"People sometimes ask me if this is my stage name," Bombara tells me at Yaquis on Cherokee. But she was, in fact, born Beth Bombara from Dutch-Italian stock in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and has spent the last 15 years building her reputation as one of St. Louis' best and most respected songwriters.
As we chat at Yaquis, near the home Bombara lives in with her husband of 14 years, Kit Hamon, who plays bass in her band, Bombara is on the cusp of releasing her excellent new album It All Goes Up on August 4, which happens to coincide with her 40th birthday.
She is one of those gals whose eyes close when she laughs, and everyone who walks into Yaquis knows her. She orders an espresso martini, the trendiest drink of 2023, but that's about where Bombara's concern for modern trends appears to end. She has, she admits, always been something of a throwback. "I've always gravitated to older music," she says. "I appreciate modern music, but there's just something appealing about stuff older than me."
She says that her personality is an even split between her mother's family's reserved nature and her father's family's affectionate gregariousness, and intellectually she inherited her mother's love of language and her father's work as a psychologist, influences that show up in Bombara's graceful lyricism and the emotional depth of her songs.
The new record is, like so many works of art this year, a product of the COVID-19 lockdowns, when Bombara took to playing weekly sets on Facebook and YouTube for virtual tips, having conversation with fans and challenging herself to come up with fresh material for each session. "[The pandemic] made me reconnect with why I was playing music in the first place," she says. "It revamped how I was thinking about music as a career and helped me rediscover my joy of playing music."
It's a joy that she has experienced as long as she can remember, first rocking out in high school in her all-girl pop-punk band Green Means Go, a band that lasted five years and gave Bombara her first glimpse at playing on the road. "We started getting emails to play out of town and had to, like, borrow our bass player's parents' conversion van," she says with a laugh. That band also pushed Bombara to the position of frontwoman and lead singer, a role she was not always comfortable with.
"I didn't want to do it," she says of leading the band. "I wasn't comfortable singing. I never thought my voice was good. I never wanted to be in the spotlight." That kind of assessment will surprise fans who have long admired her warm alto, a cross between Amiee Mann and Karen Carpenter, and her poised delivery and performance personality.
Bombara says it took her about five years of gigging to fully embrace the role of lead singer, which came about the time she graduated from high school and headed to Grand Rapids' Cornerstone University on a soccer scholarship; she was the only student in both the school's music and athletics programs. Music eventually won that internal tug-of-war when Bombara attended a semester-long study program on songwriting and record production on Martha's Vineyard, where she met two other students who would help shape her future.
One was her future husband, Hamon, who was enrolled at Greenville College in Illinois, where Bombara would herself transfer to finish her degree, placing her in the proximity of St. Louis, where she and Hamon would settle after school. The other was Americana singer-songwriter Samantha Crain, who took Bombara on as her guitarist and backup singer on tours of Oklahoma and Texas, giving Bombara her first real taste of touring.
Once in St. Louis, circa 2007, Bombara knew she wanted to play music, but she didn't take the approach of most gigging musicians around town. "I never got into what I would call the working St. Louis musician hustle, like playing bar gigs four times a week," she says. "I never developed a huge cover catalog. My experience is sort of the opposite. I started with a band doing originals, and we never did a lot of covers."
Indeed, her focus has always been on songwriting, and she has been among the area's most prolific, self-releasing six full-length albums and two EPs in the last 15 years, including the 2015 self-titled album that helped define Bombara's approach to smart, catchy indie-rock Americana. "That was the first collection of songs that really felt like me," she says.
After 2017's Map & No Direction and 2019's Evergreen increased Bombara's national profile, and after well-received sets at last summer's Pedaler's Jamboree and last month's Open Highway Music Festival, it feels like the right time for a new collection to extend Bombara's reach even further, assisted by the fact that It All Goes Up will be Bombara's first album released by Black Mesa Records out of Tulsa.
The label's marketing push has already helped get the album's first singles — "Lonely Walls" and "Everything I Wanted" — some early traction. ("I was on a BBC playlist next to Bruce Springsteen!" she says.)
Written across six months, much of it on a classical guitar, the songs on It All Goes Up came from her Patreon project, where subscribers — the Bomb Squad — were promised one new song each week. It was a formidable challenge that Beth says helped her stay on track. "The key for me that I've tried to harness as a creative person is having some built-in accountability," she says.
The deadlines and the fan expectations worked to produce Bombara's best set of songs yet. With 21 new songs on hand, she chose 10 for the new album.
It All Goes Up — with its Hamon-designed album-cover art depicting Bombara surrounded by black lava in Hawaii, embellished by fantastical elements in a sky of clouds, birds and light beams — ended up as a cohesive song cycle about embracing optimism. "I don't intentionally write on a theme," she says. "But one will inevitably come up. So this record has a thread of hopefulness and positivity that I think is just a reaction to the crazy past few years everyone has lived through."
Those themes are evident in the lyrics: "Moment" is about pandemic-inspired lessons on slowing down and being fully present; "Everything I Wanted" deals with the dilemma of never being quite satisfied with one's accomplishments; "Carry the Weight" explores the importance of collaborative healing; "Get On" carries a message of leaving the past behind. The universality of such lyricism is packaged in songs that are filled with hooks, elegant performances and gorgeous alt-folk arrangements. After all, as Bombara explains, "I think I'm somewhat of a direct writer, but I want people to be able to get their own meaning. And I like a good chorus. I'm a melody person."
Fans will be able to hear it all in person on August 18 for the new album's release party. With a couple of weeks to absorb the new songs before the show, Bombara hopes that the audience will be familiar with the material and help celebrate a fresh musical experience in her first post-pandemic album and new chapter in her career.
It's all a culmination of Bombara's relentless drive to create. "I would be making music whether or not I were pursuing a career in music," she explains. "I love it. I can't help it."
Catch Beth Bombara at her album release show at 8 p.m. on Friday, August 18, at the Old Rock House (1200 South Seventh Street, 314-588-0505, oldrockhouse.com). Tickets are $20 in advance or $25 day of.
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