UPSTATE BEAT - Saratoga County singer-songwriter Angelina Valente recently released a video on YouTube for “Running Through the Trees,” the final song from her new album “Sing.” Valente’s first full-length album, “Sing” comes out on Friday.
The 30-year-old pianist and singer, who has been compared to everyone from Joni Mitchell to Nora Jones, wrote the song one night before heading to Saratoga Springs’ Olde Bryan Inn for a gig arranged by the late Matt McCabe, a family friend, fixture in the local music scene and owner of the Saratoga Guitar shop. McCabe later died from COVID 19.
As the album’s final track, “Running Through the Trees” represents the culmination of Valente’s own experience with hardship. Her mother, Anne Valente, who owned the well-known Creative Sparks pottery studio on Phila Street in Saratoga Springs, had been battling brain cancer.
Typically, a video released for a new album corresponds with one of the album’s early tracks. But “Sing” represents a five-year arc in Valente’s life, starting with the more carefree days of her 20s all the way to her mother’s experience with cancer, which is documented in the stirring centerpiece of the album, “Over the Rainbow.”
“The album feels like a culmination of the last five years of my life,” said Valente. “I look at myself and think, ‘Wow, I really was this person at the very beginning who was just caught up in the rain.’ I was living in the moment and all these new things were happening to me, and that was incredible. And then my mom was diagnosed with cancer in 2018 and that was such a wild ride. And my whole life has changed since then.
“After my mom got sick I helped run her pottery studio every day. And I’d spend a lot of time when there was nobody there, or I’d get there early or close up, and I’d hang out in the back and just write music and play piano and ukulele,” she added.
When the album ends, a personal transformation has been achieved, resulting in “Running Through the Trees,” a beautiful song with a feeling of release.
“The song is different than anything else I’ve written,” Valente said. “My songs tend to have an arc and a beginning, middle and end. They’re very story-like. But this song is just a spattering of different things that got me through the last five years of my life, [for instance] a quote that meant something to me. Or something that came to me in meditation. And —bam — they all just became a bunch of little thoughts that weave together.”
The album’s recording was funded by an Individual Artist Grant from Saratoga Arts, the community arts organization in Saratoga Springs that supports projects to promote the professional growth of artists.
“I was given the grant, which rolled the whole album into motion,” said Valente. “I had an image in my head of what I wanted. I’d been sitting on some stuff through COVID, all this new material I had written and just not recorded yet.”
Valente enlisted Sten Isachsen, a recording engineer and multi-instrumentalist who performs with Jim Gaudet and the Railroad Boys. He also is a faculty member at SUNY Schenectady County Community College, which has a well-regarded school of music with a recording studio where the new album came to fruition.
“It was amazing,” said Valente. “We spent about three days in the studio doing a bunch of live recording with the full band. I’d say 75% of what’s on the album was recorded all in one room at the same time.”
Valente grew up in Galway, where her mother enrolled her in the Galway Players community theater program as a child.
“Since I was 5 I did community theater,” she said. “My mom would always say I could sing before I could talk. So she put me in community theater, and I did theater all through middle school and high school. And then I went to college for it, so I have a degree in musical theater.”
During the pandemic Valente’s life in Galway fueled a fertile artistic productivity captured on the new album. It was a positive time artistically, although she later battled symptoms of long-COVID.
“I wrote so much during that time,” Valente said. “I was journaling and meditating, and I was reading spiritual texts and listening to all these podcasts, and I felt so grounded and present, and the songs were so easy. I love the songs that came out of me during that time because I felt very connected. I was walking outside every day in Galway because I lived in the middle of nowhere. I was taking super long walks, and nature has always been a huge inspiration for me.”
Her full band includes JP Hubbs (keyboard), Paul Guay (drums), Matt Griffin (guitar) and multi-instrumentalists Jimi W. and James Gascoyne.
There is power in music and in creative expression. For Valente, releasing an album about such an intense period of her life has been healing, both for herself and for friends and fans who are going through a similar situation.
“It feels very much like this album is a clear chapter in my life,” she said. “It feels really good to finally have all these pieces come together and be able to get it out of my body. Like, ‘OK, we’re letting this one go.’ ”
Visit agelinavalente.com to obtain a copy of the new album.
The Week Ahead
- Seattle indie-folk group The Head and the Heart brings plaintive pop, earnest tunes and its latest album, “Every Shade of Blue,” to The Egg in Albany tonight. With Drew Holcomb and The Neighbors. 8 p.m.
- New York City indie-rock folk-punk musician and comic-book artist Jeffrey Lewis returns to No Fun in Troy tonight with The Burning Hell, who play jubilant rock ‘n’ roll, sad and somber folk songs and many things in between. 8 p.m.
- Cross-cultural ensemble The Brooklyn Nomads appear at Proctors’ GE Theatre on Friday in a Passport Series show. Rooted in music traditions from the Arab world, The Brooklyn Nomads put a multicultural spin on a traditional Arabic repertoire for a broad range of audiences. 7:30 p.m.
- Albany’s The Jagaloons hit the Hangar on the Hudson in Troy on Friday with guitar-driven, reverb-drenched, all-instrumental rock ‘n’ roll. The triple bill includes punk-instrumental group The Coffin Daggers and the cyborg surf band the Tsunamibots. 8 p.m.
- Now sold out, the “Both Sides Now: Songs of Joni Mitchell” show at Caffè Lena honors the pioneering singer-songwriter as she turns 80 with a musical tribute featuring local talent. If you failed to get tickets don’t be sad. A live stream is available for purchase at
- 8 p.m. Saturday.
- Saturday’s retrospective Jethro Tull show at The Palace in Albany will celebrate the Ian Anderson-led prog-rock band over its seven decades — from 1968 to now. 7:30 p.m.
- They got their start at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs but now call Brooklyn home. Psymon Spine, who combine post-punk and left-field dance grooves, come to No Fun in Troy on Wednesday. With Dumbo Gets Mad and Adequate Phil. 7 p.m.