Video premiere: Pittsburgh-born Antoniette Costa releases 'Pitupatter' video, announces album

About three years ago, Antoniette Costa started to feel “very off,” with headaches and a lot of weight loss, ultimately leading to a diagnosis of a brain tumor.

The Pittsburgh native first received medication as treatment, but a subsequent episode in New York, where she partially lost her vision, led to seeking a second opinion. Those doctors found her tumor was actually seven times larger than the original radiologist had believed, making her a candidate for brain surgery last summer.

Out of that surgery came Costa’s new album, “Pitupatter,” which will be released on July 12.

“That was the whole inspiration for this album because I was really scared to go into surgery,” Costa said Tuesday. “And even though it’s ridiculous to think of this, I was also afraid to not be able to sing again because that was a risk of the procedure.

“And I made myself a promise. I said, well, if I can sing again after the surgery and come out of recovery, I’m gonna do an album. And that was the whole impetus behind this. I recorded songs that I had written while I was sick and it kind of was my meditation.”

The video for “Pitupatter,” which will be officially released Friday, is debuting a day early here on TribLive. Costa said she viewed the tumor as the antagonist in some of her songs, and the tumor’s location in her pituitary gland led to some wordplay with the title track.

The video was filmed at the Oaks Theater in Oakmont, with Pittsburgh’s Dave Prokopec, who has worked on Mac Miller and Wiz Khalifa videos in the past, serving as director and music videographer. They also shot videos for “Last of a Line” and “Dear Amy” at her late grandmother’s home in Morningside.

”Especially since I recovered from my surgery in Pittsburgh — I had the surgery at NYU — but then once I was feeling well enough to travel by car, I came back to Pittsburgh, arranged the songs,” she said, “so it only felt right to go back there to shoot some of the videos.”

When it came time to make the record, Costa sought Khari Mateen, a film/TV composer who she knew from working with The Roots’ crew from her time in Philadelphia, where she received her undergraduate degree at the University of Pennsylvania. The actual record didn’t take long, wrapping in 11 days around Christmas at Mateen’s studio in Texas.

“It was the first time I sang. And I’m not gonna lie, the first two days I was very frustrated with myself because my vocal cords were so weak, because it’s like a muscle and I hadn’t worked it in so long,” Costa said. “But I was comfortable with him since we had been working together and were close friends for so long. And then on day three, it was just, I felt in a way like my voice was better than it had been before surgery. I don’t know why that was. It was like there was this dome opened where I could reach and float to higher notes.”

Balancing two careers — Costa is also a lawyer — has actually spurred her creativity, which includes two other albums.

“I have a huge performance coming up in a couple months, and I’m releasing this album and essentially doing that as a career, but I still do practice law,” she said. “I think as a songwriter that’s helped me stay prolific because when I’m using a different side of my brain, I tend to write more music.”

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All the details for her performance in Philadelphia haven’t been ironed out yet, and she’s hoping to do a hometown show down the road.

“I want to plan something in Pittsburgh. It’s my hope,” she said. “Growing up, I started harmonizing with my dad, he played guitar and loved doo-wop. So at some point in my life, I’d love to perform at the Benedum Center, somewhere Downtown, because I would go to Roots of Rock and Roll produced by Henry DeLuca. I got to see Gene Chandler, who sang ‘Duke of Earl,’ Johnny Maestro and the Brooklyn Bridge, Eddie Holman, all these doo-wop groups.

“It was such an influence that the title track on ‘Pitupatter’ has a lot of that doo-wop feel because I love the upbeat vocal harmonies of it, so that’s a dream of mine to come back to Pittsburgh and play in one of those venues.”

The 2003 Shady Side Academy graduate may live in New York now, but she still holds Pittsburgh close to her heart. Her first album, 2005’s “Breakthru,” was recorded at Soundscape Studio in McKeesport and produced by Tim Tucker, who was the jazz choir director at Pittsburgh’s CAPA and taught jazz vocals at Carnegie Mellon. She also recalled Morningside’s vibrant Italian community and its Feast of Saint Rocco, with her heritage shining through on this album.

“On this album, I incorporate a lot of Italian dialect, and one of my first songs that I ever incorporated Italian on was called ‘Bridge of Sighs-Ponte Dei Sospiri.’ I wrote that in Venice, Italy, and I am a dual citizen, and I always felt like there was this connection between Pittsburgh and Italy. When I came back this weekend, I just thought, wow, there’s so many bridges here. It’s so beautiful. I wonder why so many Italians in my family came here to this city when they came from Italy.

“And I learned that there are 446 bridges in Pittsburgh and that’s more than how many bridges there are in Venice. And that’s the next city, three more bridges in Pittsburgh than Venice. And I thought that was so cool to me because I always felt this connection between my familial line of Pittsburgh and Italy. And I had that song that I felt like I started in Pittsburgh and I finished in Venice. So, for me, there’s always been this bridge connection between my Italian heritage, music and Pittsburgh.”