I played in a band for more than a decade. I always thought (still do) that I was pretty good. I wrote a lot of song, each trying to out emotion the one before in some vain effort to prove that I was not the soulless robot that you all know me as today.
I wanted to make an emotional impact when I wrote. I wanted tears and sniffles and the remembrances of things painfully and irretrievably lost. I wanted, in short, to be Joshua Radin, I just didn’t know it.
The first time I heard Joshua Radin, I was watching a sit-com and, I reluctantly admit, he made me tear up a little bit. You heard me: I said a sit-com. His song “Winter” was included as the background for a funeral scene in an episode of Scrubs called My Screw Up.
After rewinding the TiVo a couple of times to hear it again, I hit the Internet to find out just who the hell was doing Elliot Smith better than Elliot Smith. Since then, I’ve become a huge fan of Radin’s.
He really is everything I wanted to be when I was playing guitar and singing for a living. Kinda. I also wanted to be Bono and David Gilmour. Hell, I still do.
Enjoy, and then go buy some on iTunes:
Here’s his MySpace. Go be his buddy.
Wow. He IS out Elliot Smith-ing Elliot Smith.
Nice addition to an otherwise dreary day. Thanks.
I’m glad somebody got that reference.
You become a bigger girl every year. At least I know what to get you on your birthday now – I’m just not sure what color pumps you’d prefer with your party dress. Stephanie.
Do you REALLY want me to tell the Pay It Forward story in here? Do you really?
Oh hell, Pay It Forward made everybody cry. Didn’t it?
Not me, Twinkie. Not me.