Singer-songwriter Joshua Radin assures his fans that they won’t hear the same set twice when he kicks off 2023 with a three-night stand that starts Jan. 5, at the Egyptian Theatre.
“I kind of get up and read the room, because I really try to be in the moment, completely present,” he said. “And for some reason, I can’t do that while being held to a setlist.”
By doing this, Radin guarantees a unique experience for both the audience and himself, even if things don’t go quite as planned.
“If I play a new song and people don’t like it, then I’ll play an old song,” he said with a laugh. “But if I feel like they like what I’m doing, then I’ll pretty much do anything I want. And if someone yells out something that I haven’t played in years that I may have forgotten about, but would like to try, I’ll do my best.”
Radin developed this approach to performing over the past five years, he said.
“I used to do setlists with a band, but I kept worrying about whether or not the band members would remember certain songs,” Radin said. “So, I started playing with fewer musicians in order to play whatever I wanted, whenever I wanted. That way, I could make the night seem like I was in a living room, passing the guitar off to friends. I could create a feeling like we’re all in this together.”
The Park City gigs will feature Radin’s friend, multi-instrumentalist Brandon Walters.
“He’s been with me for such a long time that we kind of play this game where I’ll start playing a song and he’ll have to figure out what song it is by the first verse,” Radin said with another laugh.
The Park City shows will also feature some songs Radin has recorded for new extended-play records — “The World Will Tell Me So” Volume One and Volume Two — he plans to release this year.
The singer currently has 10 songs in the bag, and has been releasing one a month since September.
“By the time I’m in Park City the first four will be out, and the fifth will be released a week after Park City,” he said.
The idea to release the songs on a monthly basis came to Radin as he assessed how fans are listening to music these days.
While he’s always released entire albums, and still loves that format, Radin thought things have started to become antiquated.
“Before you would wait a year or two for your favorite band or artist to release an album, but there would be one or two songs that we call ‘album tracks’ or ‘deep cuts’ that wouldn’t get as much attention as the first two or three singles,” he said. “Since I’m not someone who really does ‘singles’ or ‘radio songs,’ I wondered what would happen if I released a song a month.”
Radin’s thoughts about the attention span of younger music fans also led to his decision to release one song a month.
“Nowadays, because of streaming services and the way kids make playlists, they may never go back to listening to a full album,” he said.
The shift has given Radin the creative freedom to go into a studio wherever he was with whoever he was with and record the songs.
“Right now I’m in Stockholm, Sweden, where I just finished recording the last songs for these EPs,” he said.
The new way of releasing songs has also changed how Radin approaches and writes his songs.
“When I did full albums, I used to put songs that I thought would hit people the fastest on the first three tracks, because I thought those songs would be the ones people would like right away,” he said. “Now I feel all the songs will get the same attention from my fans because I’m releasing them one at a time.”
Although Radin’s method of writing, recording and releasing songs has changed a bit, his influences haven’t.
“I have always been inspired by my parents’ record collection, and probably always will be,” he said.
Those artists include a long list of classic artists that include everyone from The Beatles to Bob Dylan, and Joni Mitchell to Bill Withers.
And while Radin listens to these artists a lot, he is also inspired by books.
“I’m always reading classic novels, and every now and again, I’ll read a line that sparks an idea for a song,” he said.
Radin’s favorite authors are from different countries, but he has an affinity for works by Fyodor Dostoevsky, Leo Tolstoy, Alexander Pushkin, Mikhail Bulgakov, Nikolai Gogol and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.
“It’s tough to beat the Russians, because they were really the first existentialists,” he said.
Radin reflected on what his thoughts were after he first read Dostoyevsky’s “Notes from Underground.”
“I felt like the protagonist was sort of like an early version of an unfunny Woody Allen,” he said. “There is so much neurosis.”
While Radin’s songs don’t have the unbalanced ranting and ravings of the bitter loner found in “Notes from Underground,” he did say all of his songs are like journal entries.
“When I first started songwriting, I wasn’t writing them for others, because I didn’t even think anyone would even hear them,” he said. “So one of the best rewards, hands down, is meeting people after shows who tell me how something I have written has helped them in some way. I love it when they say, ‘I’ve never told anyone this, but I’m going to tell you…’ and then confide in me. There is nothing that keeps me going more than that.”
Radin is looking forward to his three-night residency at the Egyptian Theatre this weekend.
“What’s better than going skiing and then hitting sound check?” he said.