20 years later, Tucson singer-songwriter rediscovers her solo voice

There is something about the land, the mountains and the towering pine trees that dot the landscape of Taos, New Mexico, that speaks to Tucson singer-songwriter Gabrielle Pietrangelo’s soul.

“Georgia O’Keefe country,” said the Tucson native, who has retreated to Taos every July for the past five summers. “The best way to describe it is I feel all my senses are activated. I just feel alive. I think it does something for me creatively.”

Last summer, Pietrangelo, a member of the Americana Silver Thread Trio and founder and director of Tucson’s mostly a cappella ensemble Sister Solace, spent the last July retreat writing songs that chronicle her recent escape from an abusive relationship. Taos was her healer, she said, the place where she rediscovered herself and her solo voice.

On Saturday, Dec. 21, Pietrangelo will perform a pair of concerts at Club Congress to celebrate the release of “On My Way Back Home,” a seven-song EP that she wrote in Taos. It is her first solo release in 20 years and only her second solo project in a 20-plus-year music career in Tucson.

Pietrangelo was in her early 20s when she recorded her first solo album of self-penned, mostly autobiographical songs.

Being in her early 20s and writing songs that said “here I am, here’s my truth” turned out to be “just all too vulnerable for me at the time,” she said.

But as a women of 43, “I’m OK with my vulnerability,” she said. “I’m just kind of stepping into my own skin. This is my life.”

Pietrangelo gut-checks her pain and healing on “Back Home,” opening with the unforgiving “What the Darkness Knows” — “The light will tell you what the darkness knows / It’s a pardon for your sin” — before finding acceptance and redemption through the sound of the river.

The is not a sob story; it’s a tale of goodbyes and reintroductions and owning one’s vulnerability in the face of abuse. It’s about remembering who you were as you rebuild a shattered life. In the end, Pietrangelo said she feels stronger as she sorted out “the broken bits of an abusive relationship” and tried to find her way home.

“It really felt like coming home to myself and my solo act of myself as a musician,” she said.

Pietrangelo will share the stage Saturday with vocalist Julia Waters, a longtime voice student of Pietrangelo; and bass player Thøger Lund from Howe Gelb’s band.