Alyssa Bonagura

Franklin to Merseyside

Alyssa Bonagura was born on 1 April 1988 in Franklin, Tennessee, to Michael Bonagura and Kathie Baillie of the country group Baillie & the Boys. She was singing at two and playing several instruments not long after, and at ten Kenny Rogers asked her to take a duet on his Christmas album Christmas From The Heart. A childhood spent partly on her parents' tour bus is the usual shorthand for all of that, and it is accurate enough, but it undersells the odder turn her training took.

She left Tennessee for Merseyside on a Sennheiser Scholarship and spent 2006 to 2009 at the Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts, graduating in 2009 with a degree in sound technology — an engineer's qualification rather than a singer's. She gigged while she studied, playing with Pete Wylie and The Mighty Wah!, appearing at the 2007 Queen's Variety Show and performing at the 2008 inauguration of Liverpool's year as European Capital of Culture on a bill that included Ringo Starr. Those three years explain a good deal of what followed: the desk skills she now uses on other artists' records, and a working life split between Nashville and London that has never really resolved itself in favour of either city.

Other people's hits first

She signed as a staff writer with Rondor Music International, part of Universal, in 2010, and cuts followed for Sarah Jarosz, Tyler Ward and Kaya Jones. Her first album, Love Hard, arrived in October 2012. The song that travelled furthest was "I Make My Own Sunshine", which reached a mass audience through a Lowe's television campaign and was then covered by Steven Tyler on We're All Somebody from Somewhere, an album that went to number one on Billboard's country chart. Tyler has since described her as an outstanding artist, a quote her press materials have leaned on for the better part of a decade.

In 2016 she formed The Sisterhood with Ruby Stewart, after Rod Stewart suggested the pair sing together. Alongside that she built a production and co-writing business that has quietly become the sturdier half of her career: she has produced Jo Dee Messina and Jessie James Decker, produced the song that won song of the year at the 2024 British Country Music Association Awards, co-wrote "Getaway Car" for The Shires, which topped the UK country radio chart, and produced and co-wrote four tracks on Kezia Gill's number one UK country album. The public-facing high point before her own record was the 2023 NFL International Games fixture at Wembley Stadium, where she sang the national anthem to a crowd of 87,000.

Her Grand Ole Opry profile puts her at more than 20 million streams and 12.6 million US radio impressions, and lists her among CMT's Next Women of Country. It is the profile of a working professional rather than a chart act, which is roughly how she has described it herself.

The album that took ten years

America's Backroads came out on 5 June 2026 through Lookout Mountain Records: 13 tracks, about 46 minutes, recorded in Nashville, every song co-written and produced by Bonagura. Nine of those tracks were cut in a single day at Sound Emporium with session players, which accounts for the loose, unfussy sound of the finished record. Her own summary is that the songs "have carried me through so many miles, memories, heartbreaks, healing and highways" and tell the story of the last ten years of her life — not a figure of speech, since both the title track and the first single, "Hippies & Gypsies", were written more than a decade before they were recorded.

The co-writer list reaches well outside Nashville. Jeffrey Steele, who has written for Tim McGraw and Rascal Flatts, is on it; so are David Sneddon, a Lewis Capaldi collaborator, and Theo Hutchcraft of Hurts. "Circles", co-written with Steele and Brandon Hood, had already been recorded by Jana Kramer in 2015. Joe Bonamassa plays guitar on "Love You Like That", the bluesiest thing on the album, and "Life Is A Road" is drawn from her time in Britain. The single that set the album up, "Small Town Tuesday (Who You Gonna Be?)", is the most straightforwardly country song of the batch.

Reviews were strong and came mostly from the rock press rather than country outlets. Mojo gave it four stars and called it ridiculously good; Classic Rock went with "Move over Sheryl Crow". Country in the UK, reviewing it alongside the tour, reckoned the record would put her at the front of the British country scene, and noted how little of it sounds like a decade-old backlog.

Where things stand, autumn 2026

2026 has been the busiest year of her career by a clear margin. Before the album she played the Royal Albert Hall as part of Highways Festival, performed to a crowd of more than 10,000 on the Spotlight Stage at C2C in Glasgow, and appeared alongside The Shires at C2C in London. The headline tour was announced on 26 February and went on general sale on 4 March, with a pre-sale for album pre-orders; Bristol's Louisiana and Glasgow's Glad Café had sold out before the run began.

Since the UK dates she has been back in Nashville, playing 3rd and Lindsley on 1 October. Her own touring calendar is otherwise empty for the rest of the year, which makes the 24 October booking the one date currently on sale and the largest stage she has stood on as a billed act rather than a guest.

What a show looks like now

The June run was a small-room tour in the proper sense: eight club dates between 10 and 20 June, from Birmingham's Hare & Hounds 2 and Manchester's The Lodge through Bristol, Norwich, Glasgow, Leeds and Nottingham's Bodega to The Lower Third in London, with Jackie Lee as special guest throughout. Bonagura played with a full band and leaned on the new record, with the older co-writes folded in. Audience accounts on the listings sites are consistent on the manner of it — one described her coming on stage like a hurricane, friendly and welcoming, with the vocal to match.

The London date produced the story that followed the tour around. Five or six songs in, a member of the audience was taken ill; the band stopped, waited for the ambulance crew, and then played the rest of the set acoustically on the venue stairwell, taking requests. It is not a reviewable performance in the normal sense, but it says something about how small the rooms were and how little separated her from the people in them.

The Manchester arena slot on 24 October is a different proposition entirely. Cody Johnson, the reigning 2025 CMA male vocalist of the year, is making his UK headline debut with four arena shows — AO Arena on 24 October, the O2 in London on 27 October, Birmingham's Utilita Arena on 1 November and Glasgow's OVO Hydro on 2 November — and tickets went on sale on 13 February. Parker McCollum takes the main support slot. The February announcement named Emily Ann Roberts as the opener; current listings for the Manchester date have Bonagura on the bill instead, so her set is the first of three, in a room where doors open at 18:00, music starts at 19:00 and the curfew is 23:00. On that maths it is a half-hour opening slot in front of an arena crowd who have come for someone else — the standard test for an artist moving up from 200-capacity rooms, and the first time she will face it with her own album behind her.