BRADY EARNHART: Manalapan

Brady Earnhart

Manalapan

© 2003 City Salvage Records (783707662428)

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A songwriter's songwriter. Brady's character-driven narratives are delicate, hard-hitting, often funny, & full of detail. His own arrangements feature acoustic guitar with guests on cello, upright bass, vibes, french horns, & more.

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.

reviews

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  • Really good CD with amazing lyrics and vocals.
    author: Richard Bowen

    I really love this CD, the vocals and songwritng are amazing. Listened to this all day after receiving it in the mail. Its great to discover a new artist.

  • High praise for Manalapan
    author: Gregg Shapiro - Windy City Times & Bay Area Reporter

    Manalapan (City Salvage), the second full-length album by Brady Earnhart is so brilliant and wondrous that it's almost unfair to write about any other CDs in the same column. Earnhart is first and foremost a poet (he received an MFA in poetry from the University of Iowa) and his lyrics have a sophistication and sensitivity that is rare in the contemporary queer music scene. . . While I don't know in what order he writes his songs, lyrics or music first, the outcome is perfection. The music and the words are ideally suited to each other. Earnhart's vocals and acoustic guitar are supplemented by Gina Pezzoli's cello on the title track, while Kris Curran's French horn shines through on "I Just Want More." The backing vocals on "Arlington" give it an early Simon & Garfunkel zest. I cannot recommend this disc strongly enough.

  • Exceptional combination of music, lyrics and arrangement
    author: Paul Steinbrecher

    I liked Brady Earnhart’s Manalapan so much that I completely ruined an entire dinner listening to it – I couldn’t manage to concentrate on cooking at all when I heard the exceptional combination of terrific music, honest and truthful lyrics and beautiful, simple arrangements. Several songs (notably October, Whitman in 1863, and I Just Want More) made me reach for the lyrics sheet to follow along rather than attend to what was happening on the stove. The swordfish was decimated but I found a fantastic new artist. Buy this cd – but order out for pizza.

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