Josh Radnor, courtesy Nikhil Suresh.

While he recorded his debut full-length album in the throes of a breakup, Josh Radnor points out that the songs are considerably older and influenced more by bigger picture issues like the loss of the last of his childhood and mortality—hence, the title, Eulogy.

In fact, the actor, writer, director and, more recently, singer-songwriter, calls the Nashville recording sessions with his musician friends and collaborators some of the happiest, most inspiring times. And he is not dwelling on the past. Radnor, now back to living in New York, is engaged and getting married in January. He met his fiancé around the same time, too.

But it all started after his previous relationship ended around Thanksgiving in 2021. He left his L.A. home, where his ex was living at the time, for his childhood home in Columbus, Ohio. His parents wintered in Southern California, so he had the run of the place, even though his mom had converted his old bedroom into her painting studio.

“I was in kind of exile from L.A. I didn’t know where to go,” Radnor said over a recent video call. “I brought my dog, Nelson. My younger sister lives in Columbus with her family, and I still have a bunch of friends who live there, and I was just able to reconnect with people and nurse my wounds a bit. I didn’t know where I was headed. There was potential of some acting work in New York, but it wasn’t certain at that point.”

That’s when his musician friend Kyle Cox told him to come to Nashville to make an album. So he piled into his dad’s car, brought Nelson and his book of songs and rented an AirBnB in East Nashville, which the two of them, along with friends Jeremiah Dunlap and Cory Quintard, converted into a studio.

Halfway through working on what turned out to be Eulogy: Volume I + II—a double album!—he went to New York for a weekend and met the woman he’s going to marry.

“It was both a hard time and a really fun and exciting time,” he said. “Those weeks in Nashville, they still make me happy to even just think about.”

Josh Radnor, courtesy.

The 12-track Volume I contains the most autobiographical songs Josh Radnor has released so far, much more so than his two records with Ben Lee (as Radnor and Lee) and his 2021 solo EP, One More Then I’ll Let You Go.

It kicks off with the up-tempo “Red,” based on a Robert Bly talk called “The Masculine Road” that correlated three stages of a man’s development with three colors. The red phase represents adolescence and while Radnor said he was pretty well-behaved, the song is about how he wished he’d lived a rebellious streak.

The jazzy “You Can Sleep Alone Tonight” is based on a conversation Josh Radnor had with himself about choosing not to make a late-night call to a prior casual flame to both spare her more pain and himself from impulsively feeling the constant need for companionship.

Nashville singer-songwriter and friend Audrey Assad added backing lyrics and a conversational feel.

“Sometimes she’s echoing what the narrator is saying, and other times, she’s the seductress a little bit,” he said.

He describes the Elliot-Smith-like “Pretty Angel” as being about tormented by regret. “I Will Wait for You” is about loving someone through their anxiety and depression. Then there’s pre-breakup tune “Heaven Knows,” the self-grounding “What If,” an affirmation to open oneself up to all emotions on “Learning” and acceptance of growing older and wiser on “Joshua: 45-46.”

“That’s straight-up autobiographical to the point where I don’t even know if you could cover that song if you weren’t me,” he said, smiling.

Radnor wrote most of these songs during the first eight months of the pandemic, from March to November 2020. He wanted to release them as a double album because he started getting backed up (a release date for Volume II, which Radnor described as more stripped back and lo-fi, recorded just with Cox, has not yet been announced). These days, when he performs live, about half of the set is from Eulogy and the other half is newer, unrecorded songs.

As it happens, Radnor’s fiancé is a psychologist, whose research specialty is about the connection between love and death. A stronger awareness of our mortality increases one’s ability to form stronger and more intimate connections, he said.

“When we started getting to know each other, there was a lot of very sexy talk about death and mortality and love,” he said. “As I was going through each song, I realized that in some ways they were each, in their own way, these mini funerals to parts of myself that had really served me up to a point, but were no longer necessary, so it felt like there were elegies or obituaries for parts of myself.”

Some are more literal. There’s a song on Volume II called “Too Tired to Pray,” about a dear friend who was diagnosed with aggressive cancer. She later passed away.

“I wrote that song as a kind of cry of helplessness. I couldn’t help her, but I was also so tired from work, and just felt overrun by some kind of grief,” he said, adding that even “I Will Wait For You” is about a metaphorical passing. “There’s a kind of chronic acknowledgement that this whole thing is not gonna be around forever, or at least not in the state that it is right now.”

Josh Radnor said he felt more comfortable sharing parts of himself in his songs this time around because he became more confident in his songwriting ability. On the first Radnor and Lee record, he pointed out, he didn’t even play guitar. Lee provided the cover while Radnor had a case of imposter syndrome.

Still, he said, most of these song are 50 percent his story and 50 percent him as a storyteller—trying to find a clever rhyme, twist or narrative to make the story more interesting. He got that from his acting teacher at New York University, Ron Van Lieu.

So songs like “Red,” “Real Life,” “I Will Wait for You” and the poppy “NYC” share his true feelings, but they aren’t about any specific experiences. The relationship he sings about on “NYC” are a summation of various relationships he’s lived in New York, drunkenly walking the streets and falling in love.

“As a person who tells stories for a living, I do feel like the best stuff is the most personal stuff,” he said.  “Some writer—that might have been Arthur Miller— said the best stuff is the stuff that’s on the edge of humiliating yourself; can you get up close to that kind of edge? We’re all wearing masks of some kinds, but I was really attempting with these songs to remove the mask on some level—but also not completely humiliate myself.”

Besides Eulogy: Volume I + II, and getting married, Radnor is looking ahead to his next acting projects. The SAG-AFTRA strike was ongoing at the time of this interview, so he didn’t speak on screen work, but the “How I Met Your Mother, “Fleishman Is in Trouble” and “Hunters” star has a New York theatre starring role in Itamar Moses’ “The Ally.”

Follow Roman Gokhman at Twitter.com/RomiTheWriter.