If catharsis is the fuel that fires the engine of blues, then singer, songwriter and harp player Brandon Santini right now is on the edge of the most intense tour of his career. He opens the tour this Friday, August 2nd at the Linda in Albany, New York following a series of issues that might cause the average artist to simply walk away from performing.
But Santini is not your average blues musician. A native of North Carolina, his highest profile successes have been in the placement of his original music on several TV shows. His song “Got Good Lovin” is featured on season one, episode 4 of The NBC Peacock Network’s original series Poker Face. “Somebody’s Gotta Go” can be heard on the CBS series Fire Country and is the theme song for The Country Shine podcast with Graham Bunn.
That’s the good news. The bad news is the degenerative disk disease in Santini’s back. “I had back surgery in February, a spinal fusion to take care of some degenerative disk disease. A herniated disk had been pushing my sciatic nerve on my right side for a couple of years, and 2023 was pretty tough. We were working a lot, and it was rearing its ugly head, so I bit the bullet and decided to get the surgery. The recovery hasn’t been as good as we hoped and the pain we targeted hasn’t completely gone away. So, I just keep waiting it out at this point.”
If anything, his health problems are giving him an edge on a style of traditional electric blues that he says is moving in a more contemporary direction in an album he’s working on between dates of his current tour. The pain he has does not affect his harp playing. “I don’t have any pain in my hands or anything like that. It’s all been in my lower back, down the right side of my leg, and that burning feeling.
“I would say the next album is more modern blues. My career has been pretty much a traditional harp player, a lot of 12-bar 2-4-5s and things like that. The Longshot (his fourth and most recent record released in 2019) was more of step in that direction getting away from that stuff a little bit more, and then this one I did some pre-production on with Jeff Jensen who is going to produce it.” Jensen co-fronted the band featured on The Longshot that peaked at Number 7 on the Billboard Blues Album Chart.
That album was released on the now defunct American Showcase Records. “They had a good thing going, and we were actually slated to a two-album deal when the pandemic hit and slowed us down. Ben Elliott was battling lung cancer in April of 2020, and he was pretty much the main operation. The other guy, Steve Shiff was basically a silent partner. So, they just decided to sell off everything and just shut it down.”
Santini’s lyrics are heartfelt and often reflect relationship problems. His guitarist Timo Athur is the perfect foil for Santini’s songs of trouble and woe. “I don’t play guitar on stage. I’ll record and write songs, but Timo handles those duties. He’s been with me for 10 years now. He’s an incredible guy, and incredible guitar player. He’s a great guy to be around, but I met him I guess it was 2014 in Memphis. He was living in Atlanta, and I was living in Memphis at the time. His band was representing the Atlanta Blues Society, and I remember being down on Beale Street and checking out the music before I played because we were doing a late-night deal after the competition down there, but I remember seeing him and hearing him. I really enjoyed what he did. We chatted and (I remember thinking) I like this guy a lot.
“Our guitar player at the time was scheduled to leave the band and take on his solo career. So, we started chatting, and I offered the job to him a few weeks later. He moved out to Memphis, and we’ve just been touring the world since. He’s originally from Connecticut. He spent a lot of time between Boston around that music scene around there, but between Boston and Atlanta that’s where he’s lived for the most part. That’s where he’s most active.”
Santini credits the band Blues Traveler as a major influence, especially their vocalist and harp player John Popper. “He was an outcast to a lot of the blues community which I understand. It was the ‘90s, and I’d never heard harmonica played like that. The songs I was subjected to were the ones on the radio. The first was “But Anyway” and then “Run-around,” “Hook” – the big hits. I never heard anybody play harp like that. I wasn’t a harp player, and I wasn’t a musician at the time. I was listening to pop radio and country and things like that were on the radio in North Carolina.
“I just remember listening to the harmonica, and it was in a different context from what I’d heard guys like Neil Young and Bob Dylan play before, and it was really cool. I gravitated toward that, bought the CDs and read inside the booklet “John Popper plays Hohner.” And that was the lightbulb moment, and I asked my mom to take me to the music store ’cause I wasn’t driving yet, and she did, and the rest is history.”
Add to the left field influence of Blues Traveler on Santini’s sound the fact that in 2010 he recorded a song called “Airport Song” with Sam the Sham. Sam and his band the Pharoahs are best known for breaking the British Invasion’s hold on the pop charts in 1965 with a top-10 novelty song “Wooly Bully.” Sam had long since disappeared into obscurity. Santini ran into him in the produce department of a supermarket in Memphis. They ended up recording together in a studio run by Victor Wainwright.
“He had a five-bedroom house. There were always a lot of musicians living there. We always affectionately called it the Big Stink instead of the Big Pink like The Band up in New York, but we even have an engineer as a roommate. So, later that evening, Sam came over with Jerry Patterson who was the drummer with the Pharoahs. He played on “Wooly Bully,” and was over there at the house and recorded this satire that Sam wrote about what happened at the airport where the guy was being searched. We were dubbed the Wrecking Crew on that single.”
Brandon Santini may be in pain, but he’s optimistic about the future. Having his music on popular tv shows is certainly an anomaly for a touring blues singer. “The last two years are pretty exciting, and I think this new music, the new album, will only hopefully pick more rotation.”
