After more than two decades as an in-demand sideman on stages and in studios of all sizes, Berlin has made an album that combines his love of concise pop-rock songwriting with his expertise as a guitarist to make a record that celebrates both. 

 Berlin describes Space Punk and Other Junk, his fourth release, as “instrumental singer-songwriter music. These songs speak the vernacular of concise pop-rock music, so you’d expect them to have words. But it’s instrumental music.”

Why no words? 

“I liked the challenge, I thought it was an interesting avenue for exploration,” Berlin explains. 

“How do you fill the void left by the absence of singing? How do you adapt the composition, the arrangement, the guitar playing, the guitar sounds, the production, so that this music is just as compelling as if there were a singer? That challenge was the driving force behind Space Punk and Other Junk.”

It started one night when Berlin woke up from a dream in which he was listening to a long-lost hit song that no one had ever heard before. He immediately grabbed his guitar and learned the music from his dream.

Over the next month, Berlin kept dreaming songs. Gradually it dawned on him that there was a batch of material gestating in his subconscious. So instead of waiting for additional songs to come to him, he went looking for them - and found plenty of them there for the taking.

With these freshly-hatched songs in hand, Berlin spent 2019 playing live gigs around NYC, refining the material.

But then the Covid-19 pandemic left Berlin, along with so many others all over the world, stuck at home. Instead of commuting into Manhattan six days a week to his job as guitarist in the Tony Award-winning Broadway musical Come From Away, Berlin found himself alone in his apartment with his guitars, his home studio, and those new songs. 

So Berlin booked time at Williamsburg’s Grand Street Recording, where he and his band recorded basic tracks under the watchful eyes and ears of Ken Rich. The following months saw Berlin occupied with guitar overdubs, until eventually he sent the completed tracks to engineer James Frazee for mixing.

The resulting collection—and every step of its creation—was a source of constant surprise for Berlin. 

“Even though I knew the music really well, it kept developing in ways that I never expected,” he says. “From early demos, to live performance, to basic tracking, to overdubs, to mixing and mastering - at each step the music took on greater depth and dimension.”

Originally from Cleveland, Ohio, Alec Berlin moved to New York City twenty-five years ago after completing a Masters Degree in Jazz Performance at Boston’s New England Conservatory. 

Berlin’s New York gigging life began to pick up steam, and before too long he landed on Broadway, playing in Green Day’s American Idiot. He has since shared stages with Elton John, James Taylor, Rob Thomas, Ben Folds, Kenny Wheeler, and Rufus Wainwright; has performed in dozens of Broadway shows including Rent, Wicked, The Lion King, and Bright Star (written by Steve Martin and Edie Brickell); and has appeared on The Late Show with David Letterman, The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, and Good Morning America. Since 2017, Berlin has been playing in Come From Away, including in the film version currently streaming on Apple TV+. 

He released his debut record, a collection of original jazz called Crossing Paths, in 2000, and followed up with a pair of vocal-based pop and rock records - Beauty, Grazing at the Trough in 2007, and Innocent Explanationsin 2012. 

Space Punk and Other Junk is his fourth release under his name.