The Burdens of Being Upright
album by Tracy Bonham
The Burdens of Being Upright is the debut studio album by American singer-songwriter Tracy Bonham, released on March 19, 1996, by Island Records.
Content
The Burdens of Being Upright was recorded in the summer of 1995 at Fort Apache Studios in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Referencing this album, in 2015 Bonham said, That whole album was my experiment with getting a guitar. I was rebelling. It was just raw. I was like, ‘Just get out and do it; get behind a microphone and just scream.’ Twenty years ago I had more doubts; I thought, ‘I can’t just stand there and do that’ — which is when I knew I had to do it.The album cover (a reference to German photographer August Sander's work "The Bricklayer") was photographed by George DuBose, who was the in-house photographer at the hip hop label Cold Chillin' Records.
Commercial performance
The Burdens of Being Upright debuted at number 136 on the Billboard 200 chart dated April 27, 1996, and later reached its peak position of number 54 on the chart on June 15, 1996. It remained on the chart for 25 weeks. On November 12, 1996, the album was certified Gold by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), signifying the shipment of 500,000 copies of the album.
Critical reception
Rolling Stone noted that the album "tells a coherent, largely autobiographical story about a girl getting even with the obnoxious people who piss her off and underestimate her...
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “The Burdens of Being Upright” is album by Tracy Bonham. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Burdens, Being and Upright, not as a finished interpretation.
Why this record matters
The phrase “album by Tracy Bonham” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.
Reception evidence should be dated and situated: later canonical status may differ sharply from the work’s initial circulation. The source revision retrieved here is dated May 11, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q16245035. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1996, 1995 and 2015.
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This entry incorporates text from “The Burdens of Being Upright” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.