Episode 16 – Alex Radus

Alex Radus is known as a “versatile crooner” (UMC Nashville) and “skillful fretman” (Morning Call), but it's his songwriting that takes center stage. Known  for his unique brand of “genre whiplash,” Alex pairs whimsical and poignant storytelling with an eclectic mix of Americana, swing, blues, folk and more. He hails from Pennsylvania’s artistically rich Lehigh and Delaware river valley region, where he has established himself as one of the area’s premiere original music artists.

During his early career, Alex was awarded a youth scholarship to Augusta Heritage, a center for the preservation of traditional American styles of music, where he was first exposed to and learned from some of the nation’s best finger-pickers.

Alex has performed with John Gorka as part of the Razzy Dazzy Spasm Band, and has been direct support for Gorka, Livingston Taylor, Richie Havens, Tim Reynolds, Darrell Scott, Chris Barron (Spin Doctors), and more.  As a member of the folk noir duo, duende, he was a staple of NYC’s early aughts Anti-Folk scene at the Sidewalk Café, where he performed alongside some of the City’s best up-and-coming and established songwriters, including Regina Spektor, Nellie McKay and the Moldy Peaches.

Alex has toured extensively, recorded multiple albums, and earned awards, nominations and critical acclaim for his songwriting, recording and performing.  His music has been featured on radio, TV and film, including Adolescence, directed by Ashley Avis (Black Beauty). A staple of the eastern PA music scene, He is a frequent performer at the region’s best festivals and venues, including Musikfest, Zoellner Arts Center, Godfrey Daniels, Steelstacks, Hopewell Theater, World Cafe Live and more.

Transcript

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SPEAKER_04 0:09

Welcome to yet another exciting episode of Acoustic Northeast, where we talk about the singers, songwriters, and acoustic music scene in the Northeast.

SPEAKER_03 0:19

United States, Dave. And interviewing musicians who play live for us in studio. I'm co-host Dave Goldenberg. And I am co-host George Malice. And we are sponsored by HearatThere.com and also by WBXO Internet Radio and Hudson Harding, Folk Radio Music Promoters. You can listen to us wherever you get your podcasts. You're obviously listening to one of them now. They know. You don't need to tell them. No, I'm not telling them. And also on YouTube and also our website, which is acousticnortheast.com. And also the interviews are also played on WBXO.com. And today in studio, we are so happy to have Alex Radis in the studio. Alex, welcome to the show.

SPEAKER_02 1:12

My pleasure. Thanks for having me.

SPEAKER_03 1:14

Yeah, yeah. Alex made his way down from New Hampshire today. We won't tell you what date it is, but um it was today. Alex is a touring musician. Uh he's been out there opening for Livingston Taylor and playing with um you know great people. So Alex, we'd like you to kick the show off with a song. Can you tell us what you're what you want to play for everybody?

SPEAKER_02 1:37

Yeah, absolutely. So uh I moved around a lot as a kid, but the so the one home that was kind of constant, which felt like home hometown to me, was my grandparents' house out in western Pennsylvania. A little uh boom and bust steel town called Monongahala right along. Monongahela. Monongahela, right along the Monongahela River. Wow. Um and uh you know, my my grandfather worked in the in the steel mill there, and uh they they had a big war that some some of your listeners may have heard of, and it just kind of got me thinking about what it might have been like to grow up in a town like that uh in that period of history, and so I I wrote this song called Monongahela.

SPEAKER_01 2:34

We went bone and we went bust for the rain could even rust. The tin roof on the chicken shack rang with the rumble of the railroad tracks. We had a laughter and we had a war. We killed every boy who lived next door the whole town, came to say goodbye as if one of their own adaler. That's just how they raised you. You didn't take a selfie an omen on the halo. We made metal, we made love Fred to the stealers and god above and worked hard. We gave thanks to shells that we made shattered pens or tanks, or let a river that roared through here, locomotives and molts and steel dry up, crazy as it sounds. In a dry river, but we drown on the halo. You play the cards a game. You learn it, take a look at an old on the halo. The kids moved out, the new neighbors don't come around. We beat the exes on the battlefield. Couldn't beat the prices making steel. There's a heartbeat in this town, it's it's just a few feet underground. The whole place don't seem so big. But all we gotta do is dig in the number cover take a take a lick in an omen on the hiller Bliss force in a rivers always rollin' an ominong.

SPEAKER_04 5:28

Alright. Alright, that's Alex Raddis singing Monongahela, I have to pronounce it. That's one of the three rivers, right?

SPEAKER_02 5:34

It is, yeah.

SPEAKER_04 5:35

So you you grew up near Pittsburgh?

SPEAKER_02 5:37

Yeah, I grew up in Pittsburgh. Um, but uh, you know, I moved every grade from first grade to fifth grade, and um you know, different house, different school district, and so the what felt the constant for me was my grandparents' house.

SPEAKER_03 5:52

What was the reason for the for the moves?

SPEAKER_02 5:55

Uh just life, you know, all kinds of different things. It wasn't like a military family or anything like that. Some people ask me that, but you know, just life just changes. Um but um you know, but weekends and and and then when I, you know, moved out to Jersey, and I got even farther away, but would go back in the summers and and see my grand grandparents and um you know, beautiful little house that my grandfather's father built kind of situation, and it's still there. My aunt's still there.

SPEAKER_03 6:23

So where do you call home now?

SPEAKER_02 6:25

Right now I'm in the Lehigh Valley, Pennsylvania, and I've been there for long enough to you know that's that's my hometown now. And um so you know, I moved to the other side of the state. And if if if anyone's not familiar with Lehigh Valley, if you just go straight west from Manhattan and straight north from Philly, it's right where they intersect.

SPEAKER_03 6:43

Yeah, and you're on the road a lot now, a lot more than you than you had been a few years ago, I believe. Um and at home your home life is you are married and you have if I'm correct, three kids? I've got two, yeah. Okay, two. Well, you know, I'm pushing it. Maybe you'll have another one. But uh I remember when I saw you, I think, up at at Daryl's house years ago. I think you had your kids with you.

SPEAKER_02 7:05

Yeah, they came up, yeah, with my wife for that show and and met some local family members and they all came out.

SPEAKER_04 7:11

Yeah, cool. So your your kid growing up in Monongahela or in those environs. Where where and how did music find you?

SPEAKER_02 7:20

That's a that's a great question. So um another what felt like the constant kind of home area is uh a little place in Winchester, New Hampshire, which I just came from. And my um my daughters are the fifth generation of my family to go up uh to that town to a little lake called Forest Lake every summer. My great-grandmother, who is a songwriter, um bought or built, I can't remember, a cottage there. And when I say cottage, I don't mean like Rhode Island cottage. I mean like not winterized, you know, kind of proper cottage. And um they just built more and more cottages over the years, and it just I mean, I I think at one point it sort of felt like my family was about, you know, twenty percent of the houses around the lake were some related in some way. And we would play a lot of music.

SPEAKER_04 8:10

The whole family?

SPEAKER_02 8:11

Yeah, um, you know, especially when my grandparents' generation was alive, uh, they were just really into that great, you know, jazz music of the forties and fifties, and so they would have jams, they would have friends coming up.

SPEAKER_04 8:23

It's like porks jams, right?

SPEAKER_02 8:25

Yeah, totally. And there would be guitars going and keyboards going and saxophones. There was one guy who made something he called the Git Fiddle, which was this completely fabricated instrument that was about four instruments in one that he would play. So it's a guitar you play with a bow? There was a bow there was bowing involved. It was sort of an upright bass slash guitar slash banjo kind of with like some percussion with the feet. It was one of those one-man band kind of deals. Um but I there's this great video of I probably fourteen with my you know nylon string classical guitar, because I didn't even know what kind of guitar to buy at that age. Um trying to keep up with this like jazz jam that my grandparents and their friends were doing, and I'm just staring at this, you can see me just squinting at this chord chart like what is a F-sharp flat five nine? Like, what is what am I supposed to play right now? But I was doing my best.

SPEAKER_03 9:23

Um As a singer-songwriter, I've one of the things I've noticed about you is you you're playing multiple genres. You're just not stuck in, you know, three chords and whatever. You play jazz stuff. And is that where you think some of all that came from? Definitely.

SPEAKER_02 9:39

Yeah, my grandparents' generation got me into that style of music. Um, my parents' generation, which includes my uh my uncle uh Doug Ole Moose Anderson, got me into the incredible songwriter, got me into sort of the sixties and seventies kind of folk uh scene music. Um and then, you know, I was like a 80s and 90s kid listening to you know grunge music and whatever else I could get my hands on. So all those kind of meshed and yeah, I I actually have three bands now because I write in so many different genres. Um it's hard to market it, but it's a lot of fun.

SPEAKER_03 10:15

Yeah, tell us about about the three different bands, what what styles?

SPEAKER_02 10:18

Yeah, so I've got this singer-songwriter project, which is kind of what I'm doing today, and um we'll we'll get over into sort of swing music as well, uh, but all original. Um and then I've got an alt-rock band called Hot for Robot. Uh again, all original stuff, very influenced by definitely different kind of 70s, 80s, 90s bands, but all original. Um, and then I have a comedic holiday duo.

SPEAKER_04 10:43

A comedic holiday duo.

SPEAKER_02 10:45

Yeah, where we just write very silly songs, just kind of you know, about the holidays. We have a song um that tells the an entire story of Die Hard as though it is a proper like Christmas carol. Yeah. We uh rewrote the words to to the music to memory, the music for memory to be about how cats only ever get drugs for Christmas, they just all get catnipped all the time. And so just really silly stuff like that. And it's wow, yeah.

SPEAKER_04 11:12

One writer called or or referred to you using the term genre whiplash.

SPEAKER_02 11:17

Yes.

SPEAKER_04 11:18

But one one of the genres that I'm interested to hear you talk about was the anti-folk movement of a few years back. You were you were part of that whole scene. Tell us about about that and how it how it happened and where it is now.

SPEAKER_02 11:31

Yeah, so the the anti-folk scene, and there are I mean, it was a real scene, and there are real historians that can give you a better picture of it than I can, but you know, it was sort of formed by these um punk punk rockers with acoustic guitars who um had a I mean there's a lot of crossover between the punk and folk sensibility, right? I mean, it's just uh aesthetically it's it's different, but like there's a lot of the same things driving it. And so, you know, this was a New York City scene set up mainly out of the sidewalk cafe Avenue A. And um uh Latch was a uh one of the you know, really the godfather of it. And so he had this Monday night open mic that was just the place to be. I mean, and it and it was rough because if you were if you didn't know the scene, you'd you'd you know be playing at four in the morning, and that's how we started out. Um and then you know, you slowly kind of worked your way up to better slots and getting gigs there. But it was just a hoot, and there were incredible people. I mean Beck and the strokes were there a before my time. Um when I was getting there, um performed with uh the Moldy Peaches and Nellie Mackay and Regina Specter, we did a ton of shows together before she absolutely blew up for and she you know deserves every every bit of it. She's so talented. So we did a lot of shows there together. And we got to where, you know, this is the uh a band called Duende that I was with, which was sort of a male-female um Americana-ish duo, but we would branch out, and it was we were kind of all misfits who didn't really fit into the folk scene but sort of wanted to, and so none of us could get gigs in the proper folk clubs, and so that's where this scene was kind of born.

SPEAKER_04 13:20

What kind of stuff were you writing then?

SPEAKER_02 13:22

Um We were let's see, I we were writing a lot. I I I had just learned to really finger pick then, and so I was working a lot on you know, different playing the melody and the bass line at the same time, and um, you know, but still kind of singer-songwriter material. Um, you know, I had this uh one of this was a song that we did that a lot of people liked called Let the House Fall.

SPEAKER_01 13:58

I've had lovers that have left me, and I can't say that they were wrong, good old friends that don't wanna see me again, and I can't blame them at all. Sometimes you gotta let the house fall sometimes you gotta let the house fall.

SPEAKER_02 14:33

And it seemed like that should work in a folk club, but we just weren't getting booked there, you know, and so we just kind of joined this anti-folk scene. But we also had tunes that were like almost an acoustic version of a radio head song, you know. So we would get really weird, and we were very proud of that. Um so we would do it, you know, different genres in the same set too.

SPEAKER_03 14:53

But you did come back to the folk scene.

SPEAKER_02 14:56

Yeah, 100%.

SPEAKER_03 14:57

Yeah, and um what was really cool is um you in the in the 2025 Falcon Ridge Folk Festival, uh, you got most wanted. I mean, you're I don't think your picture is up on the post office as emerging artists, and then you were out on tour with I believe Tina Ross, and who else was out on that tour? Louie Lou Lewis in Brooklyn. So that was pretty cool.

SPEAKER_02 15:21

Yeah, that was that was wonderful, and that really put some nice wind in my sails to open some other doors that opened some other doors, and it's been a nice couple of years. Because like you were saying, I took time off. I wasn't really touring when my kids were younger, and then like two years ago, I kind of felt like they were old enough to where I could kind of do this like Maryland to Maine thing. And that's you know, and you're hitting twenty percent of the country anyway, so population wise the acoustic northeast as it happens. Yeah, exactly. And the drive times are are great, you know, from city to city. So it feels like a um an accessible way for me to tour with a family, and it's been working out real well.

SPEAKER_03 15:58

That's great. Yeah. Um I think what do you say? Another tune?

SPEAKER_04 16:02

I would love to hear another tune.

SPEAKER_03 16:03

Let's hear another tune. I mean, I love the last one that you were playing, but cool.

SPEAKER_04 16:07

That was a snippet. That was a snippet.

SPEAKER_03 16:08

That was a snippet. I like snippets, but you know, people's um attention span are about good for the snippet.

SPEAKER_02 16:14

That was like an Instagram reel uh version of a song. Intro what you want to play. Alright, so uh so we were talking about hometowns. I'm now in the Lehigh Valley, Pennsylvania, and my hometown club is Godfrey Daniels' wonderful, wonderful uh club on the folk circuit for many years now. In fact, 50 years, they're celebrating their 50th uh birthday this year. And as part of that, um some of your listeners are probably aware, uh, the you know legendary John Gorka started his career there. He he lived in the basement there and he did sound and he watched these incredible people came through come through and he's got this song, That's how legends are made, about all you know, watching these incredible songwriters and aspiring to be like them. And um he did pretty well for himself. So I knew he was gonna be playing the the anniversary, the birthday show, and I reached out to him uh and asked, you know, would you like to write a song together honoring Godfrey's Godfrey Daniels for his 50th birthday? And you know, he's a he's a very kind and generous guy to to the uh you know upstarts like me, and said, Sure, I'll write a song with you. And so we debuted this tune, and I thought it'd be fun to play it. It's called Bring the Music Home.

SPEAKER_01 17:41

Mark your calendar and save the date. Did you read about it in the morning? Call night together, a place to celebrate fifty years of music in these walls, and the people they come, and the people they go, and they bring music home, and the people they come, and the people they go, and they bring music home May the players and the singers make it here, traveling in a banner on their own Cause the rhythm and the spirit that they bring Leave us feeling less alone And the people they come, and the people they go, and they bring music home, and the people they come, and the people they go, and they bring music home. Yes, they made room in their lives, and they found a place to park, kindly shown their stays to listen quietly in the dark, quiet in the dark, the place where troubles fade, it's down the street from the steel mill, it's where the real bridges are made, it's where the real bridges are made, and the people they come, and the people they go, and they bring the music home, and the people they come, and the people they go, and they bring music home, and the people they come, and the people they go, and they bring music home, and the people they come, and the people they go, and they bring music home, and they bring music home.

SPEAKER_04 21:11

That's Alex Raddis, bring the music home, written with John Gorka. And that song, like the first song you played, and and like a lot of folk music, really comes from the working man perspective. Um especially especially that first one had a very John Prine kind of working man. Where where do where do your songs come from? Do you do you bring that with you to your music?

SPEAKER_02 21:37

Um Yeah, I mean they definitely all have a bit of uh bit of me in them. They're all a little bit a bit autobiographical, but not exclusively. I have some songs that are total fabrications. Um just interesting stories that occurred to me. But I I tend to write from a very um kind of i uh inspired. Place in that like I I feel like sometimes there's a radio station that I only I get to tune into and I can kind of hear the song or I can hear the a snippet of the song and sometimes it'll just almost be the whole song. And I'll you know the writing process will take just a few minutes. It's almost like taking dictation. It's it's very magical. Uh um I I I'm I I hate you already.

SPEAKER_03 22:24

I really I mean as you know, Dave and I are are singer songwriters also, and we interview a lot of people. And you know, people come up with ideas when they're driving, when they're walking, when they're running, when they're on their bikes or whatever. And then there's the people like you who just boom, you just have this thing pop into your head, and we're just so jealous.

SPEAKER_04 22:50

What does he say? He says that he used to years and years ago, he shared a house with James Taylor, just when James Taylor was breaking out and they were sitting at the kitchen table writing stuff, and and he just finally said to him, James, where does this all come from? How can you just like pull a song right out of your brain? He said, The songs are just floating by in the air, and you just have to capture them. And Arlo said, Well, when that happens, how come you always have the pen?

SPEAKER_02 23:18

Yeah, I heard somebody else describe it differently that they just said Bob Dylan was fishing upstream of everybody else. Wow. Yeah. It's it is, I mean, it's um it's it's something to be grateful for for sure. It's not a process I feel a lot of ownership over or like to take a lot of credit for sometimes, because it really does just feel like it's there already, and I I I got to catch it, I got to catch the fish. Um but you know, but it's not always like that. You know, sometimes it there's other times where I've heard people say, like a sculpture, the sculpture's in the marble, you just chip away the marble until you find it. And so there's definitely that chipping away process too, and there's and there's a certain amount of intentionality and work that goes into that.

SPEAKER_04 24:01

So, how do you know when a song is done then?

SPEAKER_02 24:04

That's such a good question. Um there's some that I don't feel have ever truly been done, and I'm still kind of searching for the perfect lyric to kind of lock up different areas. I mean, there's a song I've been playing for, you know, probably 15 years before I finally found the right lyric to fit into one piece. And I've been performing it because it's a good song, but there was always like, yeah, that lyric could be better, and I finally found it. Um so I think there's you know, it's important to to stress test songs, even if they don't always feel totally done, and see how a crowd responds to them, because you may get a response that you weren't expecting and it might be really good. Um but every once in a while you get to feel like, yep, the whole jigsaw puzzle's done, the entire picture's there, it couldn't be any better. Um those are good those are good feelings.

SPEAKER_03 25:00

Yeah, it's really nice when they just pop in there or you're you're done in like two hours or something like that. It's it's special, and then you can't you don't even have to touch those again because you know they're they're done and they're special. Yeah. Um you really um you had you had a song you've had a song in in radio, TV, and film, and you recently had one in the series Adolescence. Tell us a little bit about that.

SPEAKER_02 25:26

Um Yeah. Um so how did that come about? I've never really intentionally pursued sync licensing, and that's reflected in the fact that I've done very little of it. Um but every every once in a while I'll just get a call um from somebody who likes a song, and oddly enough, there's one song of mine that two different sync licensing people like reached out to me just based on this one song. And so Adolescence was like that. Um and I ended up with placing three songs in in that movie. Um but the the there's I'll just do another snippet, but this is the song that for whatever reason people won their movie.

SPEAKER_01 26:14

Um it's the this is just the the refrain, it's the best, it's the best, it's the best that I can do. It ain't good, it ain't good, it ain't good enough for you.

SPEAKER_02 26:33

You know, and I I think people can everybody can relate to that in one fashion or another.

SPEAKER_04 26:37

Yeah, my mind just just went there. Yeah. One thing I wanted to ask you about was the role of video in promoting your music. You have a you have a new video out, um, which was really super well done. Um how important are are videos do you think in in building your audience?

SPEAKER_02 26:56

Oh, I I don't think it can be overstated like how important video is these days. It's it's almost more important than anything else, I feel like, in this in the music industry we live in and the way people consume music. Um that said, I'd I don't put it first personally. Like for me, like the artist in me puts the song first, but you know, having a good video or a good reel or something like that on Instagram or TikTok is that's clearly how people are getting discovered these days.

SPEAKER_04 27:29

And do you just snippets? I mean, for TikTok where you take a song and cut out 30 seconds of it or yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 27:36

I'm not personally on TikTok, but I do do it for Instagram and and Facebook. Um and I've gotten I've gotten better at it. I've kind of gotten to the point where I actually enjoy video work um uh quite a bit. I don't I'm very much an amateur, but I enjoy doing it. Do you do you actually create the videos yourself? Yeah, so the video you're talking about for Where Liberty Lives, um we had it's a protest song, and I had an idea that I wanted to do the video, I wanted to do a lyric video, um, you know, just kind of which is if anybody's not familiar with them, they're not videos where people are dancing around or you see the artist a whole lot. It's really more about making the lyrics the focus, and they're easier and much more economical for DIY artists to do. So that's usually one of my first thoughts. And um anyway, I wanted to do a lyric video for this song. I want it was topical, I wanted to get it out quickly, and I thought, why not put the lyrics all on protest signs? Like, I'll do the lyric video like that.

SPEAKER_04 28:35

Great concept.

SPEAKER_02 28:36

Yeah, and I I was really excited about it, but again, I really wanted to get the song out quickly, and so I was like, I woke up one day in the morning and I was like, I think I can create this and make it look pretty good with AI. So I went on this program and I put I would just type in make me a protest sign with these lyrics on it, and and I put it in, and it was incredible how good it looked and how real. I mean, some people had three hands or too many fingers or whatever.

SPEAKER_04 29:06

Wait, that was AI, it never even occurred to me.

SPEAKER_02 29:08

No, so so I put the whole together the whole video like that, and by that time I'd finished the recording of the song, and I was watching looking at the video, and I'm like, I can't do it. But I was like, I can't do this grassroots protest song with AI images. Like, how how dumb is that? You know, I was rushing so much it that didn't occur to me until a little bit later in the process, and I was like, we need to do this somehow for real. And so my wife, God bless her, really helped me organize this because in five days we got 50 people together to make over 75 handmade protest signs with the lyrics to the song on them, and then filmed we filmed the creation process, and then we filmed people holding up the signs and synced it up with the music. And so I did all the editing for the video. Um and I mean it looks really DIY, but that that's perfect for this. You know, it's perfect for that kind of song. So I felt like it worked really well.

SPEAKER_04 30:09

It's a great video. Where can people find it, and where can people find your music?

SPEAKER_02 30:12

Sure, yeah. Please uh my name is Alex Radis A-L-E-X-R-A-D-U-S. And I'm on YouTube at AlexRadismusic, on Instagram at at Alex Radis Music, Facebook's the same. So there's not too many Alex Radises out there. If you pop my name in, you are guaranteed to find me.

SPEAKER_03 30:32

That's fantastic. So um we really appreciate you coming on the show. Yes, thank you. And this has been this has been great. And um You're gonna take us out with one. Are you gonna take us out with the new one, the protest one?

SPEAKER_02 30:43

I feel like that kind of means we should probably do that. We talked about it.

SPEAKER_03 30:46

Yeah, absolutely. Let's do that. Where where Liberty Lives, Alex Raddus.

SPEAKER_01 30:59

We watched it happen with some murder in the streets We watched with millions of people glued to our screens And when was always inconvenient To a test for red man coming List of Kindling and the flame Millions of Stride and I'm our name Striking Matches. So they wrote a declaration say we'll have no peace that we only protect it one place to leave.