Susan Angeletti has released her fifth CD Wisdom and she has the wisdom of a lady who is five CDs into a whirlwind career in blues and hard rock. Her first CD was released in 1998 and she’s been in bands since she was a 16 years high schooler in western Massachusetts.
Wisdom is her third studio CD and six out of seven of the new songs are originals. As her songwriting and as a singer she is where she wants to be. “Blues is the thing I’m most in love with,” she said. “You can’t pull the blues or the soul out of me or out of my voice no matter what I sing. I still the like the rock stuff too, but I tend to like the blues-based rock stuff.”
Angeletti plays her own material at her gigs, interjecting classic rock songs, then blues stuff by Muddy Waters, and older R&B material from the likes of Sam Cooke, Otis Redding, and Ray Charles. On her first tour Angeletti was opening for Johnny Winters after her first CD was produced by John Sheldon.
“John produced my first CD,” she said. “John played guitar on it. John’s an amazing guitar player, kind of like a Jeff Beck kind of guy. We ended up making this CD Next Year’s Model Of The Blues. It just started with all these really nice reviews and feedback, and we were doing weekly house gigs, and we got a little buzz. The folks who owned the Pearl Street Nightclub in North Hampton were having Johnny Winter in January of 99, and they contacted me and asked me if I wanted to open a show for him.” Her answer was yes.
The show was packed with a thousand people and Angeletti met Winter’s band after the show. Winter’s manager asked for her CD to be overnighter to him, called her down to a Connecticut business meeting, and tried to get her a record deal and took her out on the road. “That was so eye opening and so fun,” she said.
She opened for Winter all over the northeast before heading over to the west coast for the second leg of Winter’s tour. After winning over many new fans for her music, she got to hang out in the crowd and listen to the living legend. “I was like kid in a candy store,” she said. “California was beautiful too.”
Angeletti got to perform with Ian Anderson at the Colonial Theater in Keene after he picked her song “All Gassed Up” out of many other contestants in a promo he was conducting for his Rubbing Elbows Tour. The performance with Anderson went onto Anderson’s website and Anderson gave her his agent’s name. It’s also on Angeletti’s live CD titled 99 & A ½ Won‘t Do. Around this time, Angeletti started working with Susan Tedeschi’s producer Tom Hambridge.
“Tom Hambridge was a doll,” she said. “He’s full of energy, full of ideas, writing songs all the time. I had heard of him, of course, as he works with Susan Tedeschi, who’s also from Massachusetts and Italian and named ‘Susan.’ So, people actually mistake me for her, a lot. I used to get them going. They’d ask, ‘Are you Susan Tedeschi/’ and I’d go ‘Yeah,’ but then I told them I wasn’t her.”
From there, Angeletti went to Nashville and recorded Hambridge’s song “Love Doctor” which he wrote for Angeletti’s Bittersweet CD. “I liked that,” she said. “It was fun. He said he was trying to figure out a song for a strong woman to sing. He came up with that. I think what’s funny is George Thorogood has recorded a version of it, and now he thinks he’s the love doctor.” Angeletti’s two favorite songs off that CD that Hambridge wrote were “Feels Like Rain” and another called “The Other Side Of The River.”
When asked if she sees herself as a blues singer or a rock singer: “I always call myself a blue singer because I feel that’s really where I’m coming from, but I know that real blues purists are going to say I’m not exactly a blues singer,” she said. “But I think that it’s the feeling in the music. I almost call myself more of a soul singer than a blues singer, though I don’t call myself either, more than I would say a rock singer. I like rock and roll, but blues is my love.”
Angeletti’s friend Bruce Korona, who became her guitarist is a rock guitarist who meets her in the middle. “We make sure we have our ground covered,” she said.
Growing up, Angeletti was most inspired and influenced by Bonnie Raitt, Koko Taylor, Etta James, and Janis Joplin. “Even Janis, it was the same thing,” Angeletti said. “She may have been a rocker, but she really had the blues in her all the time, I think.”
Guitarist Bruce Korona and Angeletti had known each other from the area for years and had sat in with each other many times. Angeletti always admired his high energy, and they got together as a side band that would play out for fun. Before she knew it, he was introducing riffs and chord changes, and these original compositions became their new focus.
Her title track “Wisdom” is groovy with some rock in it while her new tunes “Rock Me Right,” “Got To Have You Baby,” and “Knock On My Door” are blues songs. Her partnership with Korona fell into place and the partnership went well, as if “we got a little angel or somebody showed up to help us” she said. In fact, a fan approached them at a gig and offered to put up the money for the current recording and lets them pay her back over time.
Working with producer Jim Fogarty at Zing Studio was another blessing. “Rock Me Right,” “Hypnotized,” and “Knock On My Door” came right out of her creative imagination and onto the recording. For her next step, Angeletti will ship out 500 copies of her CD to radio stations around the country and she hopes that will lead to new CD sales and some gigs at new rooms.
“I just want to make good music and carve out a little career, and by the time I’m an old lady, I’d like to be able to look back and think that I contributed something to the music world and the blues world,” she said.