Tucson native comes home for debut album release show

Tucson native Remi Goode would not be surprised if her childhood flashed before her when she takes the stage at Wooden Tooth Records on Saturday night.

The audience could include her old guitar teacher Michael Lich or her fellow choristers from the Tucson Girls Chorus. It’s a given that her family will be there and there could be classmates from her alma mater University High.

There might even be a few friends from Arizona State University, where she studied classical guitar and earned bachelor’s degrees in music and history.

All of them have played a role in Goode’s months-old debut album “Things I’ve Said Before,” a project she and musical partner and fellow Tucson native Gabe Lehrer have been working on for several years.

“We recorded it mostly in Phoenix when we were living there in school,” the 26-year-old Goode said. “I also recorded a lot of it in Tucson, actually, because for a while there, Gabe and I were both living under the flight path for Sky Harbor. So we had to go home to Tucson and record at my parents’ house because that was the more quiet recording option.”

The pair finished the project in Nashville, where they have lived for the past two years.

Goode released “Things I’ve Said Before” on Sept. 26 and performed the first release show in early October at Nashville’s retro Eastside Bowl, a sprawling bowling alley/restaurant/venue set up in an old Kmart store.

The album explores relationships and the idea of letting go without worrying what others think. The album title borrows from a line in the opening breakup track “Don’t Drive Me Home.”

Lehrer sings backing vocals on the album and contributes guitar. which is prominent through the record. Lehrer and Goode studied classical guitar for years as kids growing up in Tucson.

Goode said she had been interested in music since she was really young.

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“I was taking classical guitar lessons from the time I was 7,” Goode said.

She wanted to play piano, but the family’s midtown home was too small so her parents gave her a guitar for Christmas “and they put me in guitar lessons the next January.”

She said she took lessons from Lich, who teaches at Pima Community College, through high school. In addition to classical repertoire, Lich “pretty much taught me everything I know about music and about how to feel music dynamically.”

When she was in middle school, Lich suggested she add singing to her guitar playing, which was odd at first. She was used to singing classical repertoire with the Girls Chorus. But once she trained her voice to sing more pop than Puccini, she started writing her own songs “and it kind of took off from there,” she recalled.

Her album fits in the indie/alternative folk bin, which Goode said she kind of centers around given that she plays acoustic guitar and likes the genre’s storytelling aspect.

But that doesn’t mean she can’t kick up the tempo.

“I like to go off into different sorts of sound,” she said. “I have some songs that feel a little more like rockish and songs that feel a little bit more jazzy so I guess that’s where the ‘alternative’ comes from.”

Saturday’s show at Wooden Tooth Records, 108 E. Congress St., starts at 8 p.m. Tickets are $17.85 through eventbrite.com.

RISO, the acoustic husband-and-wife duo of Matt and Rebekah Rolland, is also on the bill.