“His name is Stinky, but he smells awesome,” Emily Schoonover (they/them) says, carrying a rabbit into the Zoom frame. Schoonover, the guitarist and singer/songwriter of bugsy, sits down with Stinky in their room alongside bandmates bassist Shannon Maroney (they/them), guitarist Griffen Desai (he/him), and drummer Alex Norman (he/him). Another rabbit is pictured on the cover of the Minneapolis band’s new EP, Now I Spend All of My Time Alone, in a homemade, mini 3D bedroom set-up. 

The graphics on bugsy’s work have always had a crafty, collage-style visual aesthetic. As for the EP’s musical aesthetic, it’s a scrapbook of stories assembled by Schoonover to create songs with malleable meanings. The EP sees the band sharpening pop-punk undertones. Guitars assume the foreground and make room for the band’s initial garage rock sound. Polished melodies shine through the grittiness.

The group began playing together in 2019 and released their debut EP, Teratoma, in February of 2020. After writing many songs by themself, Schoonover began looking for musicians to play with: Desai was a past biology lab partner, Maroney responded to their Facebook post in search of a bassist, and Norman had previously played with Schoonover in a different band. The three recruits didn’t know each other, but their dynamic has grown and evolved over the past four years. “We’re soul-bonded,” Norman jokes. 

When music venues shut down a month after their debut release, the band felt uncertain if they’d ever get to share new music in front of an audience, but they’ve come back strong. Their live performance pre- and post-COVID’s pause on shows looks quite different: In 2019, bugsy played almost all shows in DIY venues, but in 2021, their return to the stage happened at Fine Line when opening for the locally beloved and nationally growing Gully Boys.

“Seeing the trajectory since that [show] has been really cool. I think that was kind of a very important little blip in the bugsy timeline,” Maroney says, considering the performance a catalyst for what was to come. 

The band would continue to play First Avenue venues like 7th St. Entry, Fine Line, and Turf Club. They stepped onto the mainroom’s stage to play Radio K’s 30th anniversary show in September, and it was another special evening for everyone. This past summer, the band opened for Skating Polly, touring in Canada and all over the U.S. “There's only one thing closer than being married, and it's being in the same van for a month,” Maroney says. 

Before the tour, throughout 2021 and 2022, bugsy wrote and recorded an album. Then they scrapped it. A few singles made the cut, but the group decided to not release the whole project. The songwriting was far more detailed than Schoonover was comfortable sharing. “I felt stressed about having personal information that felt really private to me in kind of a really public manner,” they say. 

Letting go of an album was a difficult but necessary decision. “It was dramatic, but it kind of, at a certain point, felt like the right thing to do,” Maroney says. “It also felt like the only thing to do,” Schoonover adds.

“[The lyrics] were very specific about the ‘who,’ the ‘what,’ the ‘where,’” Schnoonover says. Like the band’s debut EP, words came from a perspective of “You did this, you did this, you did this.” They explain further, “I felt like a problem I had with the older songs that we’re not releasing is they centered more around what other people did, whereas these [new songs] felt more about me.” 

Maroney still recognizes the valuable takeaways from the album-making experience, and all the musicians retain meaningful memories. “Regardless of the music [not] coming out publicly, I think we still individually and as a group learned a lot of things and became much more intuitive within each other’s music processing,” they say. “At the end of the day, we finished the album, and it was a really beautiful piece of work.” 

When writing a new batch of songs for Now I Spend All of My Time Alone — and choosing which to workshop with the band — Schoonover asked themself, “What am I comfortable with people that I know in person hearing?” and they began blending stories together to conceal intimate thoughts and emotions. 

Artists are often praised for their vulnerability when sharing raw details of a situation. But there’s also something to be said for creating ambiguous songs that listeners can meld to fit their own perspectives — songs that make it easier for a person to see themself in the context of the artist’s shifting narratives and abstract scenes.

“One of the cool things about art is that it's interpretational,” Maroney says. “So it's like, listening to something and rather than being like, ‘Oh, I relate to this,’ maybe being like, ‘I can apply this to my own experience.’” Desai agrees: “Even though the subject matter of the song that's being written isn't a one-for-one parallel to whatever I'm experiencing in my life, it does always elicit quite an emotion in me.”

The song “soup” may elicit emotions in anyone who runs into someone who was once a close connection, but the relationship has since dissolved. Schoonover sings, “Locked eyes with the stranger / Who still makes my blood run cold / When did you get so small? / Uncanny same as it always was.” They explain, “I'm combining events. So seeing someone in one place, but also noticing an absence of a thing.” It’s like walking into a grocery store aisle that no longer carries the item you used to always grab.

Maroney understands and echoes the sentiment: “It’s also like, ‘I could not know what your job is now. I don't know what you're like. I don't know what you do on a day-to-day basis.’ But there are so many things that I know about you as a person that make up who you were up to the point where that relationship drifted.”

And then there’s “oh well,” a song about queer yearning, among other things, Schoonover says. “That song was funny because it was loosely inspired [by] real feelings in a specific moment, a situation that I super exaggerated about — and then a diary entry from when I was 14.” What did their diary say? Put simply, the words, “We are not lesbians,” were written after kissing a friend. What is the other story intertwined? That’s for them to hold onto.

What eventually became clear to the songwriter, and what they express candidly in our conversation, was the EP’s unintentional theme: solitude. 

The pandemic quarantine was a time of solitude for most people, but after lockdown, Schoonover remained in their own headspace as they hurried between work, school, and home. Pushing the limits of their schedule created “solitude-esque vibes,” resulting in a greater sense of self-understanding, and recurring thoughts eventually became lyrics. 

On the opening track, “Town Crier,” Schoonover sings, “Now I spend all of my time alone / Unidolize / And practice self-forgiveness / Look at how much I’ve grown / Now I spend all of my time alone.” The words about growth — by way of isolation in their theoretical “little tree house” — are filled with a bit of sarcasm. “It was kind of like a ‘We'll look where all that got me,’” they say.

At age 23, Schoonover wrote “Town Crier” when thinking about their teenage self who went to house shows and hung out with people who use sadness as a shtick. Once they became too busy to spend time amongst performatively gloomy personas, distance allowed space for reflection, and much of the EP is the singer looking at the person who they were when writing the scrapped album, and calmly saying to them, “You were doing your best. You could have done something else, but you were doing your best.” 

Now I Spend All of My Time Alone represents a shift from one era of young adulthood to another. “[The EP] ended up accidentally capturing a kind of a time in my life where I feel like I switched from feeling very passive in my life to being, generally, I think more assertive, and less nervous and helpless,” Schoonover shares sincerely. 

Despite the difficult decision to leave behind a whole album, releasing this new EP seems to have revitalized bugsy’s energy and confidence. When writing with the band, Norman often sees the newest song as his favorite. “It's really cool that I felt that feeling like 15 times,” he says. “I mean, we're all pretty young. We have nowhere to go besides up.”

Now I Spend All Of My Time Alone is out now. bugsy play 7th St. Entry on Friday, Dec. 8. Tickets here.