Perhaps it was the isolation of the pandemic, all those hours Gabrielle Pietrangelo spent rediscovering the Sonoran Desert that surrounded her.
For the first time in her nearly 30-year music career, the folk/Americana singer-songwriter found the strongest inspiration literally in her backyard.
“I found myself writing about the desert for the first time in my life,” said the Tucson native. “I didn’t realize how much it affected me.”
Pietrangelo summed up her love of her hometown in the single “Tucson,” where she swoons that when the city “has her light turned on,” mountains take on the hues of blue, pink and purple “round her head.”
“I want to touch her face/Sky so wise and clear, I see the beauty of this place,” she sings, the lyrics wrapped in the ubiquitous mariachi language of Tucson courtesy Calexico trumpeter Jacob Valenzuela.
The song, off her forthcoming debut solo album “Back to the Heart,” was a team effort with Valenzuela and Calexico drummer John Convertino performing on the album and Tucson muralist Jessica Gonzalez creating a 12-foot by 12-foot mural of Pietrangelo on the south wall of the Rialto Theatre. An image of the mural will be used as the album cover, Pietrangelo said.
Videographer Brookelynne Nisenbaum filmed a time-lapsed video of Gonzalez painting the mural, then edited in video of Pietrangelo singing “Tucson” in real time.
“It turned out so cool,” Pietrangelo said last week, days after she premiered the video during her Hotel Congress Century Room show on Dec. 5 to celebrate the song’s release.
It’s been a long time coming; Pietrangelo has been working on “Back to the Heart,” which she expects to release in May, since the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. She recorded “Tucson” in summer 2021; it’s one of five of the album’s 14 songs that focus on Tucson and the Southwest, including “Summer Loser,” the song that earned Pietrangelo a John Lennon Songwriting Contest win last summer.
The album is the 47-year-old Amphi High grad’s first solo album since she was fresh out of the University of Arizona in the late 1990s and just starting her music career.
She released a solo recording back then and then “shied away from it,” she said.
“It was too much for me as a young singer,” she recalled. “The vulnerability of being a singer-songwriter was too much.”
Pietrangelo switched gears and joined bands — there was strength in numbers that didn’t make her feel as vulnerable. She was a member of the folk group Silver Thread Trio in the 2010s and started and led the a capella ensemble Sister Solace, which had a dozen vocalists that performed in duos, trios, quartets and solos.
Pietrangelo returned to her solo roots with the release in late 2019 of her EP “On My Way Back Home.” That project gave her the confidence, she said, to record a full album, working with Jim Waters at his Waterworks Recording studio.
“The EP brought me back to it. The songs started pouring out of me once I had that green light,” she said.
Pietrangelo said she plans to release singles off the album every month or so until the album is released next spring.
She hopes that listeners come to feel the love and appreciation for Tucson that she has.
“I hope they’re like, ‘Dang, Tucson is so cool,’” she said.
Tucson Landmarks: Hotel Congress, 311 E. Congress St., opened in 1919 as a luxurious mainstay for visitors arriving in the Old Pueblo.
The downtown landmark has kept much of its history alive in the past century, while also bringing modern amenities to Tucson natives and tourists.
Video by Riley Brown / For the Arizona Daily Star
