Life’s Sure Changing Now

Singer-guitarist Susan Tedeschi was suspicious when she got a call from the National Academy of Recording Arts & Sciences asking her to fly to Chicago in January for that city’s portion of the Grammy nominations announcement.

Why would a relative unknown who plays a non-trendy brand of bluesy, rootsy rock, and has sold less than a tenth as many albums as her peers at the podium, Kid Rock and R. Kelly, be asked there unless her name was to be called?

Sure enough, in a decision that ranked on the surprise meter with jazz singer Diana Krall’s best-album nomination, Tedeschi was nominated for best new artist, joining the critically acclaimed and/or huge-selling field of Macy Gray, Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera and Kid Rock.

“I was excited, and I was a little shocked,” says Tedeschi, 29. “I think I still am. A lot of the other people are so much more famous and have sold multi-platinum records. I think I’ll realize it more when I’m there; then I think it’ll hit me more.”

Tedeschi tries to keep herself insulated from matters beyond touring and recording, so the nomination’s real effect is being felt by her label, Tone-Cool Records. As perhaps the smallest company in recent years to land in one of the Grammys’ Big Four categories, the Boston-based independent is in a rare position to discover just what kind of clout the nomination carries for an unknown name.

The answer: quite a bit in publicity, with mixed results in sales and airplay.

Tedeschi’s debut album, “Just Won’t Burn,” which came out in early 1998, has been a slow, steady seller on the way to the 353,000-plus mark.

It sneaked into the Top 200 sales chart briefly in January 1999 and again briefly a few months later. The weeks immediately following the Grammy announcement didn’t show any notable change from its recent rate of about 2,500 sales per week--but it jumped above the 3,000 mark in the most recent weekly tally.

Mainstream radio, still a crucial cog to success, is a similar story.

“[Radio] people are more open to it, they will listen to it,” says Dave Bartlett, vice president and co-owner of Tone-Cool. “But it’s not like they’re saying, ‘Hey, this is a Grammy nominee, so this will work on my station; let’s play it.’ ”

Elsewhere, though, it’s been a windfall.

“TV, who has turned us down forever, was returning our calls and saying, ‘Yes, we would like to have her,’ ” says Bartlett. “The press--Rolling Stone originally said, ‘Well, come back to us with the next record,’ and the next thing you know, she’s in the issue that just came out. . . .

“It creates a national story, so suddenly people have a reason to talk about Susan and write about Susan and have her on their show.”

How did Tedeschi get nominated?

One factor is certainly the recording academy’s relatively new system for the four top categories, in which a blue ribbon panel selects the five finalists from the 20 top finishers in the membership-wide voting.

Another is Tone-Cool’s distribution partnership with the Universal Music Group’s label Island/Def Jam. That company can take over marketing and promotion roles on selected Tone-Cool projects, and when it went to work on Tedeschi, it helped her establish some press exposure and a presence on “adult album alternative” (or Triple A) radio stations.

“She’s been working incredibly hard,” says Bartlett, whose label is home to about 10 acts, most of them blues-related. “While the general public might view her as an unknown, certainly within the industry people know who she is.”

“I thought the reason that maybe it happened was because I’ve had a lot of surprises with radio this year,” says Tedeschi, now a road nomad of no fixed address. “I’ve done really well on radio and I won the Gavin Award for best new artist on Triple A radio. I figure it must be because people knew who I was through radio, and through touring, playing live with so many big acts.”

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The capsule line on Tedeschi is “the new Bonnie Raitt,” which will do for shorthand. The Janis Joplin flag has also been raised.

Says the singer, “I think it’s pretty neat to get compared to both of them, because really those two have nothing in common. So it shows the range of music is a little different.”

Tedeschi grew up in a Boston suburb and started playing in bands when she was 13. Her inspirations included Ray Charles, Linda Ronstadt, Stevie Wonder and Aretha Franklin, but it wasn’t until she graduated from the Berklee College of Music that she focused her vision on a string of blues artists, including Magic Sam, Freddie King, Etta James, Big Mama Thornton and Johnny “Guitar” Watson.

Tedeschi, who has begun recording her second album, insists that her momentum isn’t having any effect on her musical methodology--but she’s not sure about everyone around her.

“It just kind of acknowledges that I’m on the right track,” she says of the Grammy nod. “The only problem is that now that I’m doing so well, everybody from management to agents to the record company to my distributor, . . . now there’s like four people trying to put their say into everything I do.

“They haven’t really pressured me with anything, but I can just see that it’s going in a direction where with [my next] record, they want me to overnight them songs . . . because they want to know if they’re radio-friendly and this and that.

“But I just write whatever comes out. So hopefully they’ll be supportive like with the last record. The last record did so well without them really putting any input in. So it’ll be interesting for me to see how everybody else changes.”