Today he's releasing her music online.

Rochelle Gambino, who lived in Cold Spring for nearly a decade and owned a dog grooming business on Main Street, died suddenly, apparently of heart failure, in 2007 at age 44. A singer and guitarist, she left behind a trove of analog recordings and ephemera.

Today (Feb. 14), after working with a sound studio in the city, her son A.J. Vitiello is releasing 20 songs recorded by his mother in a compilation called For Romantics Only.

"She lived in the pre-streaming era, so I had to get this project done before the tapes break," says Vitiello, 25, a travel writer. "Deciding what to release took a long time, and I had to kill some darlings. A good song could be ruined by a scratchy recording or be so '80s that it sounds stale."

The process of sifting through hundreds of songs and transcribing lyrics brought him closer to a woman who died when he was 7. Gambino also left behind diaries, letters and photos. "This project is almost an attempt to reconstruct her persona," he says. "It's as if she's using me as a vessel to get her music out there."

He adds: "People used to ask, 'When are you going to pick up the guitar?' That's not my thing - the talent didn't transfer. But I do long for a time when rock 'n' roll was the only thing that mattered."

After Vitiello's parents separated, he lived with his mother in Nelsonville before moving to Connecticut with his father. Sometimes, he travels from Brooklyn to spruce up her gravesite at Cold Spring Cemetery.

One vivid memory is a visit she made to his kindergarten class at Haldane Elementary. "She wrote a song for every student using their names," he says. "She was known for sheer kindness and being bubbly. My mom had a lot of devoted fans in the Hudson Valley and played shows all the time."

Gambino, who grew up in Croton-on-Hudson, received a scholarship to the Berklee College of Music in Boston. She dropped out and moved to Nashville but returned to New York, where she told a newspaper reporter: "I'm not some piece of plastic to be molded and make somebody else rich."

Gambino met Vitiello's father at one of her Black Jacket Band shows and the couple settled in Cold Spring. At their Dockside Park wedding, she strapped a black electric guitar over her white dress and wailed away.

Her music ranges from acoustic ballads to hard rock and includes a few religious songs. Toward the end of her life, she spent more time at Our Lady of Loretto on Fair Street, says Vitiello.

"She could shred on guitar and also compose on piano," he says. "She had vocal chords of steel. I still remember her fingernails being cracked and mutilated, as if she'd been to war. I still find [guitar] picks in her stuff."

Gambino chafed at comparisons to Janis Joplin. After she died, a close friend held tributes in Croton that raised money for music students.

The melancholy breakup song "Cold Spring" tells of "too much fighting / too many angry lies." The chorus refrains: "I didn't know what you meant to me / That night in Cold Spring / Where we fought to save our dreams / It was a dream we had when young / As the Hudson River runs / That night in Cold Spring."

For Romantics Only is available at Spotify (dub.sh/gambino-spotify) and YouTube (dub.sh/for-romantic).