Some cities hum, and some cities grind, and then there’s Dayton, Ohio, which does both at once, like it’s chewing aluminum foil and smiling through the sparks. Out of that glorious Midwestern feedback loop comes Todd The Fox—musician, songwriter, performer, singer—padding into your ears tomorrow on Your Tuesday Afternoon Alternative from 4–5 p.m. Eastern, impeccably dressed as if from a nineteenth-century sepia-toned picture, eyes bright, ready to knock over your preconceptions and maybe a lamp or two. This isn’t a press-release animal. This is the kind of musician who lives in the alley behind the club and somehow knows your name and the story of how you met.

Let’s get something straight before the bio-police arrive with their clipboards: Todd The Fox isn’t a “local act” the way people say “local” when they mean “small.” Dayton has always been a factory for nervous systems—Guided by Voices turning beer-soaked basements into libraries of genius, the Breeders bending melody until it smiles back, far too many funk ghosts rattling the windows to mention them all. Todd The Fox comes from that lineage of people who treat songs like living organisms, not products. The music breathes. It snarls. It slips between rock and roll styles the way a fox slips under a fence: quick, quiet, leaving you wondering how it got there and beautiful.

Listen closely, and you hear a songwriter who understands the dirty miracle of rockabilly, rock ‘n’ roll, juke joint, rock AND roll, pop, and more—how a hook can feel like salvation if you let it—and who also understands how to break the hook on purpose just to see what bleeds out. Todd’s songs don’t ask permission. They don’t knock. They kick the door, apologize sincerely, then steal your favorite record and give it back with new fingerprints. There’s classic melody here, yes, but it’s the kind that’s been roughed up by real nights and real mornings, the kind that knows the difference between romance and survival.

Performance-wise, Todd The Fox doesn’t “take the stage” so much as make it a living room and then light a match. There’s a physical intelligence to it, a sense that the body is another instrument and the crowd is a choir that doesn’t know it’s rehearsing. You don’t watch so much as get pulled into orbit. To call him a showman would truly understate it. That’s the secret sauce: the generosity. Even when the songs bite, they’re offered with an open palm. You’re invited to bleed a little, too. It’s communion with better jokes.

And here’s the thing the algorithms won’t tell you: Todd The Fox understands time. Not in the “retro” sense—this isn’t cosplay—but in the way great rock & roll always has, a kind of temporal vandalism. The performance of the songs feels like they all could’ve been written yesterday or twenty years from now, which is to say they live in the only time that matters: the one where you’re paying attention. There’s craft without fussiness, ambition without the TED Talk, and a willingness to leave the seams showing because that’s where the electricity leaks out.

Tomorrow’s hour on Your Tuesday Afternoon Alternative isn’t a content drop; it’s a rendezvous. Radio still matters when it’s alive, when it’s a room you can step into and feel the air change. From 4–5 p.m. Eastern, Todd The Fox comes by to talk shop, spin yarns, and let the music do what it does best: make a mess and call it truth. Expect stories that zig when you think they’ll zag, expect songs that refuse to sit still, expect the kind of conversation that remembers radio is a human act, not a playlist with a personality disorder.

If you’re tired of music that arrives pre-chewed, if you miss the feeling that something might go wrong in the best possible way, tune in. Todd The Fox is the sound of a city, of a tradition that learned how to survive by inventing its own fun, the sound of a songwriter who trusts the song more than the strategy. There’s wit here, and bite, and that elusive thing critics pretend to quantify: soul. Not the museum kind. The living, twitching kind that looks you in the eye and dares you to stay.

So set the dial. Clear the hour. Let the fox into the henhouse of your afternoon and see what survives. Tomorrow, 4–5 p.m. Eastern. Your Tuesday Afternoon Alternative. This is how radio remembers what it’s for.