Minnesota native Mary Bue has carved a unique space within the music scene, using her art for healing. Bue’s understanding of the emotional relationship between lyrics and the music has led her to create an innovative sound.

Her latest album The Wildness of Living & Dying, to be released Sunday, explores humanity, love, healing and trauma.

This album, written from 2020 to 2023, is inspired by events in Minneapolis and the world — as well as a traumatic carjacking Bue experienced.

Bue says the album captures the spectrum of good and bad possibilities every day holds. 

“We never know what can happen in a day, life, death, births, sickness, accidents, love,” she said. “It is about the awe of being alive and the preciousness of the moment and how wild a day can be, how it can turn, how we can turn emotionally on a dime.”

Like many of Bue’s previous albums, she weaves different genres together, here producing 10 new songs. Her first few albums in the early aughts leaned on piano with violin, but by 2015 she became bored of that approach and wanted to incorporate her love for 90s grunge, she says. She was inspired by artists like Juliana Hatfield, Belly and Kurt Cobain.

“I switched to electric guitar and started being more sort of pop punk, I guess, a little more rocking,” Bue describes. “It’s a way of, like, taking all the past and making it fresh.”

While The Wildness of Living & Dying still has a strong piano presence, it also blends pop, rock, folk, 90s grunge, electronic and strings. Bue describes it as modern with “hopefully, a timeless energy to it.” Her song “Draw Blood,” a punk track about a love story turned sore, features guitar riffs and a drum line that punches alongside her fierce vocals.

Bue, who grew up in Princeton, Minn., studied psychology at the University of Minnesota-Duluth and initially intended to go on to graduate school, even getting accepted into a doctoral program in California. Instead, she pursued music, which she had played since she was 15 years old, She also became a yoga instructor, something she has done for 15 years. 

“It’s a deep interest of mine, just looking at healing and the ways that we walk in the world as sensitive beings,” she said. “I feel like sound is a method. Music is a method for healing and transformation, and it’s definitely helped me move through grief and change.”

The creation of this album helped her work through the trauma she experienced during a violent carjacking. The experience caused her to enter what she calls a “trauma portal,” a term she coined to describe the darkness and healing she’s encountered in what she says has been a nuanced and complicated process, something her song “Salt in the Wound” examines. The song is about the process of digging out of one’s own trauma, and is unexpectedly upbeat as one of the only songs with a sprinkle of tambourine.

“Part of that complexity for me was looking at humanity and what can make someone take an act of violence against another person? It’s in all of us, we’re capable of violence, in small and large ways.

“When we’re experiencing trauma a lot, I feel like it opens the door to more, like it feels like some protections are stripped away,” Bue says. “Like walking out in the world is subdued, not that we're weaker, but the energy is taken and put onto this pain.” 

With this new album, she hopes her listeners feel heard and supported if they're going through hard times, and if “a little catharsis would be welcome.”

“It’s a heavy time to be alive. There’s so much news coming at us, and misinformation and it’s just a lot. So I hope everyone is taking the best care that they can,” she said, a sentiment she expresses in the final song of her album “Bedding Down with the Deer,” a slow, indie folk ballad that she sings like a story. 

Bue has a tour up next and is co-leading international retreats, she also hopes to have the opportunity to finish a few good books.

A release party is being held at The Parkway in Minneapolis on Sunday, Feb. 16, at 7 p.m. with special guest Mae Simpson Duo. Tickets can be purchased at the Parkway website. 

Listen to “Right Now” off The Wildness of Living & Dying:

This story was originally published by MPR News.