Good Earth

Maria Sangiolo's interprets others

by Mark Edmonds

Maria Sangiolo's Blue Earth (Signature Sounds) arrived recently accompanied by the standard-issue press kit

that every acousti-folkie's latest does these days. It made me pine for the days when discs just showed up in the mailbox alone and unannounced. I feel bad for anyone coming up today, hoping to make a name for his/herself solely on the merits of his or her own work. After all, how can you do that when you're constantly being compared to someone else, as Sangiolo is in her clips? Alongside the usual assortment of critics' endorsements, her record-company bio includes a handful of comparisons to Shawn Colvin and Joan Baez -- tidbits obviously included by her publicists to make reviewers buried in new releases sit up and take notice. This works, sort of. After wading through eight pages, I played Earth. Once done, my thought was that Sangiolo hardly sounds like either woman at all. Instead, she sounds like, hello, Maria Sangiolo.

Sangiolo, who'll appear this Saturday at Southborough's Steeple Coffeehouse, finds it hard to make the same comparison too. "I think it's generous, but I don't think I sound like either one of them either," she admits during a recent interview. Does she think such comparisons are fair? "I don't know. I think people like to compare me to Joan because I'm short and dark, and I sing in sort of a vibrato." And Colvin? "I think I have the emotional intensity in some of my songs that a lot of hers do, but I'm probably more of a balladeer than she is. Her writing is much more rhythmic than mine is. I actually wish mine could be much more like hers. I guess I don't see a lot of similarities there either. I'm a young writer, and I feel I still have a lot of living to do to get to where her work is at now ."

I'd say the Stoughton native's more than halfway there already. On her last project, 1996's Follow Your Own Road, she proved that she's more than capable of painting vivid imagery that, at times, jumped right out at you from the speakers. Writing from reflective and inquisitive viewpoints, she took on everything from women's and familial issues and social dilemmas to the biggest question of all: why are we put here? And she did it all without once having to mine the cliché pit, where so many others find themselves today.

Earth is a similarly complex collection. Except that this time, Sangiolo's not the only one leading the inquisition or trying to come up with answers. She's opted to interpret works by others, and these songs share space with four tracks she wrote herself. The collection includes songs by the late, great Texan, Townes Van Zandt, Vince Gill, Guy Clark, and the Boston-area's own Don White, as well as the works of lesser-known writers. Van Zandt's "To Live Is To Fly" reminds one of just how short life really is, and why it's important to dwell on positive things instead of negative ones. Clark and Gill's collaboration, "Jenny Dreamed of Trains," is about optimism in the face of bleak reality. These dovetail nicely with Sangiolo's own ruminations on subjects such as the inevitable changes we all have to grapple with as we get older, both in ourselves, and the world around us, something she does through the soft pop veneer of "Singing Beach."

"A lot of these speak to me in terms of issues I've had, like emotional stuff I had to deal with," she explains. Her favorites? "`Fly' has a verse in it that really struck me: it says, we've all got holes to fill, I guess I really related to something like that. `Anchor' I included because it really sort of hit me over the head the first time the woman who wrote it pitched it to me. At the time I was gong through a lot of things emotionally about my career . . . sort of letting go some of the expectations I had about how it was going to pan out."

Those expectations have changed some since Sangiolo waxed her cassette debut, Hard Road, six years ago. One major revision came when it finally occurred to her just how hard it was to make a living as a full-time performer. Four years ago, she quit her day job at Boston University. She struggled afterward, despite all the thumbs ups and airplay. ("I found out there isn't a lot of money in folk music unless you're Shawn Colvin.") Now, she's revising those expectations again as she prepares to give birth to her first child in a few months. "I'm not really willing to cart my child around on the road, so I'm planning to take six months off after the baby is born, and after that I'll limit my touring to New England for a while," she predicts. "I'm sure it'll give me a whole new set of experiences to write about."

Maria Sangiolo plays at 7:30 p.m. on April 4 at Southborough's Steeple Coffeehouse. Tickets are $12. Call 485-4847.