When the blues-rock singer and guitarist Susan Tedeschi considers her itinerary for a coming tour, she worries about more than venue size, motel rooms and the other things that might concern the average musician on the road. She also reads up on museums, zoos, aquariums and anything else that might appeal to the most important members of her entourage: her son, Charlie, who is almost four, and daughter, Sophia, one.
And if the vagaries of scheduling and travel permit, somewhere along the way she might even work in a few days with the fourth member of the household: her husband, the guitarist Derek Trucks.
Such is the life of the two-career family, roots-rock style. Altogether, Tedeschi, 35, and Trucks, 26, have three bands, 11 albums, two children and a house in Jacksonville, Florida, that is rarely
PHOTO: NY TIMES
occupied by all of them at once.
"The schedules are pretty chaotic," Trucks said, sitting with Tedeschi in a New York jazz club during a recent mini-vacation away from the children. "We'll both be on the road. My mom goes on the road with Susan and the kids, usually. If there's a day off, instead of resting up, you hop on a plane and meet the rest of the crew."
Trucks, who first attracted attention a decade ago as a teenage guitar prodigy, leads the groove-heavy Derek Trucks Band and is also a member of the current lineup of the Allman Brothers Band. (His uncle, Butch Trucks, is one of the Allman Brothers' drummers.) Tedeschi's 1998 debut, Just Won't Burn, earned her comparisons to Bonnie Raitt and a Grammy nomination for best new artist.
There have been musical couples before them, of course, from George Jones and Tammy Wynette to Bruce Springsteen and Patti Scialfa. But the most long-lived have tended to be professional partners, and often unequal ones. After marrying Johnny Cash, June Carter Cash once told an interviewer: "I worked with John, but I had enough sense to walk just a little ways behind him. I could have made more records, but I wanted to have a marriage."
Trucks and Tedeschi are striving for a different model, maintaining separate careers with occasional intersections.
"In some ways I feel like you're kind of finding your own path," Trucks said, "because there's not a lot of other people that do it and make it work. You hear a lot of stories, broken stories, I've seen plenty of those."
Sitting together for their first joint interview -- the first one they've had time for, they say -- the two display a bantering affection. They also sound a little dazed at the events of the past five years, which have left them little time to get their bearings as a couple or a family.
"I'm an emotional person," Tedeschi said. "Being a woman, you feel like, `Oh my gosh, everything has to be just right, your kids and this and that.' But there's no way you can control everything. I'm used to being a control freak and I've had to learn to just cut that out. Derek is such a pro at just dealing with all types of situations, so I actually really look to him as sort of guidance in a lot of ways -- how to get through situations and how to plan and not stress."
Those differences come through in their music. Trucks, whose long blond hair and wide, easy smile give him an air of overgrown boyishness, favors flowing, jazz-tinged improvisations. Tedeschi, petite and poised, has a big, warm voice that she holds back just enough to keep from swamping her
material. Her tasteful restraint makes her a natural collaborator, and she has been recruited by the likes of Willie Nelson, the Dead and B.B. King.
Trucks said he draws inspiration from his wife's work, and maybe a little competitive spirit -- "You don't want to be completely outgunned in your own home," he said, with one of his frequent laughs. But so far their musical matrimony has been limited. Trucks played on a few songs on Tedeschi's last two albums, she sang on one of his, and they recorded a track together for a Robert Johnson tribute compilation.
"In the future we'll do that much more," Trucks said. "I've been trying to build a studio behind our house. I just got plans drawn finally, so when we are rehearsing, we can rehearse at home, keep the band there, maybe record at home."
Not that home is much on the radar these days. Tedeschi is still touring in support of her most recent album, Hope and Desire, which has been near the top of Billboard's blues chart since its release last fall. The Derek Trucks Band released its latest album, Songlines, on Feb. 21.
This month, Trucks will be with the Allman Brothers for the band's annual residency at the Beacon Theater in New York, this year a 13-night stand. Tedeschi will bring the children up to join him, although she will have to make side trips for shows in Canada and at the South by Southwest festival in Austin, Texas.
Soon after, both will head to Europe for separate tours, Tedeschi with her band and Trucks as a member of Eric Clapton's touring ensemble. They will meet up in France, and maybe England -- "I'll be there for a little while with the kids, so he can see the kids for a week or so," Tedeschi said -- before Tedeschi returns home for a planned engagement with Etta James.
They met in 1999, when Tedeschi was invited to tour with the Allman Brothers. She started hanging out before and after shows with Trucks and his friend Oteil Burbridge, the Allman Brothers' bass player, talking and listening to music. "One day, they turned me on to Sun Ra and Liberace at the same time," she said.
Trucks soon took Tedeschi home to meet his close-knit family in Jacksonville. His mother, Debbie Trucks, said in a phone interview, "I liked her right off the bat. I thought, `Now, this is going to work."'
In mid-2001, when Tedeschi discovered she was pregnant, marriage seemed like the obvious step. The wedding was in December, and Charlie was born a few months later.
Sophia followed in 2004, also without forethought. "In our situation, if you're going to have kids, it's going to have to be a mistake," Trucks said. "There's just no time to plan for it."
Like a lot of working mothers, Tedeschi has adjusted her schedule, taking longer between albums and tours. She recorded Hope and Desire, an album of covers of lesser-known soul tunes, because she was pregnant with Sophia and had not finished a batch of original songs.
"The biggest problem that I have, careerwise, is finding time to play music and write music when I'm not onstage," she said. "Because I'm mom from six or seven in the morning up until a few minutes before I go onstage sometimes. So there's really no break."
Trucks is away more often than not, although he calls every day. His mother, who still has two of Trucks' younger siblings at home, is Tedeschi's nanny.
But Trucks and Tedeschi said they have not worried about giving the children a traditional upbringing. "What's normal?" Tedeschi said with a shrug.
"I don't think that's even something to strive for in 2000-whatever," Trucks said. "It's fun having a house full of musicians and instruments and kids. There's drum sets and pianos and tympanis and all kinds of fun stuff to bang on, make noise on."
There are also moments like the time Charlie, at four months old, ended up onstage with his mother and father during a Les Paul gig at the Iridium club in New York. And the time he met B.B. King, who gave Charlie a guitar pin off his lapel. "It's cool stuff that he'll look back on when he's older," Trucks said.
The couple anticipate slowing down a little once Charlie and Sophia are old enough for school, with at least one of them home at any given time. But for now, they can look forward to December, a month they set aside to be at home, or at least together. Last New Year's Eve, their extended families,
musical and otherwise, gathered for a joint show in Atlanta.
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