One listen and it becomes crystal clear that Alyssa Bonagura was born to make music. With a voice that touches somewhere deep inside, her melodies and lyrics are as haunting as they are beautiful. From the youthful, bouncing ukulele sing along you may have heard on the nationwide 2012 Lowe’s commercial, “I Make My Own Sunshine” to her rockin’, power-pop influenced “Warrior,” and everything in between, Alyssa has polished her own unique musical style. In a world where most artists tend to sound the same, Alyssa sounds fresh; new yet familiar; provocative yet reassuring. Born into a musical family, her mom and dad were RCA country music stars Baillie and the Boys, her cradle was the gentle rocking of a tour bus. Her playground encompassed sound checks and backstage catering. Her “extended” family consisted of managers, promoters, drummers, pedal steel players, keyboards, guitars and the like.

At the age of 3 Alyssa performed on the Ralph Emory television show, Nashville Now. Ralph wanted to be able to say, “She performed on my show first” where her version of the Leslie Gore classic; “It’s My Party” brought the house down in front of millions of national viewers. At age 10 one of those major acts, Kenny Rogers decided Alyssa was the perfect “child singer” to record a duet with him on his Christmas CD, Christmas From The Heart. Then, when she was 13, Alyssa started her own 50 city tour opening for up Marty Stuart. Playing guitar and singing songs she wrote about “Fitting In” and “Boys.” It became obvious she was the real deal not only as a musician and a singer, but as a songwriter as well.

After graduating high school, Alyssa received a full scholarship from Sennheiser to Paul McCartney’s Liverpool Institute for the Performing Arts in the U.K., where she would spend the next three years earning a degree in Sound Technology while continuing to perform in local venues throughout Europe. It was there that Alyssa experienced what most artists never experience – a private performance requested by the Queen to help support one of Liverpool’s local charities.

Soon returning to her home in Nashville, TN, Alyssa got a publishing deal with Rondor Music in Los Angeles. She has been a “go to” studio session singer/player for artists like Vince Gill, Matt Maher, Jo Dee Messina, and many other major & independent artists, all the while recording and releasing her own music. Playing countless venues in Nashville, not to mention festivals including Bonnaroo and the Sundance Film Festival, Alyssa has continued to hone her stage show in America and has created an underground buzz in the singer/songwriter community. The English Diaries was her first CD release, an all acoustic intimate collection of songs she produced and recorded herself in her apartment in Liverpool about her UK experiences. This was followed by another somewhat acoustic CD, Before The Breaking. The songs on these two CDs are classic singer-songwriter stylings showing what Alyssa can do all by herself armed with a guitar or a mandolin. The next CD Love Hard, which was funded by a $10,000 global Kickstarter campaign, takes us straight into the pop world where Alyssa spent her time programming beats, arranging strings, and rocking out on electric guitar.

After spending time in LA and New York writing with the top songwriters across America, Alyssa has come back to Nashville and has been writing with the likes of Jeffrey Steele, Hunter Hayes, and JD Souther. Her upcoming release, Roots Run Deep, is full of songs which reflect growing up in a country music world, showing us that her musical home is really where it all began…

Jesse and Noah Bellamy are a brother duo, and just as other classic brother groups (The Louvin Brothers, The Everlys, The Kinks, et al.) who have forged their own unique sound and identities, Jesse and Noah are also pushing musical boundaries to create their own path.

With their third record, Driven Back, the duo delivers an eclectic mix of roots-rock, power-pop, country and Americana. Coming from a family of musicians, they are the fourth generation to play music. Their father and uncle are the well-known Bellamy Brothers and their grandfather, Homer, played professionally at local dances, while his father before him was a fiddler.

Raised by their grandparents while their parents toured, the duo was first influenced by their grandparents’ love of traditional country music and the popular music of the WWII era. “When we started playing guitar,” said Jesse, “we fell in love with blues, jazz and sixties rock. Hanging out at Dad’s recording sessions led us to develop an appreciation of the recording process as an art form.”

After years of writing and recording with different record labels and becoming disillusioned with Music Row of Nashville, Jesse and Noah have thrown away the rule book to forge their own sound. Driven Back is self-produced and independently released. Recorded at their project studio in Franklin, TN (just outside of Nashville), they were very conscious of keeping the project authentic and not over-produced.

Both brothers wrote the songs on the record (the exception being “You Could Have Had It All” which was written by Jesse Bellamy with Steve Clark) — with most of the songs being written as they recorded them, unlike previous projects. Accomplished multi-instrumentalists, they’re responsible for the majority of the tracks on Driven Back, with lead vocals by Jesse with Noah harmonizing. As Jesse told the music website Riveting Riffs, “We just really wanted to make a good record … these songs don’t have to work outside the context of this record. That is the cool thing about a lot of them. It was just about feelings and putting words up against them and seeing what stuck.”

Fans are of great importance to the brothers and their past records have built a huge following in Texas, with their debut project Nowhere Revisited being based out of Fort Worth. Their first single, “Daddy’s got a Shotgun” made the Texas Music Chart’s top 50 songs of 2006. Their second release, Landfall generated fans from Texas to Tennessee and in between and even charted on the HotDisc Top 40 in Europe.

Traditionally, brother duos have been some of the most creative and innovative in the history of rock and country Music — Jesse and Noah are willing and able to live up to that tradition. With Driven Back, the brothers are proving that they are self-sufficient artists who can cross genres and gain fans simply through hard work, good music and great songs