He works as a songwriter, arranger, author, director, and record producer, releases albums as a solo artist, tours, and has created concert events at Carnegie Hall, Hollywood Bowl, SXSW, and New York's Central Park.

Richard Barone was born in Tampa, Florida, and began his music career at age seven on local top-40 radio station WALT (now known as WTIS) as "the Little DJ.

[3] Answering an advertisement in the Village Voice newspaper[3] led him to meet the musicians with whom he would soon form the Bongos, a critically acclaimed new wave band[4] that helped to create the 1980s Hoboken, New Jersey indie pop community.

[6][7] After a string of independent singles released in the U.K. on Fetish were compiled in the U.S. as Drums Along the Hudson (PVC), and a major U.S. tour with the B-52s, the group signed to RCA Records.

[11] Barone released his first solo album, Cool Blue Halo (recorded live at The Bottom Line in New York) in 1987, prior to the Bongos' amicable breakup.

Anthony DeCurtis, writing in Rolling Stone, praised Barone's "spare, elegant arrangements" and credited him with fashioning "a kind of rock chamber music.

"[12] While Trouser Press described the record as "intimate but confused,"[13] NPR's Tom Moon, in a more recent assessment, called the album "a plaintive masterpiece," adding "Cool Blue Halo feels timeless, and maybe even exotic."

Moon also credited Barone's version of David Bowie's "The Man Who Sold the World" with influencing Nirvana's own cover of the song on their 1994 album MTV Unplugged in New York.

Trouser Press championed the "fine set of yearning love songs" on Primal Dream, while calling their production and arrangements as a "step backwards" from his debut album.

[13] But David Browne, writing in Rolling Stone, gave the album four stars and commented that "Barone is fast moving beyond the limited vocabulary of twelve strings and wimp-pop vocals.

"[20] Also in 1997, Barone partnered with songwriter Jules Shear to co-host "Writers in the Round - Bluebird Style," a monthly series at The Bottom Line that featured Rosanne Cash, Ron Sexsmith, Susan Cowsill, and other singer/songwriters.

[24] From 1999 to 2004, Barone directed and performed in The Downtown Messiah, a unique, multi-genre interpretation of Handel's baroque oratorio that was broadcast annually in December on over 200 public radio stations nationwide, and combined elements of pop, folk, blues, and jazz.

[28] For New York's Central Park SummerStage he created The Not-so Great American Songbook, a lovingly irreverent look at the guilty-pleasure hits of the 1970s, featuring an eclectic cast that included Justin Vivian Bond.

[31] That year also saw the first release on his own RBM Special Editions label, an anthology entitled Collection: An Embarrassment of Richard, composed of highlights from his back catalogue.

[32] In June, he performed in The Blood on the Tracks Project at Merkin Hall, a multi-artist tribute to Bob Dylan's landmark 1974 album on its thirtieth anniversary.

[33] Also that year, Barone joined 1960s folk-rock icon Donovan for a series of the latter's Beat Café concert events, including nine performances at New York's Joe's Pub, singing and reading excerpts from Allen Ginsberg's Howl.

Several Bongos reunion concerts were held, culminating with an outdoor performance at the Hoboken Arts and Music Festival, during which the band was honored with a Mayoral Proclamation and the keys to the city.

On his birthday, October 1, 2008, he brought Frontman: A Musical Reading to the stage at Carnegie Hall in New York City, with "Special Guests and Legendary Friends," including Moby, Lou Reed, the Band's Garth Hudson, Marshall Crenshaw, Terre and Suzzy Roche, Randy Brecker, Carlos Alomar, DeWitt and others as a benefit for public radio station WFUV.

Anger performed, along with Lou Reed, Sonic Youth, Jonas Mekas, Moby, actors Ben Foster and Philip Seymour Hoffman and others.

[49][50] On September 11, 2011, the tenth anniversary of 9/11, Barone released a re-write of the 1894 song "The Sidewalks of New York" with updated lyrics that referenced the World Trade Center attack, co-written and produced by collaborator Matthew Billy.

[51][52] In December 2011, Barone was appointed as a professor at the Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music at New York University where he began teaching "Stage Presence: The Art of Performance.

[64] Barone partnered with Alejandro Escovedo on March 14, 2014, to produce and co-host the first major tribute to the late Lou Reed at the Paramount Theatre in Austin, Texas, as part of the SXSW Music Festival.

[65] Barone also released a recording of Reed's "All Tomorrow's Parties" produced by Chris Seefried with a video by Jonas Mekas assembled from footage of the early Velvet Underground at Andy Warhol's Factory.

[66] In October 2014 Barone launched "A Circle of Songs," a live, monthly musical talk show series at SubCulture below the Lynn Redgrave Theater in Greenwich Village.

The album was curated by music writer/Columbia Records executive Mitchell Cohen, with sessions produced by Steve Addabbo and featuring guest appearances from Dion, John Sebastian and David Amram.

[68] In March 2017, Barone brought the Sorrows & Promises project to the SXSW Music Festival in Austin, Texas where he hosted a five-and-a-half-hour showcase based on the album.

[90] Joining forces with Glenn Mercer, guitarist/frontman of The Feelies, Barone began performing a series of concerts entitled Hazy Cosmic Jive, a tribute to the mid-1970s experimentation of David Bowie, Brian Eno, Roxy Music, Marc Bolan and others.

[100] On January 8, 2021, David Bowie's cover of John Lennon's song "Mother," for which Barone had sung harmony vocals with producer Tony Visconti at the original session in 1998, was posthumously released on limited edition vinyl and digital streaming on Parlophone Records.

The sold-out concert, which featured performances by Tom Paxton, Jose Feliciano, Vernon Reid, The Bongos, and many others, was a benefit for MusiCares and the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation.

[109] Barone's latest single, "All Fall Down", featuring Darryl "DMC" McDaniels, was released on September 20, 2024 on Richard Gottehrer's Instant Records label.