The very first lineup of Satellite Inn existed since the late ’80s as a garage rockabilly/outlaw country band with the name Henry. Their first demo came out in 1994, when Uncle Tupelo was still touring, and Whiskeytown was an unknown bar band. In 1997, MoodFood Records, located in North Carolina, having just sold Whiskeytown to R.E.M. manager Scott Litt’s Outpost Label, chose Henry to replace them in the US alternative country scene. Since there was another roots-indie rock band from New York called Mr Henry, the label persuaded the guys to change their name, and they came up with Satellite Inn as a tribute to their passion for roadside motels and for the fact that the word “satellite” meant the same thing in both Italian and English.
An Italian alternative country band in the US? It seemed so. Cold Morning Songs came out in October 1998 and made some noise. They were selected for the CMJ Fest in New York City and, in 2001, played at SXSW on top of a West Coast mini tour. They seemed to be ready to make it happen until MoodFood Records shut its doors. The band members carried on with other projects, and guitarist/songwriter Stiv Cantarelli made a solo album with Richmond Fontaine as his backing band.
Then in 2002, Satellite Inn backed Willard Grant Conspiracy’s Robert Fisher on a string of Italian dates. The relationship forged during those weeks led to Fisher taking production duties on what should have been Satellite Inn’s second album. Unfortunately, their label went out of business, sending the band on permanent hiatus, leaving the songs included in that demo in the equivalent of a storage locker.
Following the release of the reconvened Satellite Inn’s 2024 eponymous album, almost a decade since Fisher’s passing, those lost songs reappeared in a box of unused master tapes. On renewed listening, the material was so inspiring for the band that they decided to pay a tribute to their old backer. Those early songs sounded so fresh that they became the backbone of their new record, From Nowhere Revisited, released March 2026 on the historic El Cortez label from Portland, Oregon, once run by Richmond Fontaine and now the platform distributing aural gems from the Delines.
The current lineup consists of Stiv Cantarelli, who’s the main singer/songwriter and plays all the guitars and harmonica. He is the founding member and the only one left from the ’89 Henry lineup. Fabrizio Gramellini, who plays bass, has been part of the band since they changed the name to Satellite Inn, and Antonio Perugini, who plays drums and occasionally backing vocals, replaced the original drummer before the band’s second US Tour in 2000.
Each has a story to tell about the instruments they are playing in the video. Cantarelli picks a mid-’70s Japanese aftermarket copy of a Gibson that had been given to him by a friend who inherited it from his uncle, and that he hated to see unused around the house. It has been modified, like the (in)famous John Lennon Gibson, in order to allow Stiv to play acoustic and electric guitar at the same time and, along with the customary folkie sound, to make some proper ’90s alt-country noise.
Fabrizio Gramellini played his first real bass that he bought with his own money in 1983. At that time, a Japanese Squier Precision bass was considered just a cheap alternative to the better-known American-made instrument. Nowadays that series (Chuck Prophet has his signature Telecaster from that line) are some of the most sought-after instruments produced by Fender in the ’80s.
Antonio Perugini plays an early Gretsch Catalina Jazz drum kit, one of the very first batch coming from Asia. He had it for pennies because the dealer discovered that all the parts of the kit came in different colours (bass drum was gold sparkle, upper and floor tom were silver sparkle), so he couldn’t sell it to anyone. Being a jazz kit, it really fits the electro-acoustic type of sound that the band wanted to achieve better than any other kit he has.
The session was recorded at Northouse, a wonderful recording studio located inside an early 20th-century ex-church in the deep South Wales green, in Ebbw Vale. Owner and video/sound engineer Chris Peet has been a friend and collaborator of the band for many years. For their exclusive AUK mini-gig, Satellite Inn offers four songs con fuoco, two each from their eponymous album and Nowhere Revisited, all written by Stiv Cantarelli. You can find out more on the band’s Bandcamp page and follow them on Facebook and Instagram. Below are notes on the songs in the video by Satellite Inn.
1 – Happy To Survive (from 2024 Satellite Inn): The first song we wrote for our comeback in ’24. It’s a pandemic song, written when nobody knew if this bunch of songs would ever become a record or just a promo. The idea was to write something in the style of early Byrds, and it ended up to be more Velvet Underground (especially live). Lyrically, it’s very ’90s, a period where all alt-country bands embraced the punk feeling of a no-future lifestyle instead of the beers/girls/truck stops lyrics coming from Nashville.
2 – Carry On, Benjamin (from 2024 Satellite Inn): Same record, but older song. I guess it’s the only one that made it onto Satellite Inn that doesn’t come from the pandemic period. We wrote this song while reading about Benjamin Booker’s debut album (Benjamin Booker, 2014) that got outstanding reviews and discovered that he was 24 at the time of all that praise. The song is about the troubles of being a public performer at a very young age.
3 – Fall River (from 2026 From Nowhere Revisited): This is one of the songs produced in 2002 by Robert Fisher and is the very first song we worked at together. It was originally a rocker, but Robert wanted to change it to something that sounded like an outtake from Neil Young’s Harvest. Written at the time when Stiv Cantarelli was living in Boston, Massachusetts, it’s based on the true story of a Massachusetts small-town basketball legend that made it to the NBA while being one of the few athletes ever to shoot heroin while actually having a career as a pro basketball player in the US and abroad.
4 – Hey Mister, What’s the Matter Now (from 2026 From Nowhere Revisited): This is the first protest song Satellite Inn ever wrote, and it came back to that ’02 session with Robert Fisher. It was dedicated to Silvio Berlusconi, a right-wing political leader, owner of most Italian media and probably the richest man in the country, who decided that democracy didn’t apply to those who have money if somebody could bend the laws in their favour. Something that could very well fit the days we are living in, especially the line “now I just want you to die.” There are many political leaders in the East and the West that we would like to include in that list.
