By DAN ARMONAITIS
There’s something about Christmas music that always puts Nathan Angelo in a good mood.
“Celebrating Christmas is pretty awesome,” the Greenville-based singer-songwriter said. “I just have so many great memories of times with family and cousins in other towns, and I think just hearing some of those songs brings back a lot of those memories.”
It’s only fitting that Angelo has a made a tradition of performing annual Christmas shows, having done so in the Upstate each of the last three years. He’ll perform another one on Saturday, Dec. 21 at The Radio Room in Greenville.
“I’ve got my full band that’s going to be there with me, and Wirewood — another local group — is opening the show,” Angelo said. “So, yeah, it’s going to be fun. I just released a four-song Christmas EP, so we’ll be playing all of those songs, of course. … And, then, we’ll be doing a bunch of Christmas classics and some other originals as well.”
The EP to which Angelo referred is “Season For You,” a solid effort that showcases Angelo’s knack for crafting soulful piano-pop that manages to sound simultaneously classic and contemporary.
“I started working with a licensing company in L.A. at the beginning of the year, and they were looking for songs for the holiday season,” Angelo said. “I already had one original Christmas song that I’d never recorded, ‘It’s Christmas,’ so I got together with a buddy of mine and we put that together, and then he had started working on another song that we finished together, which became ‘Season For You.'”
The EP also includes a rendition of “The Christmas Song,” the holiday standard written by Robert Wells and Mel Tormé and most famously recorded by Nat King Cole, as well as another Angelo original titled “The Ending.”
Of the latter, which doesn’t specifically mention the holiday season but was written near the end of last year, Angelo said, “I felt like it just kind of added some weight and gravity to the project, which is otherwise a bit lighter and just feel-good.
“I’ve been playing that one a bit this year and people have been responding, so I was like, ‘I think it’d be good to just put it on the EP and have it be a song about the new year and about endings.’ And thinking about it, with the decade about to be over as well, it’s a big ending of sorts.”
The 2010s are sure to be remembered fondly by Angelo, who has spent the entire decade making music. Having begun his professional music career in Atlanta, Angelo moved to Greenville seven years ago and has continued releasing new material.
His most recent full-length album, “A Matter of Time,” which was released in 2017, debuted at No. 12 on the iTunes singer-songwriter charts and has already amassed more than two million streams on Spotify.
“I’m very grateful to have been able to continue to do this and to keep creating,” Angelo said. “And, of course, I’m hopeful to continue the path into the ’20s.”
Angelo, who’s in his mid-30s, was born in Copiague, N.Y., “not far from Amityville, where the horrors were,” as he put it with a laugh. The son of a pentecostal pastor, he moved with his family from Long Island to South Florida before he celebrated his first birthday.
Although his family wound up moving to Greenwood during his middle school years, the time Angelo spent in Florida had a tremendous impact on his musical path, especially in terms of his appreciation for classic R&B in the tradition of Stevie Wonder and Marvin Gaye.
“At our church, we had a Cuban drummer and a Puerto Rican trumpet player who would play the congas as well, so there was a lot of expression that was deeper and soulful and even international in some sense,” Angelo said. “So, when I started hearing old soul records when I was in middle school, it just made sense to me. A lot of that stuff kind of came out of a mix of gospel and blues and jazz, so I feel like I already had a palette and understanding for some of that stuff just from what I listened to and experienced all my life in church.”
It also didn’t hurt, Angelo believes, to have grown up in an Italian-American family.
“Coming from Long Island and being Italian, our culture is very expressive, very emotive,” Angelo said. “You kiss each other on the face when you see each other, you hug each other, you pull people close. So, when I hear soul singers, it makes sense because they’re expressing from a deeper place. It’s like they’re crying with their voices.
“So, I just feel that coming from a more expressive culture is also a part of why that style of music has always resonated with me and touched something deep down in my heart. It’s not like I ever tried to look for it. It just found me, and I responded.”
Angelo said this Christmas is an especially exciting time because he and his wife, whom he met in Greenville while touring in support of his 2011 album, “Follow Your Heart,” are expecting a baby boy in the next month. They already have a four-year-old daughter, who was diagnosed with a rare life-threatening metabolic disease and received a liver transplant in 2016.
“She’s doing really well,” Angelo said of his daughter. “She loves Christmas. She’s so geeked out about Christmas Day and all of the songs, so it’s fun to see her just relishing and living her life.”