BONNIE PARKER: Defying Stereotypes One Project at a Time
by Maximo Aguilar Lawlor
The name “BONNIE PARKER” could not be more fitting for this up-and-coming local performer.
From queer-based lyrics to gender-bending aesthetics, he describes his discography as indie pop, but according to PARKER, his upcoming music will be more of an indie-rock aesthetic.
PARKER is defying the norms of what musicians have historically been, and he is a trailblazer for what artists can be in the future.
But with every performer, there is a journey that brought them to today.
Born in Westlake Village, CA, BONNIE PARKER, whose real name is Andrew Muccitelli, could not remember a time where music wasn’t part of their life.
“Ever since I was a baby, I’ve always been into music—specifically pop music. I feel like it’s kind of rare that you meet a four-year-old that’s like ‘I love Britney Spears,’” PARKER said. “I started taking vocal lessons when I was eight, and I was at this music school called ‘Rock Nation’, which is where I met my present-day drummer.”
It wasn’t until later that PARKER would launch a YouTube channel under his legal name.
“I started publishing videos of me singing on the internet at age ten, so I guess that’s when you can consider that the start of my career,” PARKER said. “On YouTube, I would cover artists such as Lady Gaga on my mini Casio keyboard having known only those chords for that song, just learning enough to post stuff.”
Little did PARKER know the traction his videos would receive.
“I remember I posted a cover of “Someone Like You” by Adele, and that got like 15,000 views. Then a bunch of people started commenting on it because they're like, ‘Oh my God, Kurt Hugo Schneider commented on this video,’ and I was like, ‘Who is that?’ PARKER said. “I guess at the time he was this big YouTuber, and he had like a few million subscribers or whatever.”
Once Parker was discovered by Schneider, his parents received an email with a proposal to record a song. Sticking to Adele, the song of choice was “Set Fire to the Rain.” Despite a full recording session and subsequent video shoot, the single was never released on Schneider’s channel.
To this day, PARKER doesn’t know the true reason, but this didn’t stop him from utilizing the platform.
“I remember my dad telling me he thought that being 12 [years old] at the time was too young to be on his YouTube channel,” PARKER said. “So the video was just ours, and we put it onto my channel and put [Schneider’s] name on it cause he's famous. And because of that, it ended up racking in like a few million views.”
Fast forward a couple of years, PARKER was able to gain even more traction once he became a contestant on a reality competition TV show.
“When I was 12, I was a contestant on X-factor US Season One, and by no means a finalist or anything crazy like that, but I had some airtime which drew people to my YouTube channel,” PARKER said.
After the success of PARKER’s pre-teen era, there was a dry spell for his music career. In 2017, he finally recorded and released his first official album, Bleach, under his legal name. According to PARKER, this was “a fucky little project.”
“I do this thing when I write [music] where I will write down the verse and a chorus to a song and lay the foundation, and then never come back to it for months because I'm like, ‘Okay, I started it, I know how it's going to go, but like I don't want to finish it right now,’” PARKER said. “So Bleach was this collection of eight songs that were all in that stage, but I had already fleshed out a bunch of other [songs] that I liked more. And then it was my last day living in Westlake Village before I moved to Boston for my freshman year [of college], like the day before my flight, and I was just like, ‘Okay, fuck it. I'm going to do this for myself.’ I thought it was this big metaphor about leaving that chapter of my life or whatever.”
PARKER continued, “I recorded [Bleach] in one day—my last day in California—on my voice memos app. Most of them were one-take and not recorded into a metronome. The keyboards and the vocals were recorded at the same time. It's really just like eight-voice memos of uncompleted songs that I threw up onto Spotify for the sake of having music out there as I got to college to try to have something to build upon when I got there, you know?”
PARKER is a current junior at Emerson College in Boston, MA, where he’s majoring in Visual Media Arts with a minor in Music History and Culture. During his freshman year, PARKER recorded his second album, Fear of Intimacy (2018), in one of Emerson College’s dorm buildings.
“The entire album is produced by Ryan McDowell, who's a senior currently and then mastered by Jake Weinberg, who is my friend and an amazing producer,” PARKER said. “Basically [Fear of Intimacy] is just like an amalgamation of every song that I had written across high school that I liked and envisioned one day being on an album.”
PARKER wrote all of the songs back in high school, and he is proud to call Fear of Intimacy his official “project one.”
Following the release of Fear of Intimacy, PARKER came to the conclusion that it was time to rebrand himself under a new stage name, thus the birth of “BONNIE PARKER.” The name originated after reading about Bonnie and Clyde on Google one night.
“I was reading something about Bonnie Parker, which is her legal name, and she was a poet and an artist and all this stuff—she had a lot of creative ambition, but then she was kind of swept into this life of crime due to her devotion for Clyde Barrow,” PARKER said. “And you know, she goes down in history as one half of the most insane crime duo of all time, my delusional ass was like, ‘So romantic,’ because I thought that like represents something. I don't know, I'm a very romantic person in general, and I kind of just felt a connection with that idea.”
Another reason for PARKER’s stage name change was to embrace his identity being a cis-gendered gay man.
“I really liked how feminine it sounded. Bonnie Parker—it kind of sounds ambiguous. You're kinda confused by it,” PARKER said. “Every single day, the persona of Bonnie Parker means something new to me. The main motif behind this project was to create total and absolute freedom of expression without being bound to one identity, or one look, or one style or whatever.”
Back in October of 2018, Alex Andrews, BONNIE PARKER’s drummer, reached out for the first time to work together. Andrews suggested working with Jack Severino, one of his bassist friends, to make a complete team.
But this would be a tough feat considering the two lived back in Los Angeles. Over winter break, the three of them got together and recorded eight songs including, “Jason”, “History”, “Body”, “Nicotine”, Scarborough Street”, “Running Water (Demo)”, “Laughing Gas” and a new version of “Window”—a song featured in Fear of Intimacy.
Every month, PARKER has been releasing individual singles on iTunes, Spotify, and YouTube after hearing of other unsigned artists gaining traction by releasing singles a few months at a time. From the six singles that have been released through the last six months, PARKER has accrued roughly 275,000 streams across all platforms.
According to PARKER, there are two more singles coming soon.
As PARKER moves forward throughout his musical career, he wants his music to stick with everyone, but especially the LGBTQ+ community. One way he does this is through his lyrics.
“The romantic narrative of being LGBTQ+ is so different than the heterosexual narrative, and all of my songs are very heavily informed by my personal experiences,” PARKER said. “There's only a few instances I can think of where I'm writing about something that isn't strikingly personal, and I feel like the benefit of writing so close to my personal narrative as a gay man is that that experience is shared between so many members of the LGBTQ+ community. Falling in love with another man as a man is different than falling in love with a woman as a man.”
PARKER’s success story is on an upward slope, and he is excited about what the future entails. He attributes a lot of his success to those who are fans and advocates of his recent work.
“The fact that I'll be like walking around and people that I don't know will just stop me for a quick second and mention that they listened to [my music] and they enjoy it. Like, that’s one of the best feelings in the whole world to know that it has reached somebody that I don't know,” PARKER said. “Like they've paid attention and [took] the time to like listen and liked it enough to like say something to me.”
Even with the distance between PARKER and his two bandmates, he firmly believes the new album will be released in 2020. He continued by stating that no one will hear anything official until he has completed photos and videos, booked gigs and made merchandise.
PARKER wants his fans and followers to know that he is extremely excited for the next chapter of his music career.
“Get hyped for the final single release that we have from this era, which will maybe be next month,” PARKER said. “I thank anybody who has ever taken the time to listen to [my music] from the bottom of my heart. It's the support from the Emerson student body that gives me the motivation to like continue writing, to keep making music and to keep trying to make queer art that people haven't seen before. Thank you.”
PARKER currently has no booked gigs in the near future, but he can be found on Instagram for future updates.