Album Notes

Over the past 10 years Brady has built a steadily growing audience throughout the mid-Atlantic region. Acoustic Guitar magazine's Elizabeth Papapetrou called his 1998 debut After You "one of the ten best contemporary folk CD's of the 1990s."

C-ville Weekly music critic Keith Morris describes Brady's new work Manalapan as "a fully realized, mature album . . . the most subtly poetic, skillfully crafted, and all-inclusively human stuff I've heard in years." Named for a tiny south Florida snorkeling destination, Manalapan extends the emotional landscape of the earlier album with a new series of character-driven stories set off by innovative arrangements of strings, horns, and guitars.

Manalapan was one of 5 finalists in the 2004 Outmusic Awards for Outstanding New Recording - Male. (The award ended up going to Rufus Wainwright, sigh.)

Brady's song "Gargoyle" won the gold medal in the folk category of the 2002 Mid-Atlantic Songwriting Contest. In June 2002, Brady's live recording of his own "Car Repair" aired on NPR's CarTalk. Three Earnhart performances appear on King of My Living Room (also available here at CD-Baby), a live showcase released in 2001 that also features fellow central Virginia singer-songwriters Jan Smith, Danny Schmidt, Nickeltown, Stratton Salidis and Lance Brenner.

Brady is a 2002 Mountain Stage New Song Festival Finalist and has performed at places like The Prism, Starr Hill, Jammin' Java, Acoustic Charlottesville, Acoustic Muse, the Shenandoah Coffeehouse Series, and the Florida Folk Festival. Originally from Delray Beach, FL, he holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Iowa and a PhD in American Literature from UVA. In addition to his songwriting and performing, he has taught creative writing in upstate New York schools, English as a Second Language in the Basque Country, and (currently) American Literature at the University of Mary Washington in Fredericksburg, VA.


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"Brady Earnhart can intimate with heartrending subtlety the psychological tensions that attend friendship and love, 'the questions I was not supposed to ask.' The best songs of Manalapan only pass through your ears to break open at your core where they stir up a strange response at once painful and deeply tender."

--Poet Forrest Gander


"I'm one of those media types. I produce two radio shows geared toward GLBT listeners, and consequently often get preview copies sent to me by the artists. The past couple weeks have been particularly bountiful, as I have received 8 to 10 new discs. I get through about one a day.

I have found the new Brady Earnhart CD, Manalapan, to be patently unfair to the others. I've been playing it over and over for four or five days now, can't seem to take it out of the player.

I am very impressed and think it's a marvel of songwriting, singing and production. While artists hate comparisons, it makes me think of a young Paul Simon, only much smarter and more sophisticated, with lyrics that paint full scenarios that pull you in.

I highly recommend this CD."

--JD Doyle, producer of Queer Music Heritage on KPFT-fm, Houston, and co-producer of Audiofile, heard monthly on This Way Out.