[Photo courtesy of Alice Falkowski]

By Eileen Fortner, News Editor 

Bugsley is a unique four-piece band with a different lineup of musicians in three different cities, Cincinnati, New York and Savannah. The Cincinnati lineup of musicians is comprised of Leia Bulger on vocals and guitar, Elliot Heldman on drums, Megan Denham on bass and Mary Klein on Guitar. I was fortunate enough to speak with the band after their performance at ACRN’s Halloween show. 

[This interview has been edited for length and clarity.]

Eileen Fortner (EF): Post-performance at this year’s ACRN Halloween show, how are you guys feeling? 

Leia Bulger (LB): It was definitely one of our best sets.

Megan Denham (MD): Yeah, I think we played really well.

LB: The stage was nice and big, and the sound was good. 

Elliot Heldman (EH): The people were really nice, too.

EF: Recently, you guys have been doing a lot of traveling. How is it being on the road? What’s it like? 

LB: We’ve never been on tour as a band. So the way this band kind of works is I started Bugsley in Savannah, GA, where I went to school and we had a band there. It didn’t include any of them [gesturing to bandmates]. And then I moved back to Cincinnati, where I’m from then they became my band. I moved to New York for like a year, and I had a different band there. So we haven’t been on tour as, like, one group. 

Mary Klein (MK): Bugsley is a rotating line-up of where Leia is.

EF: So, bouncing off of that, does that change the vibe of Bugsley for you with each different band? 

LB: The vibes are all the same, I think. Each time I bring somebody new to the band, everyone brings something different. But it’s always felt like one band to me. 

EF: So it’s kind of like a little community. Do you guys ever interlink with the other bandmates?

EH: Definitely.

MK: My other band played a show with the Bugsley New York line-up.

MD: I went to New York to play a show with Bugsley. 

EF: So Bugsley really is a community. 

MK: Yeah, the Bugsley extended universe.

EF: Where does the name Bugsley come from? 

LB: I knew that I wanted to have a theme for my band. I feel like bands should have a strong image, and you can just visualize that from the name. And when I was thinking about it, I wanted the theme to be bugs. I grew up around a lot of bugs. Not mine, but my brothers collected bugs growing up, and I used to hate it. But now I think bugs are cool. Bugs was just a little too basic, so Bugsley. 

EF: So, how did this part of the Bugsley universe meet?  

LB: Elliot and I met at School of Rock and played music there in Cincinnati. And then Elliot and Meg used to be in a different band together. And then Mary- 

MK: I was in a band with her high school friend, and that’s how we met. 

LB: Yeah, just through the Cincinnati music community. 

MK: Cause I also worked with Meg at a coffee shop.

MD: Yeah, that’s how we met.

EF:  What inspires each of you to make music? 

LB: I write a lot of the songs while driving. I would drive back and forth between Savannah and Cincinnati when I went to school there, and that’s like 12 hours. And I would just have my voice memos app, and when I got bored, I would just start singing. Most of the songs were written that way. When I’m driving, I just think about, I guess, Cincinnati as the big inspiration for me. ‘Cause I’m always in other cities and I don’t really know where I want to live, but I keep coming back to Cincinnati. A lot of the songs are about missing home. 

MD: I think all of my friends playing music really inspires me. Like watching everybody do it and doing it together. I don’t know, it’s just fun. 

MK: The community is a big part.

ED: Being able to connect with people is a great way to sort of kind of, like, create something with a group of people. And also when I saw music live for the first time, like the drums. 

EF: So when you guys perform live, what musicians inspire you? 

ED: Mitch Mitchell for Hendrix. That’s probably one of my favorite drummers. Stewart Copeland also, from The Police. 

MK: I think about my friends in Badman, and I think about Katie Jane Garcide from Daisy Chainsaw. 

MD: I don’t know, I think about going to Twin Peaks shows in 2016 and watching them and being like that s— is crazy. 

LB: I have a clear one, Kim Deal from The Breeders. She’s from Dayton, and yeah, when I started writing songs for the first time, I think five years ago, I was listening to the Last Splash, that album on repeat. Especially “Drivin’ on 9”, I would listen to that song a bunch, and I think a lot of my songs are derived from that album specifically. I try to bring her energy to the stage. We saw them pretty recently, and she’s just so smiley, she doesn’t have that rockstar personality. She’s just a really nice person. 

EF: What can we expect from Bugsley next? 

LB: I would really like to tour, it’s gonna be hard for me to get people together. ‘Cause Mary has her own band, so does Meg. We’re all busy, but I definitely want to go on tour and record, actually record our music. I have two albums’ worth of songs just not recorded. That’s definitely the priority right now. And maybe after the album release, we’ll go on tour. The nice thing is, I have friends in other cities who used to be in Bugsley, and if I play in that city, I can just have them play. 

MK: We were talking about community earlier, and I think that’s the thing I’m so grateful for in music, cause now I have friends in New York and Louisville and Pittsburgh that I would have never met otherwise if I was not in music. 

EF: Any final comments or shoutouts?
Leia: shoutout to any Cincinnati bands, shoutout Tweens. Meg and I were talking about them last night, big inspirations.