Tony Lucca

Singer-songwriter Tony Lucca’s sixth studio album “Rendezvous With the Angels,” out July 13, 2010, on Rock Ridge Music (through Warner Music Group’s Alternative Distribution Alliance), 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.
The album also includes a nod to one of Lucca’s key influences in a cover of Billy Joel’s “Vienna.” He says, “That was a song that I have loved since I was a kid. I spent a lot of time with Billy Joel’s ‘The Stranger’ and ‘52nd Street.’ Those two records were in full rotation when I was growing up. When I started learning how to play piano, I, of course, took to Billy Joel and Elton John. ‘Vienna’ was always one of those tunes that you had to tackle. I started playing it live, and the lyrics really hit home for me.”
“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 was 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.”
Lucca went the Internet route and sold his first two independent releases, his debut “So Satisfied” (1997) and the follow-up “Strong Words, Softly Spoken” (1999), through his own website. His first commercially distributed album, “Shotgun,” arrived in 2004. It was succeeded by his Rock Ridge Music debut “Canyon Songs” (2006) and “Come Around Again” (2008).
His songs have been featured on TV’s “Friday Night Lights,” “Brothers & Sisters,” “Shark,” and “Felicity” and in Kevin Costner’s feature “Open Range.” He has been seen on E! Entertainment Television and A&E, and performed numerous times on NBC’s “Last Call With Carson Daly.”
Over the course of his career, Lucca has shared stages with *Nsync, Marc Anthony, Macy Gray, Johnny Lang, and the late Chris Whitley. His 2009 dates included an opening stint with Bareilles, gigs with Tyrone Wells, and a cooperative tour with Jay Nash and Matt Duke (which resulted in “TFDI,” a collaborative EP recorded at SPACE in Evanston, Illinois, and released by Rykodisc in late 2009).
A variety of musical influences flow through Lucca’s music. Among his peers, he says, “There have been a few artists of late who have raised the bar and have forced me to reach higher – Ray LaMontagne, Jeff Tweedy and Wilco, Band of Horses, Fleet Foxes. These are people I listen to now that have become the underscore, the soundtrack to my life. Whenever I’m stuck on a lyric I think to myself, ‘What would Tweedy do?’”
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