Presenting: Life in Seven Songs with Guest Josh Radnor
How We Made Your Mother
Audacy & Josh Radnor and Craig Thomas
4.8 • 922 Ratings
🗓️ 26 September 2025
⏱️ 34 minutes
🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Hello Major Fans of How We Made Your Mother and welcome to another bonus episode!
We are hard at work on Season Two (which will launch soon), and we want to use this space to share some appearances of the team on other great podcasts. This week, we bring you Josh Radnor’s appearance on Life in Seven Songs.
What songs tell your life story? On Life in Seven Songs, we ask this question of some of the world’s most fascinating people. Through seven songs, guests reveal the milestones—and the music—that have shaped their lives.
This week, we Willkommen actor and musician Josh Radnor! Josh is best known for playing Ted Mosby on the hit sitcom How I Met Your Mother for nearly a decade. But that success came at an unexpected cost: an identity crisis that left him feeling trapped in a character he didn’t create. In this episode, Josh talks about his formative role as the MC in his high school’s production of Cabaret, his first “almost kiss” (soundtracked by Aretha Franklin), how psychedelics helped him stay centered amidst the whirlwind of fame, and the chance encounter that launched his second career as a musician in his 40s. Here are his songs.
- Rocky Mountain High – John Denver
- Respect – Aretha Franklin
- Willkommen – Cabaret (Joel Grey, original cast recording)  “Cabaret”
- All I Want – Joni Mitchell
- Delicate – Damien RiceÂ
- Tara – Dechen Shak-Dagsay
- Cmon – Fred Again/Brian Eno
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Ted was something I've described him as a younger brother. |
| 0:04.5 | Like he's not me and he's sometimes annoying, but he's family. |
| 0:07.4 | I feel like I can take him along now and there's no problem. |
| 0:25.3 | This is Life in Seven Songs. |
| 0:28.3 | From the San Francisco Standard, I'm Sophie Bairman. |
| 0:32.3 | This week, I'm speaking with actor and musician Josh Ratner. |
| 0:36.8 | You might recognize him from shows like Grey's Anatomy, Six Feet Under, or Fleischman is in trouble. |
| 0:42.3 | He's written and directed two feature films, starring countless plays on and off Broadway. But he's best known for his long-time role as Ted Mosby from the Emmy Award-winning hit sitcom, |
| 0:48.3 | How I Met Your Mother, a legacy he's been at War with for over the last decade. |
| 0:52.3 | Just recently, Josh has decided to stop trying to |
| 0:55.5 | outrun Ted Mosby's shadow. He's even launched a brand new rewatch podcast called How We Made Your Mother. |
| 1:02.1 | These days, Josh is embracing all the characters that live inside him. Josh Radner, thanks for coming on |
| 1:07.3 | this show. Thanks for having me. It's good to be here. I heard a little chuckle during |
| 1:11.1 | that intro. What were you reacting to? Oh, stop being at war with Ted? I think that. It's not inaccurate, |
| 1:18.1 | but it made me laugh. You played the role of Ted Mosby on how I met your mother for almost 10 years from |
| 1:24.2 | 2005 to 2014. You've said it's given you a lot, but it's also taken some things from |
| 1:31.3 | you as well. Tell me about that. You know, it gave me some creative and financial freedom. |
| 1:36.6 | It allowed me to become a musician. I don't know if I would have felt as emboldened to take |
| 1:42.4 | these creative risks and do all these different things. |
| 1:45.2 | But it also, it's strange from an identity perspective to be collapsed into a person. |
| 1:51.5 | One of the reasons I wanted to be an actor was I wanted to kind of escape the prison of self. |
| 1:57.0 | You know, I wanted to live other lives and experiment. |
... |
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