Radio active

For singer-songwriter Seth Glier, the next right thing is to come back to Eugene.

“I remember, it was one of the most unique places,” Glier says over the phone from his apartment in Northampton, Mass.

It was two, maybe three years ago, and Glier was on the road with Ani DiFranco, en route from San Francisco to Portland, when they pulled off Interstate 5 and drove into town looking for a bite to eat.

They ended up downtown, at Cozmic, and they enjoyed some pizza before getting back on the road.

The 25-year-old Glier, whose 2011 album, “The Next Right Thing,” was nominated for a 2012 Grammy for best engineered album, will not be playing at Cozmic on Sunday on his return to Eugene.

Instead, he’ll be playing a house concert at 755 River Road on Sunday afternoon. And yes, he’ll bring that big bass drum that he bangs away on in a Brooklyn, N.Y., subway station — the same spot where Michael Jackson filmed his “Bad” video in 1987 — in the music video version of the title track, “The Next Right Thing.”

Glier’s appearance at Staples Center in Los Angeles on Feb. 12, 2012, for the 54th annual Grammy Awards, was a shining moment that can be traced to one of the darkest days in American history.

Glier, whose latest album, “Things I Should Let You Know,” came out last fall, does not come from a musical background. His father was a fashion photographer in New York City, a career he had to cut short to take care of Seth’s older brother, Jamie, now 30, who is nonverbal and autistic. Glier’s mother is a state welfare worker.

Glier says he was moved to write his first song on Sept. 11, 2001, when he was just 12. He was in history class in the seventh grade in his hometown of Shelburne Falls, Mass., that Tuesday morning when news of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in New York City and the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., came across America’s TV sets.

“It wasn’t so much the effects of the day; it was how the adults were treating it,” Glier recalls. Everyone watched for a while, but “then we all just went back to learning history” — even though history was happening right before their eyes.

“And that’s really what sort of changed my ideology toward the world — at 12!” Glier says.

So he wrote a rap song about it. He’s not even sure what it was called, but he thinks it might have been “Endless.” He performed it at a middle school talent show on his Casio keyboard, a gift from the mother of a friend he’d gotten into a fight with while shooting BB guns.

Glier says it was around this time that he went from listening to the likes of Eminem and Chumbawamba to the music of his parents’ generation — Joni Mitchell, Jackson Browne and James Taylor. Glier would listen to Mitchell’s 1971 album, “Blue,” on the school bus every day in seventh grade.

“I wasn’t finding music that talked about things I was feeling in my generation,” Glier says. “Those (older) records were rescue lines for me.”

Glier, who’s been described as a “troubadour” by more than one reviewer and who plays piano and some guitar, has taken just one formal piano lesson in his life. He says he didn’t get much out of it.

Instead, he taught himself how to play on that little Casio keyboard.

“I just kind of taught myself by ear,” he says.

Sounding out silence

Glier attended high school at a performing arts charter school in South Hadley, Mass., and then for a year he attended the prestigious Berklee College of Music in Boston. But he dropped out, eager to get going on a career and determined to make it happen.

And the young man who has a pet pig named Pork Chop and who now tours with a blind, 62-year-old saxophone player (Joe Nerney) has done just that.

Glier has recorded three albums and does about 150 performances a year. And he no longer has to record his albums in his parents’ Shelburne Falls basement, as he did with “The Next Right Thing.”

“I get to do what I love full time,” he says.

One of the biggest inspirations in his life is his relationship with Jamie, his brother. Glier is a national spokesman for Autism Speaks.

His mother used to take Seth out of school and take him with her to Massachusetts State House in Boston, where he met senators and representatives as his mother promoted autism awareness.

Glier says the values he learned as a kid were about “not what you did, but what you did with it.” Thus, he says he uses his music to “shed light on things that are more important, whether they are social issues or political issues.

“Growing up in my family really instilled a sense of caretaking and service providing.”

And what about the inspiration for his biggest hit thus far, “The Next Right Thing,” the fervorous, rhythmic ballad that seems like a clarion call to the millennial generation?

You’re a long way from home/ Hear me sing

People need a miracle/ To do the next right thing

Gained in translation

Glier says it was actually actor and comedian Bill Murray, during a 2009 ABC TV special, who uttered something like, “What if we dedicated ourselves to the next right thing?” That special, “Adventures of an Incurable Optimist,” featured actor Michael J. Fox, who has Parkinson’s disease.

The TV show played off Fox’s book, “Always Looking Up: Adventures of an Incurable Optimist,” about how Fox’s battle with Parkinson’s ultimately had led to a more productive and positive life through activism. After Murray uttered the quote, Glier says “I wrote it down.”

Then he wrote the song, drumming out the beat and the melody by banging on his bed’s headboard in the middle of the night. That’s because all his instruments were packed away in the car and he didn’t feel like dragging them out at that hour.

“That’s why that song is different than my other body of work,” Glier says. “If I wrote it on the piano or guitar it would have been a totally different song.

“It wouldn’t have been as raw.”

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Mark Baker has been a journalist for the past 25 years. He’s currently the sports editor at The Jackson Hole News & Guide in Jackson, Wyo.