His Shore: Bryan Russo and Coastal Connection
By: Diane Elliott
Bryan Russo leads two lives, at least. The host of Coastal Connection, heard Fridays at noon on WAMU 88.5’s Eastern Shore relay WRAU 88.3 FM, he is also a journalist and a musician. He describes himself simply as a storyteller, and his abilities are on display when he sits down for an interview.
Bryan lives in Berlin, Md., with his wife, Andrea, and their two children. If you’re picturing a quiet, bucolic life, though, think again. Talking with Bryan is less a day at the beach than a day at the races: he leads the conversation quickly from Pittsburgh to Glasgow to Ocean City, Md., and back again via sports, music, journalism, and Sesame Street.
His life follows a similarly busy path. A typical day has him waking up at 6 a.m. to write music. After taking care of his kids, it‘s Coastal Connection time. He heads out to cover stories, to the studio to record, or to his dining room “office” to edit text or audio. The evening may include more work on a story, or he may have a music gig that ends in the early hours of the next day. “I keep asking for 4 extra hours in the day, but I never get them,” he says.
Bryan’s mom says that music was his first love. She remembers him watching Itzhak Perlman play the violin on Sesame Street at 2 years old. He pointed to the violin and told his mother, “I want to do that.” Piano lessons followed, and then years with the violin, culminating in a performance with the Pittsburgh Symphony. He and other selected high school musicians had three days to learn a classical piece that they then performed at Heinz Hall, each playing alongside their Pittsburgh Symphony counterpart. This was Bryan’s first experience with a high-pressure deadline.
Journalism didn’t become a strong interest until college. At Lock Haven University of Pennsylvania, he played ice hockey and tried out all forms of journalism, starting with a college radio show on Saturday mornings titled something like Healing Your Hangover. His ambition was to be Mike Lange, the voice of the Pittsburgh Penguins (pause here for loud boos from Caps fans). A senior year spent in Glasgow, Scotland, led him to print journalism, and he eventually landed a job with the Associated Press, covering the NHL and NBA. After a few years of talking to “men in towels,” however, Bryan says he was ready for other kinds of stories.
Since his childhood in rural Pennsylvania, Bryan says he had spent his life “trying to go places where there were more people,” but when his wife was pregnant with their first child, they decided to return to the area where they’d met: the Eastern Shore. Ocean City had long been Bryan’s go-to place for financial refueling. He’d take summer jobs there, including a short stint as a scoper (“one of those guys that took pictures on the beach; I was terrible at that—I lasted about 3 weeks,” he explains) and, eventually renting chairs and umbrellas.
A stint on the local news beat for Maryland Coast Dispatch, a weekly Ocean City newspaper, prepared Bryan for an unexpected opportunity. A few years ago, when WAMU was looking for someone to be the local force behind its Eastern Shore presence, Bryan got the job. “It’s not very often that a gigantic organization like WAMU decides to come to your neighborhood, and you’re the guy that they want to spearhead a new portion of their organization,” he says.
Coastal Connection, the weekly hour-long show hosted by Bryan and produced by Tara Boyle, covers science, business, politics, arts, and local interest. The show has garnered three awards from the Chesapeake Bay Associated Press Broadcasters’ Association, and recently, a regional Edward R. Murrow Award for one of Bryan’s favorite pieces for the show, “Homeless in Hobo Woods.” The story follows Kenny, who moved into a tent in the woods after losing his job as a house painter and has to deal with the destruction of his tent by local vandals. The listener gets to know the man quickly: his history, his work skills, and the challenges he faces.
An interview with singer/songwriter Randy Newman is another of Bryan’s favorite segments. The two shared stories about writing songs and composing movie scores, another of Bryan’s sidelines. “Writing for movies is like a story problem, where, like, one ship is leaving here and another is leaving there,” he says. “You have to think very mathematically about it, whereas writing albums is very freeform, it’s poetry.”
Bryan’s latest album, with a sound described as “the blues stomping on pop melodies,” is called Sound the Alarm. He recorded it with his group, The Tragic Figures. He recently wrote and scored a short documentary for the Babe Ruth Museum in Baltimore on “The Star-Spangled Banner” and its relationship to sports. He also scored the documentary by WAMU 88.5 education reporter Kavitha Cardoza for her American Graduate series.
Bryan ends the interview by reflecting on his work with WAMU. “I work really hard [so that] when people cross the bridge and they flip from 88.5 to 88.3, if they click over on a Friday I want them to hear the same quality that they would hear on a show like Kojo’s.”
He interrupts himself. “Kojo has become, like, my Elvis,” he says. “I still geek out a little bit every time I hear one of Kojo’s Friday promos: ‘And in Ocean City, Maryland, it’s Coastal Connection with Bryan Russo.”
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