Josh Radnor is best known as an actor — he played the main character, Ted Mosby, on the sitcom “How I Met Your Mother,” which ran for nine seasons. But for the last several years, Radnor has also been working as a singer-songwriter.
His first album was a collaboration with singer Ben Lee, and now he’s out with his first full-length solo record — a double album called “Eulogy.”
Radnor, who will be performing Saturday night at the Musical Instrument Museum, joined The Show to talk about his music.
Full conversation
SAM DINGMAN: You have a couple of songs about the way that you find yourself behaving when you're in New York City, and how the concrete behaviors that you engage in in New York City, you sort of recognize in yourself and sort of don't recognize as yourself. If that makes sense.
JOSH RADNOR: Yeah. [LAUGH]
[MUSIC CLIP PLAYS]
RADNOR: I suppose I'm quite nostalgic is one of the things I battle in my life. This playwright I worked with, Richard Greenberg, I did a play of his off Broadway a couple of years ago. And he has this line — I think he just said it very casually in an interview, but it always stayed with me. He said he thinks “nostalgia is just a longing for a time you know you can can survive.” You know, the present moment —
DINGMAN: Oh, wow. That’s beautiful. [LAUGHS]
RADNOR: Right? The present moment is so harrowing and so scary, because we don't know. I only realized it while I was recording, but I ended up telling my friends, the producers, you know, I think this album is about death. I think this album is about the part of me that couldn't behave in New York City. I can certainly be in New York City and behave now in a different way. That was a very particular moment in my life. But it was also like — there's a Buddhist statement that says, “When you get to the other side of the river, drop the canoe.” Right? You don't need the vehicle that got you across once you're across the river. So, a lot of these songs are about dropping the canoe.
DINGMAN: Interesting. Interesting — but I have to ask, there’s a way in which by making a song about them, it does seem like there's a bit of a desire to commemorate him or make some sort of musical monument to him.
RADNOR: Yeah, for yeah, for sure. I mean, it's a musical cemetery, but it's also like everyone gets a 21-gun salute or whatever. You know, like there's an honoring of the characters that were populating my life. I always think that you can write songs from two places. This is very broadly speaking. One, you can write songs as a protagonist in the middle of the confusion, like notes from the battlefield. Like, I don't know what's going on, I'm confused, I'm overwhelmed. And you can also write songs from the perspective of the wise elder — whether it's giving advice or wisdom to your younger self or to a younger person. But I play with these narrative focal points.
DINGMAN: Yeah. Well, and if I may, you're talking about very vulnerable experiences on this record. Just to give one example on the song “You Can Sleep Alone Tonight.”
[MUSIC CLIP PLAYS]
DINGMAN: That's a very tender space to explore in a song. And it makes me think of there's a lyric on the record that I really love, where you say — this is from a different song — but you say, “You fear dirty laundry aired, I fear living and dying scared.” And it made me wonder if part of the goal with the writing on this record was to be sort of fearless in talking about these tender experiences?
RADNOR: I don't know how much forethought there was around that. … When I went to NYU to the graduate acting program. And we were trained to be publicly vulnerable and publicly truthful. So. it's not like I rethought my whole personality, and I was some clammed-up person who said, all right, on this album, I'm gonna really be vulnerable and tell the truth. I've just found the artists I respond to are the vulnerable artists, who kind of crack open their skull and pull open their rib cage and expose their heart. And it makes me feel less alone in the world, because I suspect that everyone's — most people's internal lives are quite tender and quite chaotic and quite confusing and scary. It's hard to be a human. And I've described everything I do as a campfire. My friend calls Fire Channel One, it's the first channel we all kind of gathered around and watched.
DINGMAN: I like that. That’s great.
RADNOR: I just love this idea that like, OK, here's a fire. I'm gonna be telling stories and singing songs around it. … And if you find this fire in this circle nourishing for you, please stick around. And if you don't, there's plenty of other campfires. But I think that when I write something that feels honest, and it's just edging up against the part of me that I don't want to share, I know I'm on to something.
DINGMAN: This makes me think about a line that you wrote on Substack that I really loved. You said, “The older I get, I'm finding it more and more important to be witnessed, to have my thoughts heard and my feelings acknowledged by someone other than a partner or blood relation.” I wanted to ask in in that the same part of that Substack, you talk about having a weekly men's group that you talk to. And to whatever extent you're comfortable and wouldn't be betraying confidences, it strikes me that the kind of vulnerability that you're describing is something that is very much in the culture right now as a subject of debate, in terms of what masculinity is or should be. Is this something that comes up in that group? Can you tell us how much those conversations inform your songwriting or the other way around?
RADNOR: That's a great question. You can read a lot of my music and, in some ways, it's a reappraisal of manhood, right? Like the song you brought up, “You can Sleep Alone Tonight,” there's a lot of cultural messaging around for men that getting the woman to your hotel room is what you're supposed to do. But you get to a certain age, and you've had the woman in your hotel room, and you say, “You know what? What if I learned how to be alone just in this moment? And what if I let her go on with her life in a way that I wasn't disrupting it because of my own neediness or my own sense of loneliness.” And so it's almost like a revisionist love song. It's a new genre where it's not about, like, “Baby, it's Cold Outside.” It's more about … I think maybe we shouldn’t — maybe it's better that we're alone. And maybe I should learn how to be alone.
DINGMAN: Yeah. What if I could just sit with myself?
RADNOR: Yeah, and that's the part of me that started writing songs when I was 40 rather than 20. You know, I have a line in “Joshua: 45-46” which closes “Eulogy I,” where I say, “I started writing songs when I was just north of 40. I try to write some every day. I wish that I had started sometime in the ‘90s, but I'm not sure I had much to say.”
DINGMAN: Huh. Yeah.
RADNOR: And, and I feel now I have some stuff to say.
DINGMAN: Well, Josh Radnor is an actor, a writer, a filmmaker and a musician. His new double album is “Eulogy: I and II,” and he will be performing on May 3 at the Musical Instrument Museum. Josh, thank you for this conversation.
RADNOR: Absolutely.
