Ed Romanoff

Ed Romanoff is an American performer, singer-songwriter, and entrepreneur who appeared on Broadway between 1992 and 2005 and later built parallel careers in music and brand communications. Raised in Connecticut, he attended the University of Virginia, where he earned a Bachelor of Arts in Communications. Before settling into a professional path, he worked in carpentry, special education teaching, and cattle branding.

Romanoff's early professional life centered on the communications industry. From 1988 to 1992 he held positions at Jack Morton Co., serving successively as account manager, director of sales, and assistant to the general manager. He then became general manager of Ray Block Productions, Inc., a role he held until 1996, when he founded PineRock, a New York City-based global brand communications company specializing in events, digital and video production, and corporate communication strategy. The company's name derives from PineRock Park in Connecticut, where Romanoff played sports during his childhood.

His Broadway career spanned more than a decade and included productions such as Annie, Man of La Mancha, The Most Happy Fella, Hairspray, and Children and Art, among others. During this period he developed the performance background that would later inform his work as a recording artist.

Romanoff acquired his first guitar at seventeen and was drawn early to the music of John Prine, whom he credits as a primary influence. He did not begin writing original songs until 2008, when he also studied at The Song School in Lyons, Colorado, working with artists Darrell Scott and Beth Nielsen Chapman. His songwriting gained recognition quickly: in 2011 he won first place in the International Songwriting Competition for the lyrics to "St. Vincent de Paul," and he received top honors in the Great American Song Contest for "Two Yellow Roses" and "Breakfast for One on the Fifth of July." In 2013 he won the New Folk competition at the Kerrville Folk Festival, a prize previously awarded to Steve Earle and Lyle Lovett.

His self-titled debut album was released in June 2012, when Romanoff was fifty-three years old. The record contains ten original songs, with guest vocals from Josh Ritter, Tift Merritt, and Mary Gauthier, and instrumental contributions from Duke Levine, Jaroslav Rodriguez, Tom West, Kimon Kirk, and Eugene Friesen. The album reached number twelve on the European Americana Charts and was named a Roots Radio Top 100 Album for 2012. The opening track, "St. Vincent de Paul," draws on a personal discovery Romanoff made in 2008, when a DNA test taken alongside a friend revealed that he was of half Irish descent rather than the Russian heritage he had grown up believing was his own, and that the man he had known as his father was not his biological father.

In December 2016, Romanoff released the digital single "Everyday Is Christmas (Since I Met You)" on the German label Birdstone Records, produced by Nic v. Vogelstein. His second album, The Orphan King, followed on February 23, 2018, released in both the United States and Europe on PineRock Records and produced by Simone Felice, known for his work with The Lumineers, the Levon Helm Band, and Bat for Lashes. The record entered the Euro Americana Charts at number two in February 2018 and repeated that position in March 2018. The German edition of Rolling Stone awarded it four out of five stars, and the vinyl publication MINT placed it in the company of Bruce Springsteen's Nebraska and Leonard Cohen's Songs of Love and Hate as a work that defines its genre. Guest musicians on the album included Larry Campbell, Cindy Cashdollar, David Baron, Teresa Williams, Cindy Mizelle, Mai Bloomfield, and Kenneth Pattengale of the Milk Carton Kids.

Romanoff also toured Europe in 2015 as an opening act for Rachael Yamagata. The first leg, in February, took him through Munich, Frankfurt, Leipzig, Cologne, Stuttgart, Duisburg, Hamburg, and Berlin. A second European run in September covered London, Hamburg, Verona, Ravenna, Zürich, Frankfurt, Amsterdam, and Rotterdam, with an additional date in Barcelona in October of that year.