Bnny Open Up to Love's Highs and Lows

“Time is a strange thing/Forgotten a lot but remember some things,” sings Bnny's Jessica Viscius on the opening track of her second album, A million love songs. The song is called “Missing” and tells the story of the fickle first stages of love. Her voice begins to breathe, fragile and slightly hesitant, like she's finally coming out for air, before the guitars and drums expand and shimmer, creating an entire world like an avalanche in the space of just two minutes. Then, as if on cue, the instruments bow to give Viscius room to say the quiet part aloud: “When I'm with you, I almost forget I'm missing.”

Viscius Sees 'Missing' As Marking A Transition From Bnny's 2021 Debut album Everything, which she wrote in the wake of the death of her partner and fellow musician Trey Gruber. If that album was a vessel for immense sadness, the new one shows how love can still feel like muscle memory and nothing short of a miracle.

“Obviously, when I wrote Everything, it was a very dark time in my life,” says the Chicago musician. “This album for me is much lighter and it's a new era of Bnny.” The loss that inspired the first album, she continues, “was kind of down. Nothing can be as bad as this experience. So even though I might be going through a really painful breakup right now or something, it's like I can look at it in a different light. I will continue to write more love songs.”

Loving after loss, trying (and failing) to get over the past, putting yourself in the dangerous position of being hurt again and again and again… Viscious explores it all without shame A million love songs. In conversation and listening to the record, it's clear that her capacity for love is immense. “I still remember the first time it felt real to love again, to feel,” she sings on the single “Good Stuff.” The song's chorus feels like a promise to herself and a thesis statement on the album: “I'm hanging on to big my love.” Over a guitar line on the jammy “Something Blue,” he admits that “Lately I've been dreaming of everyone I've ever loved.” “I've never felt safe like this,” she sings on the dreamy “Changes,” before noting that she's so happy she could scream — and then she does.

“What's life without love?” she says when I ask what she deserves all of this. “I feel that love is the power of life, so risking everything for love is worth it.”

Much has been made of the sensitivity of the “lover” on the internet. There are endless arbitrary debates about who can be considered a “real craver” versus a “fake one.” All serve to emphasize much the same point: that the act of unabashedly loving someone can often be seriously humiliating, if not almost humiliating. It's certainly not the safest way to operate if the goal is to keep your dignity fully intact. Viscius has described her new album as “having fun with a broken heart”: “I've kind of given in to the fact that I'm just writing love songs, even though I'm trying to write about other things,” she says. “When you write a love song, sometimes it seems so certain and so certain, but love is often so fleeting and there are no guarantees in anything. You just have to keep trucking.”

This lightness open A million love songs extends beyond the subject matter: Many of the songs on this record are louder, the guitar riffs looser and funkier, the rhythms more compelling. Her signature ballads are still on display with songs like “Sweet,” a waltz tune that shows the sly confidence that can emerge in the midst of budding romance: “I'm so sweet/Don't you want to meet me?” Lyrically, Bnny's songs are direct and uncomplicated. “I don't really think too much about the lyrics, so maybe that's why they're so simple and so honest,” he says. “It's just how I feel at that moment, that time, that minute when I write a certain song. I don't take voice memos or record things when I'm writing — I'll know it's a good song if I remember it the next day.”

Viscius recorded A million love songs during two weeks in Asheville, North Carolina with co-producer Alex Farrar, whom he chose as a collaborator in part because of his work with acts such as Wednesday and MJ Lenderman. “We have soft pop songs, but then there are some rock moments as well,” he says. Recording in this environment was a “completely original experience” for Vicious, who mostly writes in isolation, at night, with a beer or two in her bedroom. Bringing those songs to others can be a little nerve-wracking, she says.

Her bandmates — anchored by her twin sister Alexa on bass, along with her husband Alexa on guitar and “a drummer, who usually rotates” — joined her for about half the time in Asheville. Alexa, who is also a photographer, shot the album cover One Million Love Songs — a vivid, candid photo of Whiskey lying in a field against a backdrop of snow-capped mountains — while the sisters were hiking in Alaska. “I love the connection between the two albums,” notes Jessica. “The first album, Everything, I am shrouded in darkness with my back to the camera. This has a lighter feel — I'm relaxed, playing in nature. They bond together that way.”

On the morning of my conversation with Viscius, a piece entitled “The question of desire” is causing debate in some social media circles. The essay features more than 60 people answering the same question: “Is it better to desire or to be desired?” I think Viscius, the self-proclaimed arbiter of love songs, might have some thoughts, so I turn the question to her. “I mean, for art, I think it's better to wish,” he says. “He does better songwriting. In my personal life, it would be nicer to be desirable. True, honest, good love is, I think, a mixture of both. Two sides. And that's why it's so rare.”

This rare quality may explain why we spend a very embarrassing part of our lives trying to cradle (and perhaps stifle) any tenderness we experience, for fear it might be taken away. Viscious takes us on a journey with her A million love songsfrom the blur of euphoria to heartbreak and the commitment to let love change your heart even if someone else decides to change their mind.

It's only fitting that the album ends in the way we hate to admit most relationships do. On the defiant and resigned “No One,” Viscius gently plucks a guitar while repeating, “No one loves me anymore.” “It was this moment of self-pity and you're like, 'No one loves me and I'm trying to change and nothing's working,'” she says. “But by the same token, he was finding acceptance that this is okay.”