2025 Update

I’m excited to be getting close to the final mixing stage of my upcoming album Wild Figurines. It’s been serious fun to work with coproducer and sound wizard Lance Brenner (Naked Puritans, Thrum, Falsies) and to have a long line of the most natural musicians in musician-dense central Virginia passing through the studio. Their names will be familiar to listeners for a long way off, but I saw them first in Charlottesville, where most of them and I live and where I still go out to see them today. I think I a lot of live music fans will remember them as key players on the soundtrack of the ’20s.

I’m gonna have to buy a record player! I don’t see much use in making cd’s at this point, so the plan is to release the new album on (drumroll) vinyl, as well as digitally at all the places. Sorry, no date yet.

Since my sick spell a while back (undiagnosed neurological condition, 2010-2013, much better now, thanks), one of the things I’ve had to relearn is how to play guitar. There have been some hitches—sometimes my fingers take a while to thaw out—but they’ve spurred me to explore a more percussive way playing that I probably wouldn’t have gotten into if I hadn’t had to. I keep thinking of Django Reinhardt, who coped with losing two fingers in a fire by coming up with a new way of playing that influenced guitarists around the world . . .

I haven’t been playing out as often as I’d like (I’ll let you know), but I have a gig with Luke Kibler now and then and go to open mics to keep my hand in. (Michael Clem’s Monday nights at The Local are one of the best reasons for a singer-songwriter to live in Charlottesville.)

Thanks to all of you for listening. Stay tuned!

Brady

Bio

Over the past 20 years Brady has been quietly building a solid reputation as a songwriter's songwriter in central Virginia. His moving, tightly written, often funny songs have been compared to those of Paul Simon, Leonard Cohen, Nick Drake, & Joni Mitchell.

While he was getting PhD in English Literature at the University of Virginia, he caught the attention of several local singer-songwriters. Browning Porter & Jeff Romano of Nickeltown ended up performing several pieces of his and recording "Tide by Tide" & "After You" on their Presto Change-O album; Paul Curreri included his version of “Stephen Crane” on his collection California. Brady has also arranged and produced songs for local favorites The Naked Puritans, Mary Gordon Hall, and Michael McConkey.

Acoustic Guitar magazine's Elizabeth Papapetrou called Brady's 1998 debut After You "one of the ten best contemporary folk CD's of the 1990s." C-ville Weekly music critic Keith Morris called his 2003 release Manalapan "a fully realized, mature album . . . the most subtly poetic, skillfully crafted and all-inclusively human stuff I've heard in years."

Brady's song "Gargoyle" won the gold medal in the folk category of the 2002 Mid-Atlantic Songwriting Contest & appeared on Charlottesville radio station WNRN's Station Break. In June 2002, "Car Repair" aired on NPR's CarTalk. In 2004, Brady was an Outmusic Award finalist. Three of his performances appear on King of My Living Room, a live singer-songwriter showcase released in 2001.

Brady is a 2002 Mountain Stage New Song Festival finalist & has performed at such venues as Starr Hill, Acoustic Charlottesville, Acoustic Muse, the Shenandoah Coffeehouse Series, & the Florida Folk Festival, as well as pubs & coffeehouses throughout the eastern U.S.

From 2015-19, Brady ran the popular original Charlottesville songwriter showcase Uncovered. He has taught poetry writing to elementary school students, English as a Second Language, & American literature & Creative Writing at the University of Mary Washington in Fredericksburg, VA. Besides continuing to write, perform, & record, he is currently working as an interpreter for Spanish-speaking refugees through the International Rescue Committee.