Josh Radnor has never had a problem sleeping. But at times in his life where the beloved singer, songwriter, actor, writer and director finds himself quietly battling the stresses of this world, he’ll often find himself awake at three in the morning with the rest of us.
“My eyes just open up and it’s like everything I’ve ever done wrong or every stupid thing I’ve ever said or what’s coming or what I haven’t done comes to the forefront of my mind,” Radnor, 49, tells PEOPLE in a recent interview from his home in Brooklyn, which he now shares with his fiancee. “I just think that these hauntings in the middle of the night are a very special but very universal thing.”
In 2020, the same year he began creating the songs that would finally live on his upcoming album, Radnor lived with that kind of persecution constantly. Praise: Volume I, a kind of booklet with instructions to the sound of beautiful music.
“I started the record with this mixture of sadness and anger, and by the end of the recording, I was really connecting with someone in a very special way,” says Radnor, apparently referring to his fiancée, who works as a psychologist in the New York area. “It’s been a journey, that’s for sure.”
This journey included writing his new single “Learning” and telling a complex story about the emotions we all deal with at times.
“Sometimes I have the weird experience of writing a song and then after a while I realize how much I needed the song,” says Radnor, who started making music in 2013 with friend and celebrated Australian artist Ben Lee. “And ‘Learning’ is one of those songs.”
Josh Radnor.
Nikhil Suresh
Written during the first year of the pandemic with friend and fellow songwriter Kyle Cox, the song “Learning” came about when Cox mentioned the phrase “learning to be lonely” in the writing room.
“That was the genesis of it,” Radnor remembers. “I was thinking about this melody and the chord progression, so we just joined forces with his lyrical idea and my musical idea.”
But if he’s being completely honest, Radnor says he believes “Learning” was always a song floating around somewhere in the atmosphere.
“It seemed like it was a song that Wanted exist or maybe it existed somewhere before and we just grabbed it,” says Radnor. “I think at first we wanted to talk about loneliness, and then we just started talking about fear, and then we started talking about sadness.”
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The tidal wave of emotions that Radnor goes through in this chapter of his life is interesting, especially when he was always best known for his lighter side in shows like How I Met Your Motheron which he played the role of beloved Ted Mosby.
“I had to work around some of the darker emotions,” says Radnor, who has released his debut solo EP One more and I’ll let you go 2021. “These darker emotions of sadness, anger and loneliness were not very welcome in my home growing up. I think of it as emotions on a keyboard. They only taught me how to play these keys. And I would say, ‘but I have all these notes down here.’ So it was really about expanding my emotional vocabulary.”
And it is precisely this emotional vocabulary that resonates with his music.
“As you get older, life is going to hit you,” says Radnor. “They’ll beat you up.” You don’t get to middle age without real pain and heartbreak and without hurting and hurting people and feeling lost and afraid and alone. I mean, in addition to feeling successful and happy and in love, you just get a whole menu of emotions if you’re paying attention.”
And while it is Praise: Volume I may have an undertone of melancholy, Radnor’s undeniable comic side is still evident. All that needs to be seen is the cover of the upcoming album.
“There’s a dancing skeleton on it,” he chuckles. “It’s some silly, fun picture like death. There’s a lot of death imagery on the album, but I mean it both literally and metaphorically. It’s a lot about looking at the endings of chapters in your life and finding the beauty in the beginning of a new chapter.”
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Source: HIS Education