If not for his friend, musician Ben Lee, actor-director Josh Radnor would have never picked up a guitar or written a song. Two well-received folk albums later as part of a duo with Lee, Radnor is a legit musician in his own right. Now he’s feeling as inspired to write songs and chord progressions as much as he was with acting in high school.

His increased level of skill on the acoustic guitar—which was nearly nonexistent when Radnor & Lee began performing shows in 2017—combined with Lee’s family moving to his native Australia at the end of 2020 to ride out the pandemic, essentially turned Radnor into a solo artist.

Still inspired and encouraged by his friend to keep writing, Radnor compiled and recorded his debut solo EP, One More Then I’ll Let You Go, which he released in April. In a way, he said, it was as if Lee pushed him off a tree and told him to fly.

“I know [Lee is] deeply supportive of me doing this. I justifiably give him a lot of credit. I would not be doing this, if it were not for my friendship and collaboration with Ben,” Radnor said in a video call a few days after releasing the EP. “If and when things open up, I’d love to get to Australia for a tour with Ben, a Radnor & Lee tour. We have an offer to go back to Brazil for a multi-city tour. … I’m really open to writing more with Ben, I just don’t know, logistically. … We’re both really proud of [2020’s] Golden State, the second record. It was a real sadness for us that we couldn’t tour that record. Fingers crossed we’ll get to it.”

Of course, the path Josh Radnor took to get here didn’t just suddenly appear out of nowhere but is one he’s been on for a long time. Music was his first love, but the acting opportunities came first, starting in high school with musicals, for which he also learned to sing.

“Some of this [ability] is brand new and other stuff is more of a transferred skill,” he said. “So I have a singing background. It’s a different mode of singing. The kind of stuff I’m doing now, it’s not exactly like musical theater.”

He loved singing deeply, but said it had never occurred to him that pursuing a music career was possible in his 30s or 40s (he’s 46 now).

“I thought you had to start playing guitar at 12 to be a professional songwriter/guitar player,” he said. So instead, he became a professional multi-hyphenate with a good taste in music. One of the things he’s proud of is the selection of music in his films, such as “Liberal Arts.”

In the arts, he said, there’s an obsession with young talent. Radnor hesitated to make the comparison, but pointed out that Leonard Cohen was best-known as a poet until middle age.

“I’m a little more seasoned around living life. I’ve failed quite a bit and I’ve been humiliated quite a bit, and I’ve also succeeded quite a bit. I’ve had relationships work and not work,” he said. “By the time you get to your mid-40s, life has knocked you around sufficiently. … I felt like I had more to say now than I would have back in my 20s. I don’t know what I would have been writing about. … Somehow, through a series of twists and turns, I disproved that to myself. I was able to find my way towards writing.”

As a successful professional in Hollywood, Radnor didn’t exactly start from the bottom. He said he can hear the music of a film script. There’s musicality and rhythm in the way language is delivered in a performance, with stresses on certain words or feelings. Shakespeare is incredibly musical, just like a score, he said. That’s why some really talented actors are also talented musicians.

“They’re their cousins, in a way. I don’t think they’re wildly dissimilar art forms,” he said.

Radnor met Lee on the set of “How I Met Your Mother” and the two became close friends. Eventually the two began writing songs together. At that point he could only strum a couple of chords himself. The duo’s first shows had him singing and occasionally shaking a tambourine.

In 2017 he wrote his first song using some D-shaped chords and got up the courage to play it to his friend. With Lee’s encouragement, he started playing the song at shows. By that point, he said, songs were flowing out of him. He found guitar teachers in both Los Angeles and New York, between which he split his time. By 2020, when the duo released Golden State, Radnor was playing rhythm, which allowed Lee to play intricate leads.

One of the reasons Radnor was seduced by the guitar was because once a player grasps a few fundamentals, there are endless possibilities. Some of the songs weren’t that great, he concedes, but some of them he was proud of.

“I just allowed myself to overwrite and create a fertile kind of musical landscape for myself, where I wasn’t shaming myself or thinking it wasn’t good enough. I just kept making stuff,” he said.

He’d play the songs for Lee, and eventually he started playing some solo songs at the duo’s shows, switching off with Lee.

“I was able to do it in a relatively safe way, even though I was on stage playing guitar far earlier than I had any right to be playing guitar,” he said. “It took a certain amount of courage, and maybe silly bravado, for me to do it, but I was passionate enough about songwriting and playing and singing that it felt like I had to do it, even if I was a little green. I’ve spent the last couple years just writing and writing and writing.”

In addition to the songs he was writing for Radnor & Lee, he wrote with other collaborators, as well a whole lot more on his own. While he missed the companionship and “quality control” of the partnership, he also enjoyed the opportunity to follow his own ideas to completion.

One of the songs he wanted to start with Lee was a surly country-ish love song Radnor called “You Have the Right to Change Your Mind About Me.” Eventually, he wrote it himself.

“In some ways, when you’re writing by yourself, you can listen to your muse a little bit more,” he said. “It’s still a cowrite, but it’s between you and your muse.”

Eventually, he and Ryan Dilmore, who produced the first Radnor & Lee album, started demoing and recording them in his spare time. Radnor said the producer helped unlock the potential of his songs and understood how to work with him at this nascent stage in his songwriting career. Radnor didn’t want the songs to sound glossy or overproduced and that he often prefers rough demos to the final version.

“I love Carole King’s tapestry, or the first Bon Iver record—things that feel like they were just caught,” he said. “I was looking for that kind of organic sound, which he really understood.

The name of the EP stems from one meet-up between Dilmore and Radnor, where the artist implored him to listen to one more song before departing. “One more, then I’ll let you go,” Radnor said, and Dilmore knew then what the record should be called.

The two were originally working on a full-length album, but then the pandemic struck. Eventually they settled on the five songs Radnor felt best about as an EP. The rest are in various states of completeness. Some are close while others are missing lyrics or need an overhaul.

“I’m curious to see which of them linger and [I] feel that there’s an urgency to reexamine them and get them out,” he said. “I know that I have two albums’ worth of new songs that I didn’t work on with Ryan that I’m most anxious to record.”

The five songs are a blast of jangly Laurel Canyon sound and Americana—not surprising as he’s a fan of Joni Mitchell, Bob Dylan and Cohen—yet there’s more than a hint of modern production, filling the absence of Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros.

The track list is a blend of the old and the new. Radnor first wrote “Apocalyptic Love Song” in 2017 and posted it to YouTube in March 2020, just as the pandemic was setting in. It’s a sort of self-aware love song for the end of the world that recalls both Bob Dylan and Death Cab For Cutie.

Dilmore, himself a songwriter, plays on several tracks. So does renowned violinist Kerenza Peacock, Radnor’s friend, who’s performed or recorded with the likes of London Symphony and Royal Philharmonic, as well as Adele, Kanye West and Madonna.

More surprisingly, she plays harmonica on “You Feel New,” an up-tempo romp about breaking through complacency to find love.

“I’ve been with myself so long/ I need better company/ Most of my daydreams are being somebody other than me/ I would like just one day a week/ To walk in other shoes,” Radnor sings.

But the song is neither strictly biographical, nor about a love for a person.

“I was just painting a picture of a person [to whom] things had felt uninspiring and he had reached that point in his life where he was bored of himself and his thoughts and his words and his actions and his face,” he said, clarifying that the narrator of the song is not him, per se. “I would caution listeners against autobiographical readings of these songs. I wrote one song called “JOSHUA 45-46” that is literally about me turning 46. You can read all you want into that, autobiographically. The other songs are imaginings. … It’s almost like a character.”

And yet…

“The more I sing it, the more I think it’s [a love song] about the guitar and music. Things had felt like running in place. Then this this guitar comes into my life, or music comes into my life, and I suddenly feel artistically reinspired or reborn,” he said. “I say it’s not about me, and it’s also all about me. But I define myself in a much broader way than other people might. … There’s villains in me, there’s heroes and me, there’s a bored person, there’s an inspired person—so it just depends on what I’m pulling from.”

Follow editor Roman Gokhman at Twitter.com/RomiTheWriter.