Mark Radice
MUSICIAN & SONGWRITER
Mark Radice has been a musician and songwriter in the music industry since 1964. A talented musician from a very young age, he has provided keyboards, vocals, guitars, production and songs for himself as well as many well-known artists. With well over 5,500 original songs to his credit, he is one of the more prolific songwriters alive.
Mark Radice was born in Newark, New Jersey on November 23, 1957 and moved to Nutley with his family in 1968. He resided at 155 Grant Avenue and attended Washington Elementary School, Franklin Middle School and Nutley High School. Musical talent was strong in his family. Radice’s father, Gene Radice, was a well known recording engineer who worked with artists such as Jimi Hendrix, Velvet Underground and the Mamas & The Papas.
Considered a musical prodigy, Mark Radice began writing songs after teaching himself guitar while listening to Beatles songs. In 1964, at the age of seven, Radice was signed by RCA Records. His first single Natural Morning was later covered by Frankie Valli. In 1967, while signed to Decca Records, Radice released 10,000-Year-OId Blues, which featured then twenty-year-old Steven Tyler. His very first full-length self-titled LP was released in 1971 on Paramount Records and the song Hey My Love was later covered by Dion.
In 1973, Radice was asked by Donovan to move to England and rehearse, tour and record with him on his 7 Tease album. In 1976, through United Artists Records, he released Ain’t Nothin’ But A Party which featured Brass Construction and included the hit single If You Can’t Beat ‘Em Join ‘Em. Throughout 1978, Radice toured with Aerosmith playing keyboards and performing backing vocals as well as playing on Aerosmith’s Live Bootleg! Double LP. In 1996, Radice played keyboards and sang backup vocals on a ten-month tour with legendary Bluesman Matt “Guitar” Murphy.
As a writer for EMI Publishing, Radice collaborated with artists, to name a few, Michael Bolton, Eddie Money, Barbra Streisand, David Edmunds, Barry Manilow, Gene Simmons and Cheap Trick. After touring with Cheap Trick in 1985, Radice was introduced to Jim Henson by Phil Ramone and collaborated on and wrote over fifty songs for The Muppets over a period of eight years. Radice also wrote one hundred and sixty songs for Sesame Street, including rearranging the original theme in 2008 to reflect a more current sound. Radice was nominated for three Emmy Awards for his work on Sesame Street.
In 2012, Radice moved to Tennessee and from 2012-2014 wrote twenty-seven songs, one for each letter of the alphabet plus a “new” alphabet song, for the Sing and Spell Learning Letters project which in 2019 became an animated television show.
Radice has self-produced many original albums from the 1990’s to the present, including a variety of previously unreleased materials, often writing up to ninety songs a year. In 2016, Radice released his first original solo CD in twelve years called Audio Quicksand, which spans thirty-seven years of recordings and fifteen songs.
Radice maintains a lot of proud family and friends living in Nutley, which he will always call home, especially his brother Steven, who nominated him for inclusion in the Nutley Hall of Fame. Radice currently lives in Tennessee tracking songs for the creators of Karaoke and continues to create music.