Susan Tedeschi of the Tedeschi Trucks Band Gears Up for Red Rocks

“Red Rocks is one thing we look forward to every calendar year,” states singer-songwriter/guitarist Susan Tedeschi from her property in Jacksonville, Florida, wherever the Massachusetts native has lived for twenty yrs. “To me, Red Rocks is incredibly Colorado, and you’re loving character and just soaking it all up. If you’re that type of human being, it’s just incredible. We know it is an honor, and we do not consider it lightly. It kind of blows my intellect each time we go there. It appears to be like a sacred put.”

Tedeschi and her partner, all-star slide guitarist and Allman Brothers royal Derek Vehicles, have been touring and recording alongside one another with the blues-rock Tedeschi Vans Band considering the fact that 2010 the act has performed at Pink Rocks plenty of periods. Mainly because of the COVID-19 pandemic, 2020 was the first time in what appears like an eternity that it did not make the trek to Morrison. In reality, for the first time since both longtime performers have been in elementary school, they didn’t move on any phases for a good calendar year.

“The first couple of months, we were being truly arranging on taking off,” Tedeschi recalls, “but after about four months, we have been like, ‘What the heck is happening?’ It was really strange and surreal, but we stayed active.”

They stayed active mixing the Tedeschi Trucks Band’s new album, a 2019 reside general performance of the traditional Derek and the Dominos album Layla and Other Assorted Enjoy Tracks, with Phish’s Trey Anastasio sharing lead-guitar and vocal responsibilities, and also surprised their file label with yet another album that’s currently in the is effective.

Immediately after the Layla album was completed, Tedeschi remembers, “We have been like, ‘We have to do one thing. We need to have to be resourceful. We need to have to get likely here.’ We kind of place our heads together with Mike Mattison, one particular of our bandmates, who is a Harvard grad, English big. He experienced an notion: ‘Why don’t we all attract from the very same subject?’ He gave us a twelfth-century poem as inspiration, and we all wrote music that would go in and out of that theme. We have penned 24 new songs and have recorded them, so we have been operating on making an attempt to end that, which is an unbelievable total of tunes, and we’re thrilled about it.”

Far more so than on past Tedeschi Vehicles documents, the tracks came from quite a few bandmates rather than just the partner-and-wife stars of the group.

“It’s been genuinely remarkable to be equipped to place ourselves out there and all operate together,” Tedeschi suggests, “but it also built us say, ‘We will need to do some thing for our lovers.’ That was also what induced the Fireplace Classes through the pandemic.”

The act’s well-liked Hearth Sessions, which highlighted several smaller incarnations of the twelve-member Tedeschi Vehicles Band, were being aimed at cheering up lovers all through the most isolating periods of the coronavirus outbreak. Now, Tedeschi is fired up about taking a bare-bones edition of the band on the highway for what is been dubbed the Fireplace Stay Tour.

The livestreamed Fireside Periods were “really entertaining and a wonderful option to show how various the band is, that we’re able to perform as a two-piece or a 4-piece, or 5 or 7 or 8 or whatever,” Tedeschi clarifies. “It produced us comprehend, ‘Once things open up, we can go out. We can do a much more scaled-down thing.’ So that’s what we’re undertaking this summer season. We’re gonna do that until finally items open up up and we can go back to operate as a full band.”

Supporting all of the musicians in that full band and their households for the duration of a pandemic was not easy, admits Tedeschi, who has two teens of her personal, but creating personal sacrifices in get to ensure that her bandmates did not go through was “a no-brainer,” she states. “Since we’re variety of conservative about owning these types of a massive band and paying cash, we’d saved a good deal of money in circumstance of an emergency. So we have been currently setting up on taking a few months off and experienced saved a lot of funds to pay out the band. Then all the unexpected emergency money…we just place that in and paid the band.”

But the revenue that Tedeschi and Trucks experienced saved inevitably ran out. “We have been truly fortunate with some of the PPP financial loans to help out with the band. That genuinely served,” she states. “At the close of the working day, it just seemed like the proper point to do. You gotta preserve people today afloat. I was definitely shocked how quite a few other bands did not do that. You appear at the full picture, and we’re a loved ones it is not the Derek and Susan clearly show. Our band and our crew, we’re all in this alongside one another.”

Some a lot more than other individuals. “Derek and our supervisor and I did not get compensated,” Tedeschi admits. “We have not been compensated since last March. We have been residing on financial savings and pretty much selling baseball cards and points we had acquired in the past for a rainy day. But it is been fine I sense seriously blessed to have had that additional time at house with our daughter and our son ahead of he went off to faculty. He truly received the uncooked end of the deal. He was an honors scholar and a baseball player. He only bought to pitch a number of game titles. It was genuinely heartbreaking, but truly extra for the young ones — seeing the alternatives that they ended up missing out on….

“The two factors I required to do when I grew up had been to have youngsters and participate in tunes,” Tedeschi confides. “I get to do each, so I come to feel extremely grateful.”

Tedeschi has been an entertainer given that she was five, when her mom got her concerned in theatrical effectiveness. “For a lengthy time, I truly did not know what my contacting was, but when I identified blues in my early twenties, that seemed to be much more of my calling,” she remembers. “Just simply because you’re from up north, it is not like the blues are a regional matter. It is just all about what moves you.”

She found her husband’s uncle’s band, a minimal Jacksonville outfit named the Allman Brothers, as a child,  when she and her brother went to a property sale. “I acquired a Clash file, and he identified Brothers and Sisters. To this day, I even now like both of people documents,” she suggests. Like the über-gifted Trucks, Tedeschi invested time taking part in in nostalgia bands with some famous American musicians, such as the surviving customers of the Grateful Lifeless — but as Vehicles explained to me when Tedeschi Vehicles Band final frequented Colorado to participate in Purple Rocks, in 2019, the couple is thrilled to be in a band whose enthusiasts occur out to celebrate new, original music.

“At the end of the working day, it’s all about building your have seem and building your possess tunes and enabling your have self-expression to appear via, and getting to do that with Derek due to the fact 2010 has been astounding,” Tedeschi suggests. “We experience really fortunate and grateful for that, for absolutely sure. And he’s completely appropriate: There is one thing pretty distinctive about when you’re performing your have audio than when you are singing somebody else’s songs.”

Looking again on her career, which started out with the 1995 solo album Greater Times, Tedeschi recollects her 2000 Grammy nomination for Finest New Artist, which observed her together with Child Rock, Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera. “Here I am, a blues artist,” she remembers. “There’s no way in hell I assumed I would ever be in a category with any of them.”

“People always say, ‘Aren’t you unfortunate you didn’t get?’ And I’m, like, ‘No, I did not seriously want to be renowned!’ I’m so satisfied I can go to the supermarket and do ordinary things, like go to my son’s baseball game,” Tedeschi suggests. “We have a typical lifestyle, and how lovely is that? I in no way needed fame it is not about dollars and fame, and in no way was for Derek and me, due to the fact we definitely have a genuine enthusiasm for music and making people today pleased, as well as ourselves. And I obtained to tour with B.B. King and enjoy with John Lee Hooker. John Lee Hooker took his guitar off and gave it to me! I feel like Forrest Gump, for genuine.”

Tedeschi states that her heroes — people today like King, Hooker and David Hidalgo — gave her not just a love of music, but a sense of graciousness, humility and sincerity. All 3 were being mirrored in the way that she and her partner supported their bandmates during the pandemic, and the way they guidance other musicians now.

Could possibly there be a 2000 Ideal New Artist reunion on stage? Tedeschi is amused by the prospect of Britney Spears sitting down in with the Tedeschi Vans Band at Red Rocks.

“Let’s go,” she claims. “Bring it on. I consider we must cost-free Britney, anyway.”

Tedeschi Vehicles Band brings its Fireside Are living Tour to Red Rocks Amphitheatre at 7:30 p.m. Friday, July 30, and 7:30 p.m. Saturday, July 31 tickets, $49.95 to $130, are obtainable at axs.com.