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Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Grammy Nominee Tracy Bonham Finds Success Hectic

Steve Morse The Boston Globe

She’s up against a heavy list of Grammy nominees Smashing Pumpkins, Bonnie Raitt, R.E.M. and Tori Amos among them. “What am I doing there?” says Tracy Bonham.

She’s joking at her own expense, but the out-of-left-field Boston singer has capped a whirlwind year with two Grammy nominations.

“It was a complete surprise. To be nominated for two is too good to be true,” says Bonham. She’s up for best female rock vocal for “Mother Mother,” her humorously histrionic song about making it in the big city. And she’s in the running for best alternative music performance for her debut album, “The Burdens of Being Upright.”

“It’s all just strange, just surreal,” says Bonham, who’s back in Boston after a year in which she toured the United States three times, hit Europe three times and went to Japan and Australia.

“I almost lost it in Australia,” she says. “I had always wanted to visit that country, but they worked me so hard that I didn’t have a second to spare. They had me doing interviews and radio stuff to where I was drained. The only picture I have from that trip is of me in the hotel room, so that says a lot.”

Then again, don’t assume Bonham is ungrateful for her fame. “I had six days off in Europe, so I said, ‘Why not fly to Rome?’ And when I got there, I thought, ‘If all this hard work allows me to have fun in a city this incredible, then it’s worth it. I’ll never complain again.”’

Bonham, 29, who is originally from Eugene, Ore., doesn’t even mind all the misinterpreations of “Mother Mother.” The song is about a daughter who calls home and, through gritted teeth, says, “Life is perfect, never better,” then erupts into “I’m hungry, I’m dirty, I’m losing my mind, everything’s fine!”

The song earned her rising-star status in the modern-rock world and frequent lumping in the “angry rock women” movement, which was unwarranted.

“I finally had to turn on to autopilot to explain it,” says Bonham. “I’d say how the song is supposed to be a joke and that I’m not angry. But then I decided to let that go and let people believe what they want to hear. If people want to believe it’s a hate-my-mom song, then fine. It’s theirs for the moment. But I know what it means to me … I love my mom and she knows it. We’ve discussed it many times.” Her mother, Lee Anne, even appears in the song’s hit video.

Bonham, a classically trained violinist who played violin on the New England dates of the Page/Plant tour in 1995, followed up “Mother Mother” with another radio hit, “The One.”

“People tell me nowadays that you’re considered incredibly lucky to get a second song on the radio. I don’t want to believe that because it sounds pretty bleak, but it might be true. Today, (the music industry) doesn’t think about artists, it thinks about songs. Which is scary for artists who would like to have a career with some staying power.”

For the moment, she’s catching her breath, but is busy writing new songs. “I constantly have to do something to help me feel I’m a creative person instead of a slug. If I sit around, I feel lazy.”