For a guy best known for playing America’s favorite emotionally constipated architect, Josh Radnor has a lot of feelings—and now they’ve got a soundtrack.
Eulogy: Volume 1 is Radnor’s debut solo album, a moody, reflective, and surprisingly lush breakup record that somehow feels like it was co-written by Nick Drake, Leonard Cohen, and your therapist. “I think each of these songs is a bit of a funeral,” he says, as casually as someone might mention their lunch order. “Little funerals for parts of myself I couldn’t carry forward.”
Radnor is used to storytelling, just usually with fewer minor chords. “I’m a storyteller whether I’m acting, writing films, or writing songs,” he says. “These are just three- to four-minute stories set to music.” And boy, some of them hit like a punch to the solar plexus wrapped in a warm cardigan.
The album opener, “Red,” is a defiant, adolescent snarl in the rearview mirror. “It’s about this masculine rite of passage,” he explains, quoting Robert Bly. “Rebellious, lusty… you know, ‘fuck you, Mom and Dad.’” And then comes “Pretty Angel,” which he describes as “a hug in a song,” written for insomniacs haunted by regret.
The record is filled with this kind of duality: grief and joy, melancholy and playfulness, dead ends and new love. Radnor met his now-fiancée while recording it in Nashville, and the experience was more moonlit-dog-walks than Broadway-benders. “It was tender, liminal, a little exile-ish,” he says. “Death and rebirth stuff.” Naturally.
And don’t expect some kind of tortured genius routine—Radnor’s way too earnest for that. He credits his old pal Ben Lee as a songwriting sherpa during their Radnor & Lee years. “It was like an apprenticeship,” he says. “Then I picked up a Gibson acoustic during a breakup, and it was like a dam broke. Songs just poured out of me.”
Despite the title, Eulogy isn’t all doom and gloom. “I don’t trust art that doesn’t have humor,” Radnor says. “Or tragedy. Or both. Life’s funny and tragic and sexy because we die. Angels don’t die. Humans die. That’s hot.”
The record also includes the aching standout “You Can Sleep Alone Tonight,” which he wrote instead of calling someone he shouldn’t have. “It’s like a prayer to myself,” he says. “To not make the dumb choice.” There’s also a harmonica.
He’s got another batch of stripped-down tunes ready to go for Volume 2, but he’s in no rush—partially because he’s also planning a wedding. “There’s a song I wrote for her,” he says of his fiancée, “but it took months to find two lines that would land just right. You have to wait for the Muse. It’s not a horse.”
Radnor may be best known for How I Met Your Mother, but it turns out he’s just as compelling when he’s not trying to be funny—or maybe because he isn’t trying at all. “I’m not a nihilist,” he says. “I want the plane to pull out of the nosedive eventually.”
Yeah, Josh. Same.
Watch the interview above and then check out the video below.
