‘How I Met Your Mother’ Star Josh Radnor Previews New EP With Introspective ‘The High Road’
Josh Radnor, the actor best known for How I Met Your Mother, Hunters, and his film Liberal Arts, will put out his first solo release as a musical artist on April 16th. The One More Then I’ll Let You Go EP, which is available for preorder, will be available digitally and as a signed 12-inch pressed to clear vinyl via Flower Moon Records.
He’s previewing the record with “The High Road,” a gently lilting ballad about the breakdown of a friendship on which he sings, “I wanna take the high road, but I’ve lost the map, and my life on the low road always draws me back.” As the song, which features deep textures of piano, acoustic guitar, organ, and snapping fingers, progresses, Radnor slowly reconciles his feelings.
“I wrote ‘The High Road’ during a low point,” Radnor tells Rolling Stone. “I was stuck in a huge resentment against someone and couldn’t move past it. The song is about how hard it can be to authentically forgive.”
One More Then I’ll Let You Go follows Golden State, the 2020 album Radnor recorded with singer-songwriter Ben Lee, which they released together under the name Radnor and Lee. He worked on the music on the EP, as well as more songs that will come out in the future, over the space of a year and a half, beginning in the fall of 2018. Producer Ryan Dilmore, who worked on Radnor and Lee’s 2017 self-titled LP, oversaw the sessions. Dilmore plays on several of the EP’s tracks, as does Kerenza Peacock (Adele, Kanye West).
“When I started playing guitar four years ago, songs exploded out of me,” Radnor says. “In addition to the ones I was writing with Ben [Lee], I was writing a few songs a week on my own. I asked Ryan to produce a record for me and he came over one afternoon to hear what I had written. It was an unreasonably long list of songs. At some point I sensed him needing to leave and I said, ‘One more then I’ll let you go.’ He immediately said, ‘There’s your album title!’”
Radnor estimated he recorded somewhere between 15 and 17 songs in the sessions, in between working with Ben Lee and on his film projects. He says “The High Road,” and the four others on the EP, were the tracks he and Dilmore felt best about.
