Tony Lucca
- Old Church |
- Thursday, November 10
- 7 p.m. |
- Free |
- All ages welcome
About Tony Lucca
Singer-songwriter Tony Lucca's sixth studio album, Rendezvous With the Angels, finds the performer crafting his most thoughtful, tuneful, and mature work yet. The album includes appearances by Lucca's 2009 tour mate Sara Bareilles (who duets on "Back to Me") and Lady Antebellum guitarist Jason "Slim" Gambill (featured on the bonus track "Nobody But You").
The songs on the new album, mostly penned on the road over the course of a busy 2009 touring schedule, demonstrate new growth and fresh perspectives on the artist's part.
Lucca notes, "A lot of my earlier records have break-up songs on them, and woe-is-me songs, and pointing-finger songs. Those make for emotional music, and a lot of people can relate to those songs. But that's not really so much where I am anymore."
Now married for three years and the father of a baby girl, Lucca found the expanding emotional parameters of his life working their way into his material.
"‘Always' was a song I wrote for my baby girl," he says. "I wrote that before she was born; I wrote that while I was on tour in September of 2009, and the baby was born in October. I had a lot to think about on the road. The idea of being able to honestly, unconditionally love someone, forever and always, became an overwhelming source of inspiration, and I was able to write that pretty easily. ‘Love Light' follows that, and is a creative take on the miracle-of-life adventure, about how wonderful it is to pass things along."
Three tracks on the album - "Stay With Me Tonight," "Song to a Martyr," and "Nobody But You" - are longtime concert favorites that attained a life of their own via exposure on the Internet and YouTube. Lucca decided to record them after years of fan requests at shows.
Rendezvous With the Angels is the culmination of a life spent in music. Raised in Waterford, Michigan, Lucca began singing at age 3; by 12 he was writing and playing in Detroit-area bands. As a teen, he lived in Orlando, Florida, where he worked for four seasons on the Disney Channel's "Mickey Mouse Club" alongside such future superstars as Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera, and *Nsync's Justin Timberlake and JC Chasez.
Lucca says of that experience, "A lot of the kids who came out of ‘Mickey Mouse Club' wound up sitting at a big banquet of stardom and celebrity and pop success. That was awesome for them, and exciting. That was what they chose to do. There were another handful of us who didn't do that. I got to California in 1995 and saw what was out there, and got away from the star-making machinery, and thought about what I was going to say before I had other people tell me to say it. For me, it wasn't so much about being big and famous and doing whatever it took to do that. It was about having a sense of self as an artist and a sense of credibility, and doing something that I was happy with, regardless of the accolades or the success."
As far as the veteran artists who have helped shape his sound and style, he adds, "I'm a huge Crosby, Stills & Nash fan, and a Joni Mitchell fan. Lyrically and compositionally, I've always tried to incorporate their integrity into what I do. And over the last five years I've spent an ample amount of time with the Beatles. There's music, and then there's the Beatles. They're almost like a course you'd take in school."
Lucca's life-long immersion in music and his ever-deepening experience have resulted in a potently affecting new work. Summarizing his achievement on Rendezvous With the Angels, he says, "I set out to make a record that was me, as much as possible. I was trying to look at things from another angle. There are songs that deal with faith in love and letting go of relationships in hopes that they may return. It's about the ebb and flow of love."
- Website:
- http://www.tonylucca.com/
