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In early 2022, exiled from his Los Angeles home and reeling from an intense breakup, actor-writer-director-songwriter Josh Radnor sought refuge in close friends and good music. He drove to Nashville, Tennessee with his dog, Nelson, and roughly fifty original songs in tow. There, despite the heartache that initially led him South, Radnor found deep peace, immersing himself in what would eventually become his debut solo album, Eulogy: Volume I + II. The process of sifting through the emotional complexities of love, loss, death, identity, grief, and redemption grew into a powerful outlet for healing. It also resulted in twenty-three beautifully minimal, meditative, and stirring folk-Americana tracks—a double-album debut, now available via all streaming platforms.ulogy: Volume I + II are gardens of carefully chiseled gravestones—a moment of respite in a frantic, overwhelming world. Produced and engineered by Nashville friends Jeremiah Dunlap, Cory Quintard, and Kyle Cox, the album’s dozen original tracks exude the unquestionable sturdiness characteristic of classic Americana—these songs tell you stories, make you stomp, and break your heart. Simple, anthemic melodies are laced with electronic elements and idiosyncratic twists, drawing comparisons to 1960s Laurel Canyon artists as well as modern folk acts like Edward Sharpe & the Magnetic Zeros. Each song feels substantial in its own way, intentionally created by a dynamic and introspective artist seeking to understand his own lived experiences. “At some point in the writing process, I realized that each track on this album is, in one way or another, about death,” Radnor says. “If not a literal death, then a metaphorical one. I was using these songs to honor—and then bury—parts of myself that were no longer serving me. The album is a song cycle of mini-funerals.”
Radnor’s grounded and intimate songwriting style blends the timeless art of existential questioning with relatable, down-to-earth narratives, in the vein of acts like Nick Drake, Alexi Murdoch, Bob Dylan, and Neil Young. Spanning the spectrum of human emotion—from rage to joy, grief to hope—the tracks seem to speak to one another like bodies in a room, alternately concealing, revealing, or connecting various thematic threads. Backed by sometimes rowdy, sometimes sparse instrumentation, there’s an alluring sense of vulnerability woven throughout the album, each track well-attuned to the emotion that sparked its creation. “All my work is a process of storytelling, in one form or another,” says Radnor. “After spending so much of my career telling stories that last ninety minutes or nine years, I’m finding some real joy these days in being more economical, telling three to four-minute stories.”
Songwriting is nothing new to Radnor, who began making music in 2013 with friend and celebrated Aussie artist, Ben Lee. The pair released two albums as Radnor & Lee—a self-titled debut in 2017, followed by sophomore album Golden State in 2020—and toured the U.S. together, playing small local venues as well as international gigs in Brazil, Argentina, and Australia. Bolstered by the crowd response to Radnor & Lee and enthusiastic support from musician friends, Radnor picked up a guitar along the way and began writing his own melodies and lyrics. Then, in 2021, he dropped his debut solo EP, titled One More Then I’ll Let You Go, via Flower Moon Records. The songs were produced by Ryan Dilmore and praised by American Songwriter for their sincerity, “clever craftsmanship” and “certain purity.” The EP also showcased Radnor’s emotionally-rich, unassuming vocal style and talent for nuanced reflections on life in the guise of relatable, human stories.
Josh Radnor
Michaela Anne
Full of lush, sweeping arrangements and honest, deeply vulnerable self-examination, ‘Desert Dove’ marks a bold new chapter for Michaela Anne, both artistically and professionally. While the songwriting is still very much rooted in the classic country she’s come to be known for, the record (her first for Yep Roc) represents something of a sonic shift, incorporating more modern production elements than ever before in pursuit of a sound that owes as much influence to indie rock as honky tonk. Despite the bolder, more adventurous arrangements, Michaela’s crystalline voice remains front and center on the album, a pure, airy beam of light shining bravely into the dark corners of loneliness, pain, and desire that we all so often to try to hide.
Produced jointly by Sam Outlaw and Delta Spirit’s Kelly Winrich and recorded with an all-star band that included guitarist Brian Whelan (Dwight Yoakam, Jim Lauderdale), fiddler Kristin Weber (Kacey Musgraves, Margo Price), and drummers Mark Stepro (Ben Kweller, Butch Walker) and Daniel Bailey (Everest, Father John Misty), ‘Desert Dove’ is an achingly beautiful collection, with songs that frequently find themselves balancing optimism and fatalism in the very same breath. There’s an undercurrent of yearning in Michaela’s music (the melancholy “Be Easy,” for instance, chases a peace of mind that never comes, while the breezy “Child Of The Wind” longs for connection and permanence in the face of perpetual itinerancy), as well as a fiercely feminine perspective that’s assured in its power and unapologetic in its candor. The prostitute of the title track challenges the traditional perception of women as a source of comfort and service for men (“You love them all the way they want and they need / But tell me who does your heart wish to please?” she asks), and the spirited “If I Wanted Your Opinion” offers up an all-purpose response to gendered condescension.
Michaela first began garnering national attention with the 2014 release of ‘Ease My Mind,’ an old-school collection hailed by The New York Times for its “plain-spoken songs of romantic regret and small-town longing” and named one of the year’s best country albums by The Village Voice. After a move from Brooklyn to Nashville, Michaela followed it up in 2016 with the similarly lauded ‘Bright Lights and the Fame,’ which featured guest appearances by Rodney Crowell and Punch Brother Noam Pikelny. NPR said Michaela “works through weepers and hits the honky-tonks as every great country singer should,” while Rolling Stone compared her to Linda Ronstadt and Emmylou Harris, and Vice Noisey praised her as the antidote to commercial pop country, calling her “our saving grace, our angel, the person who will help usher us into a new age.” Songs from the record landed on high profile Spotify playlists as well as the HBO series ‘Divorce,’ and the album earned Michaela slots at Bristol Rhythm & Roots, Merlefest, and both the US and UK iterations of AmericanaFest, along with a seemingly endless series of dates across the States and Europe with the likes of Mandolin Orange, Courtney Marie Andrews, Joe Pug, Ron Pope, and Sam Outlaw.
Since the release of Desert Dove on Yep Roc Records in September 2019, the critical acclaim has continued. The album has received national praise from a multitude of outlets that include Billboard, Rolling Stone Country, NPR, Paste Magazine, Wide Open Country, Brooklyn Vegan, Albumism, Associated Press, No Depression, The Bluegrass Situation and The Boot. Regionally, Michaela has appeared in print in Nashville Scene and Nashville Lifestyles, who commented that, “The classic country-style songs sound as if they’re being sung from an expansive cave or a massive honky tonk… the effect is a group of acoustic songs with the brevity of country songwriting and the capricious intensity of indie rock.” The fall of 2019 saw Michaela’s debut on Mountain Stage while Philadelphia’s WXPN named her their Artist of the Month. Desert Dove has been appearing on multiple end of year lists including Albumism’s top 50 best albums of 2019 as well as both Stereogum and Rolling Stone Country’s top 10 best Country & Americana albums of 2019. Rolling Stone Country described the album as “a textured portrayal of turmoil and restlessness set to a mix of West Coast-country, atmospheric indie-rock indebted reverb and plaintive folk-pop.” while Stereogum considered Michaela as “hard to pigeonhole” with “a perspective so uniquely her own on Desert Dove, an album that paints a story of a life lived on her own terms.” They summed it up even more concisely, saying Michaela and the album were simply “impossible to forget.”
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