For anyone that’s a huge How I Met Your Mother fan like myself, you’re always excited to hear about new projects the cast is taking on. Josh Radnor, aka Ted Mosby, has surfaced over the last couple months playing live gigs for his two man folk band, Radnor and Lee, with long time friend and Australian musician, Ben Lee. The pair are currently putting on the finishing touches of their debut album, which they started recording in September and hope to release in the next few months. Their first song will be on Spotify on Friday and the second song in June.
The folk duo played four songs live in The Booth‘s studio with a Facebook comments Q&A between each song. The songs they played were: It’s yours once you give it away, Doorstep, All Shall Be Well, and Be Like the Being. All Shall Be Well is a song Josh wrote for a friend that was going through a divorce at the time.
And though I’m saying this with a mild bias, these tunes played really well with just having their voices and an acoustic guitar. Lee has been writing music since age 10 and Radnor has sang on Broadway…so not a far fetch. Their songs are pure folk where at times both are singing at full throttle for the choruses and at other times cruise though verses with a nice riff. I highly recommend a listen.
As for the Q&A…my initial goal was to see if I could get a response, chuckle, anything by requesting a thirty second cover of Sandcastles in the Sand before asking some more hard hitting questions. They read over that comment as well as the many, many Let’s Go to the Mall song requests from others. One nugget in the Q&A is that Josh has a new TV show coming out in 2018 on NBC called “Rise,” which is a high school-set drama. After a few minutes of Josh reading the fastly scrolling comments….
Josh Radnor (in good humor): “There’s a lot of requests for a song I’m not going to sing because I didn’t write it….I’m moving on from that musically.”
Fair enough! Here are some of their other answers:
On touring the US:
Lee: “We don’t know. This is a fun project and our rule from the beginning has been to do what is fun. So as things come up and they sound fun, we’ll do them.”
Any other cool musicians lending their talents on the album:
Radnor: “Yes in fact!”
Lee: “Ryan Dilmore produced the record. Kerenza Peacock our dear friend who is one of the world’s great violinsts is all over the record. She’s played with us live a bunch of times.”
On their influences:
Crowded House (Aussie band) was one Lee named and Josh agreed on.
After it was clear HIMYM questions were not going to get any attention, I angled my questions a different route, which they were happy to read off and, wait for it, ANSWER!
Kevin Ewoldt: “Was any thought put into a cool band name before settling on last names?”
Radnor: “Is the implication that Radnor and Lee is not a cool band name?!?! (laughing) It felt pretty simple and the least pretentious thing. It also sounded like a hearty kind of roots band.”
Kevin Ewoldt: “Can we expect some music videos in the future?”
Radnor and Lee: “Yes! We do have plans.”
You can follow Radnor & Lee news on their Twitter: https://twitter.com/radnorandlee
To watch their concert, view it here:
