No Scrub: Joshua Radin

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IN AN AGE where record sales are plummeting, singer-songwriter Joshua Radin is still selling records — sort of. His latest EP, the indie-folky "Unclear Sky," was an iTunes exclusive and it recouped its entire expenses in two days.

"Most, maybe half of my sales are digital anyway," Radin said by phone. "I think I'm probably one of the only artists on my label that sells that much percent-wise."

Radin is on a major label, Columbia Records, but he doesn't mince words about the continually shifting record industry.

"Everyone is starting to realize we're in the music business, not the record business," he said. "When the railroads died — all those big railroad companies in the early part of the century — they died because they didn't realize that they needed to be in the transportation business not the railway business because people were buying cars and taking buses and trains. ... [And that's] like the record industry, the big labels. ... I read in Rolling Stone that six percent of American teenagers bought a record last year. So it was kind of like, 'Whoa, I knew it was bad but I didn't realize it was this bad.'"

But Radin isn't just a musician.

For six years, Radin lived in New York, working as a screenwriter and a painter. He lived above a coffee shop, where he would write, and when he became frustrated from working scripts, he would walk upstairs, pick up a guitar and learn a Bob Dylan or Beatles song.

A couple of failed screenplays and one bad breakup later, Radin picked up his guitar and — so cliche, as he put it — started writing original songs. One month later, thanks to the help of actor and close friend Zach Braff, Radin's song "Winter" was featured in "Scrubs" three and-a-half years ago.

Yes, it's true: The first song he ever wrote and recorded was broadcast to millions on television a month after he wrote it. Radin's songs have since been featured on "Grey's Anatomy" and "North Shore," as well as more episodes of "Scrubs."

"When I do interviews people say, 'This is a very weird way to have gone about it: not starting with touring, not starting with radio, all the conventional ways,'" Radin said. "But nowadays I think maybe this is the more conventional way."

With Radin's hobby now his profession, the singer-songwriter is scheduled to release his second album this fall.

"It's close," Radin said of the project. "I always think I'm really close but then I go, 'Ahh, I got some more work to do.'"

The new album will be a significant departure from 2006's "We Were Here," which had more of a "bedroom intimacy," as Radin put it.

"A lot of what I was listening to was Nick Drake and Elliot Smith and a lot of that really lo-fi sound when it's just about the song and its essence stripped down to the melody and the lyrics and that's it — not the production," Radin said. "And for this record I wanted to do something differently obviously, because if you release a record every couple of years you, just as an artist, you want to grow. And I understand the people that found that first record probably want a similar cut of sound. But it's just it gets boring. I would say I have drums on almost every song on this record and I had no drums on the first record, so that in itself is a huge difference."

Radin said he thinks his songwriting has also improved. Considering "We Were Here" featured some of the first songs he'd ever written, he's probably right.

"I think these songs may be even less specific in a way and a little more relatable to people," he said.

This could also be Radin's last full-length record, at least the way he sees the industry going, but he has his own idea for what might be next.

"Maybe the full-length record is dead; that would not be great," he said. "But on a positive side of that, what if I kept putting out digital EPs two times a year and little bundles of digital music where I could experiment with doing maybe one EP that's all electronic, the next with a symphony, another that's all collaborations with artists that I love, and not having to wait two years. ... It's a lot more freedom for an artist like me who's sort of made their career based on the Internet."

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Written by Express contributor Rudi Greenberg

Photo courtesy Columbia Records