Josh Radnor on Creation of New Single 'Learning': 'It Felt Like It Was a Song That Wanted to Exist' (Exclusive)

"I have the weird experience of writing a song and then later realizing how much I needed the song," the actor and musician says of his latest song

Josh Radnor never has had trouble falling asleep. But at times in his life where the beloved singer-songwriter, actor, writer, and director finds himself wrangling silently with the stresses of this world, he will often find himself awake at three in the morning with the rest of us.

“My eyes just pop open, and it's just like everything I’ve ever done wrong or every silly thing I’ve ever said or what's to come or what I haven't done comes to the forefront of my mind,” Radnor, 49, tells PEOPLE in a recent interview from the home in Brooklyn that he now shares with his fiancée. “I just think that those middle of the night hauntings is a very particular but very universal thing.”

It's this sort of haunting that Radnor found himself living with nonstop in 2020, the very same year that he began creating the songs that would ultimately live on his upcoming album Eulogy: Volume I, an instructional booklet of sorts put to the sound of beautiful music.

“I started the record with this mixture of grief and anger, and by the end of recording it, I was really connecting with someone in quite a special way,” says Radnor, seemingly referring to his fiancée, who works as a psychologist in the New York area. “It was a journey, that’s for sure.”

This journey included the writing of his new single, “Learning," and telling the complex story of the emotions we all deal with at one time or another.

“I have the weird experience sometimes of writing a song and then a while later realizing how much I needed the song,” says Radnor, who began making music in 2013 with friend and celebrated Aussie artist, Ben Lee. “And ‘Learning’ is one of those songs.”

Written during the first year of the pandemic alongside friend and fellow songwriter Kyle Cox, “Learning” came to be when Cox mentioned the phrase ‘learning to be lonely’ in the writing room.

“That was the genesis of it,” Radnor remembers. “I had been kicking around this melody and chord progression, so we just kind of united forces with his lyrical idea and my musical idea.”

But if he’s being completely honest, Radnor says he believes that “Learning” has always been a song floating somewhere out in the atmosphere.

“It felt like it was a song that wanted to exist or maybe existed somewhere before, and we just kind of grabbed it,” Radnor says. “I think initially we were going to talk about loneliness, and then we just started talking about fear, and then we started talking about sadness.”

Related: Josh Radnor Reveals He Might Be Allergic to Ice Cream: 'I Sneeze for 20 Minutes. It's So Sad'

It’s an interesting tidal wave of emotions that Radnor finds himself experiencing in this chapter of his life, especially when he has always been best known for his lighter side on shows such as How I Met Your Mother, on which he played the role of the beloved Ted Mosby.

“I've had to do some remedial work around some darker emotions,” says Radnor, who dropped his debut solo EP One More Then I’ll Let You Go in 2021. “These darker emotions of sadness and anger and loneliness were not exactly welcome in my home growing up. I think of it like emotions being on a keyboard. I was taught to only play these keys. And I would be like, ‘but I got all these notes down here.’ So, it was really about expanding my emotional vocabulary.”

And it’s this emotional vocabulary that resonates through his music.

“As you get older, life is going to kick you around,” Radnor says. “It's going to beat you up. You don't get to midlife without some real heartache and heartbreak and being hurt and hurting people and feeling lost and scared and alone. I mean, in addition to feeling successful and happy and in love, you just get the full menu of emotions if you are paying attention.”

And while Eulogy: Volume I may have an undercurrent of melancholy to it, Radnor’s undeniable comedic side is still evident. All one needs to see is the cover art on the upcoming album.

“There is a dancing skeleton on it,” he chuckles. “It's this kind of goofy, fun, death like image. There's a lot of death imagery on the album, but I mean it both literally and metaphorically. A lot of it is about looking at the endings of chapters in your life and then finding the beauty in a beginning of a new chapter.”

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