Tucson singer-songwriter finally drops debut solo record

We all know that character in Gabrielle Pietrangelo‘s “Bisbee Bluebird.”

“The vagabond child with a sad face and a pretty smile” who should be your for now, not your forever.

The story always ends in heartbreak, and you’re left with the realization that “maybe it’s really me who’s a vagabond child/searching for a song with a pretty rhyme.”

The song is one of the stories ethereal-voiced Tucson singer-songwriter Pietrangelo weaves in her debut solo album “Back to the Heart,” which she will release on Friday, March 7, with a star-studded concert at Temple of Music and Art’s Alice Holsclaw Theatre, 330 S. Scott Ave.

The concert, at 7:30 p.m. Friday, will feature a handful of Tucson artists with whom Pietrangelo has collaborated over the past 20 years, including Howe Gelb, John Convertino (Calexico), Naim Amor, Tom Walbank, Wolf Larsen, Mamma Coal, Thoger Lund, Jacob Valenzuela, Nick Coventry, Katherine Byrnes, Chris Peña, Casey Hadland, Brian Lopez (XIXA), and Tucson singer-songwriter John Coinman, who Pietrangelo has known a short while.

Some of the artists will sit in on songs while others will lend backing vocals as Pietrangelo, winner of the summer 2023 John Lennon Songwriting Contest, plays the full album, from the opening “Bisbee Bluebird” to the closing melodically acoustic “Western Sea (Nayla’s Song).”

She’ll take us to “Tucson,” where soaring trumpet and percussion (Convertino and Valenzuela) add mariachi accents to the “mountains colored in a hue of blue, pink and purple round her head.” We’ll tag along to North Fourth Avenue with “Summer Losers” who “got stuck in Tucson without a good plan,” waiting for the monsoons “with the spirit world to keep him high,” before we hightail it through the arroyos to ride on the desert wind “through the sun-bleached day and star-filled night” of “El Gran Altar.”

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“Back to the Heart” is a reminder of Pietrangelo’s vocal range and diversity, which we’ve mostly experienced from her work with her critically-acclaimed Silver Thread Trio folk ensemble and her 12-voice a capella ensemble Sister Solace. She went solo in 2018ish and had done just a few live shows including a March 2020 Hotel Congress gig with Gelb when the pandemic slammed the brakes on her plans.

Pietrangelo spent the COVID era penning the album, which was recorded with Tucson’s celebrated recording engineer Jim Waters at Waterworks Recording and with Steven Lee Tracy at Saint Cecilia’s Studios. Pietrangelo recorded one song — “Little Runaway” — on her own after making a last-minute switch.

Pietrangelo goes from rockabilly twangy on “No Mistake,” given a terrific bluesy feel courtesy Tucson blues harmonica great Walbank, to sweetly pop on “Rise,” with Coventry (The Black Market Trust) playing violin and viola, Lund on upright bass and Hadland on percussion and bowed vibes. She shows off a palpable vulnerability with the dreamy vocal feeling she summons on “Western Sea.”

Perhaps the song that best sums up Pietrangelo’s Tucson is the sentimental “1953,” taken from family stories about going to the Tucson rodeo parade with “Granddaddy behind the wheel/His two little girls in the back seat driving, “Grandma waiting there in her hat/And scarf and her cowgirl shoes.”

Friday’s release concert begins at 7:30 p.m. Tickets are $22-$52 through ticketweb.com.

Pietrangelo will have vinyl and CD copies of the album on hand for sale at Friday’s concert. You also can order through her website, gabriellepietrangelo.com.