Minnesota-based singer/songwriter Tony Cuchetti is following his debut album, Hid It On The Sly (2020), and performance album, Live From Drum Farm Studio (2020), with 2023’s Freer Street, a collection of original songs punctuated by a couple of beloved cover tunes. Cuchetti returned to home turf at Drum Farm Studio in Menomonie, WI to record, joined by fellow Minnesotan Erik Koskinen, who produced and played both rhythm and lead guitar on the album, as well as co-writing many of the tracks.
Together, they gathered friends and seasoned musicians Blair Krivanek (lead/rhythm guitar), Nick Salisbury (bass), JT Bates (drums/percussion), and Gregg Inhofer (Hamond B3 organ) to complete the tracks in a collaborative environment. Wanting as raw and as spur of the moment a vibe as possible, the majority of the album was recorded live with everyone in one room and had minimal overdubs in post-production.
The album’s title refers to a presence on the album, never too openly stated, but imbued into the music itself, that of Cuchetti’s late grandfather who lived on Freer Street in Detroit, where much of Cuchetti’s family hails from.
Cuchetti shares: “There isn’t much directly written about him on the album, but he was a huge influence on my life. About a year ago, I found this old black and white, sepia-toned picture of him that I’ve had forever and I thought it would be an outstanding album cover.”
The experiences of performing as a touring musician from a young age and playing Minor League baseball after college also shaped Tony Cuchetti’s life and contributed to the drive that fires him today.
Cuchetti explains: My parents are both still active musicians and music teachers. I am number 8 of 10 children. My parents decided to start a family act in the late 60s, and started playing malls, fairs, conventions, and even Vegas in the era of the Jackson 5 and The Osmonds. That’s pretty much how I grew up, on the road for ten or eleven months a year. It was a pretty tight-knit production, and we were self-contained as a family.”
Storytelling is key to Cuchetti’s way of thinking, in the vein of singer/songwriters like Kris Kristofferson, Guy Clark, and Townes Van Zandt, who combine compelling details and situations with music that creates an intrinsic connection with fellow human beings. When the Minnesota State Arts Board awarded him an “Inspired Collusion-Fine Art Interpreted Thru Song, Advancing Artist Grant” in 2019, Cuchetti accepted 200 art submissions of various media from local artists, picked twelve, and proceeded to write songs inspired by those art submissions. The results were the pieces we find on his album, Hid It On The Sly.
Through recording his initial album, and two subsequent albums at Drum Farm, a studio owned by John Richardson(who produced Hid It On The Sly), Cuchetti also became one of Richardson’s flagship artists for the newly founded Farm To Label Records. It was Richardson who suggested that Cuchetti record a live collection, capturing some of the performance life of his music from Hid It On The Sly as well as performances from two of his younger sisters on vocals, his brother on drums, and his father playing trumpet.
From the Jazz, Motown, and Opera he inherited from his parents, to the Rock, Blues, and Funk his siblings passed down, the only things really missing from Cuchetti’s palette were Country and Folk, but discovering them became the basis for his later development in the current wave of Americana music.
“It’s a really exciting time since there’s so much of an underbelly to Americana and there are people who are seeking it out.”, he comments, “People are digging a little deeper than just what they are hearing on the radio.” But the flipside of storytelling is that moment of truth standing in front of an audience and hoping to make an impact.
As Cuchetti explains, “When you’re playing a song that you’ve written, it’s a really vulnerable thing. There are moments when you can hear a pin-drop and people are really tuned in. Music is so powerful in its effects on people. I think people, intrinsically, feel way more than they think they do or give themselves credit for.”
The songwriting for Freer Street proceeded very much at its own pace since Cuchetti tries to let songs develop in a natural way, however, he found himself in an unusually active period while writing many of the songs that appear on the album. He shares: “I had some ideas I was throwing around. That’s kind of the style of writer that I am. Stuff doesn’t just come to me every day. But for some reason, there was a spell of a few months when things were just coming.”
There were some other elements that needed to come into play to finish the songs and also to get a clearer picture of the album. As Cuchetti explains, “I got together with Erik Koskinen and we hashed out and finished a few songs. Then there were a couple cover songs that I wanted to throw on there that I really loved and that fit the vibe.”
The role of the cover songs on Freer Street is actually key rather than being simply an extra embellishment. The emotion and stories behind those songs form part of the tapestry of connections we see on the wider album as a whole.
“Convince My Heart” was written by a former Nashville songwriter and family friend, Tim Probst, who loomed large in Cuchetti’s early life. While Probst often encouraged Cuchetti to keep at songwriting and use any of his songs that he might care to play, ironically, it was many years after Probst’s untimely death that Cuchetti began bringing “Convince My Heart” into his live set. Audience reaction was clear and instant, and even Probst’s daughters were delighted to see Cuchetti make an album recording of their father’s work.
Cuchetti adds: “It’s a cover song by someone who I grew up admiring as a songwriter and I hope putting his music out there picks up a bunch of traction because he deserves it. You hear that story all the time. There are great writers and Nashville tells them they are no good, but they are great.”
The album’s other cover, “Lay It On Me”,was written by Eddie Hinton,a relatively obscure songwriter of the 70s, who never formally released the song but created a demo that included his heart-wrenching soulful piano vocals and piano stylings. When Cuchetti’s bass player, Nick Salisbury, put him onto the demo version, he found himself listening to it twenty times late one night after a gig. As Cuchetti comments, “Still, it does something to me. It’s one of my favorite tracks on the album for sure.”
While the original songs on Hid It On The Sly were inspired by art objects, Cuchetti’s original songs for Freer Street spring from a source close to the surface as a songwriter, performer, father, and family member. It was actually a discussion that his father started that inspired Cuchetti to write one of the most gripping tracks on the album, “The After.” The expansive and conversational feeling of the song delivers some of the most universal feelings, questioning why we put off doing the things that might bring us happiness until it is, potentially, too late.
Cuchetti shares: “The song came from an article that my dad sent me on a text thread with my siblings. The writer was saying, ‘Don’t wait for the afters. Do what you want to do now.’ Later, I thought, ‘I want to write a song about not waiting to do what you want to do.’ A lot of people wait for retirement, but what if you don’t make it there?” Cuchetti, coincidentally, found that the song structure complimented the idea of the piece by consistently building, as if “…you’re rolling down a hill, slow at first, then increasingly building up speed until you almost have the sensation that you may very well become airborne!”
Another key track from the album, both thematically and musically, is “Stubborn Bones.” The song not only represents Cuchetti stepping more firmly into an observational role of the world as storyteller, it also shows the fruits of shooting for the moon in terms of orchestration and production, as well as by including Aby Wolfas duet vocalist.
Cuchetti was familiar with Wolf’s work through his collaborator, drummer JT Bates’ wide-ranging work in Jazz. Having already finished the track, Cuchetti and Bates put their instinctual sense that Wolf’s vocals would complete the song into words, and to their surprise, she agreed wholeheartedly. Having given Wolf free reign, Cuchetti observes, “It was just mind-blowing in the studio. It was beautiful. She totally absorbed that song, came in there, and just nailed it.”
Somewhere between the music and the lyrics, the bigger story of “Stubborn Bones” takes shape, a story that remains balanced between despair and hope. For Cuchetti, “The theme of the song came from seeing how people were treating each other during Covid, then seeing what happened to George Floyd and the riots that followed. When I was first playing around with the song, I had a progression, then the words just all came from there. That song developed from things that had been on my mind and that I was really struggling with, emotionally, dealing with how people were treating each other.”
An interesting aspect of the song was captured when key words from the chorus were sung differently by Wolf and Cuchetti. Cuchetti sang, “Cause we can change it.”, while Wolf sang, “Cause we can’t change it.” Together, the differing lyrics pose a question for the future. The orchestration on the song, however, trends towards a soulful hope. Cuchetti observes: “It almost has a trance or mantra feeling to me, musically, but with the layers between the vocals and the instruments, it becomes a really beautiful, organic piece.”
While the songs from Freer Street move between classic Rock elements, Bluesy rhythms, and Gospel-tinged undertones, there’s a sense of touching base with core values and core questions to reach out to audiences. But in the end, Tony Cuchetti builds songs from his own perspective in the hopes of finding those of like mind. He concludes, “What sounds good and what makes me feel good, that’s how I operate.” by Hannah Means-Shannon