The room is a basement. That is the first thing worth knowing about the Underground Lounge, the volunteer-run music series that operates out of 17 Court Street in Belfast, in the space beneath the Basil Burwell Community Theatre. It is not a club with a bar and a soundproofed wall and a capacity sign. It is a coffeehouse-style listening room, set up and staffed by volunteers, that runs through the colder months when the summer crowds have gone home and the peninsula gets quiet. Admission is ten to twenty dollars, cash only, at the door. Drinks and homemade snacks go by donation. Season tickets can be bought ahead of time.
On Saturday, Oct. 24, that room will host Cilla Bonnie, a bassist, singer and songwriter from Portland, along with her band. Doors open at 6:30 p.m. and the music starts at 7. Joining her will be Emmett Harrity on keys, who also plays with Katie Matzell, and Chris Sweet on drums, of the Portland organ trio Micromassé.
The Underground Lounge describes itself as a DIY, volunteer-led music series dedicated to bringing original music to Belfast through the off season, and its booking reflects that: regional and local acts, songwriters and small ensembles, in a room where the audience is close enough to hear the musicians breathe. The setup is deliberately unpretentious — a coffee shop vibe in a theater basement, with the emphasis on the exchange between performer and listener rather than on production.
That setting suits Bonnie. She has spent two decades performing, touring and recording, much of it in service of other people's songs. In recent years she has been an in-demand backing vocalist for Maine artists including Spencer Albee and Ali McGuirk; she also plays bass in McGuirk's band, and appears on the Herd Studio live session of McGuirk's "My Man is Gone" alongside guitarist Jeffrey Lockhart, drummer Brandon Mayes and keyboardist Odaine Williams. That kind of sideman work builds a particular kind of musician — someone fluent in other people's arrangements, comfortable holding down the low end while someone else takes the spotlight.
"There for Me" is where she steps forward. The album is ten songs, and it drew a strong review from Chris Busby in The Bollard, who called it "the sound of an artist in full bloom." Busby noted flashes of what was coming on her earlier EPs — he singled out "Rusty," from 2020 — but argued that the full-length is where her artistry is fully realized. He described the opener, "Don't Mistake Me," as a jazzy shuffle that morphs into a passage of baroque pop with layered vocal harmonies, and "Not Now" as a funk tune built on a strong bass line that then takes off on a keyboard flight from Harrity. Sweet, he wrote, shines on drums and percussion. Guests fill out the record: Jeffrey Lockhart adds guitar to the bluesy "Taking My Time," Emma Stanley contributes haunting trumpet to "Cross to Bear," and Shannon Allen plays cello on "Jump a Fence."
Busby reserved his highest praise for the closing stretch. "Apartment Song," he wrote, captures "tears of disappointment in a bottle" and distills them into a meditation on longing — a song about the gap between the life you have and the one you can see across the street. He quoted the lyric: "There's a parallel universe across the street / Another apartment where we dwell / Close enough to see yet still out of reach / In my mind I know it well." He placed the song alongside other recent Maine writing about housing and money — Dead Gowns' "Renter Not a Buyer" and Derek Lobley's "Warm Here" — as evidence of a local songwriting turn toward the so-called American Dream and what happens when it stops being available.
Bonnie's own description of the record is modest. She has said the music touches on themes she knows well and that she hopes listeners will hear themselves in the lyrics, the music and the imagery. In performance she works either stripped down — just bass and voice — or with the tight trio that will be onstage in Belfast. Her sound pulls from R&B and soul but keeps rock's structural dynamics, which is a way of saying the songs have both intimacy and force. She is known for warmth and authenticity onstage, and for low-end grooves that get a room moving.
The venue itself has a longer history than the series. The Belfast Maskers, the community theater company that owns and operates the Basil Burwell Community Theater, has spent more than three decades producing everything from Shakespeare and the classics to musicals, comedies and serious dramas. The building at 17 Court Street is rented out to other performing arts groups as well, which is how a volunteer music series ended up in its basement. The Underground Lounge has become one of the more distinctive small rooms in the midcoast circuit — the kind of place where a touring songwriter and a local audience can actually hear each other.
For Bonnie, the Oct. 24 date is a chance to play the new material in the format it was built for. The album's arrangements leave space; the trio setting lets Harrity's keys and Sweet's drums answer her bass lines in real time rather than through a mix. And the room, with its donated snacks and cash box and volunteer crew, is about as far from a ticketed club show as a Saturday night gets.
Doors at 6:30 p.m., music at 7. Ten to twenty dollars at the door, cash only. More about Bonnie's music at cillabonniemusic.com.