Want to Talk About Loss? For This Label Head's Album, Many Stars Did.

New York Times

25-02-2025

At the height of the pandemic in 2020 and 2021, the English music producer Richard Russell realized how many conversations he was having about mortality and loss.
Russell owns the label XL Recordings, whose roster has included Radiohead and Adele. He also makes his own studio albums, with widely assorted collaborators, under the rubric Everything Is Recorded. With permission, he started recording the death-haunted discussions.
Those voices would find their way into the opening track and shape the overarching theme of the third Everything Is Recorded album, 'Temporary,' due Friday. The songs materialize in a soundscape that mingles past and present, new performances and vintage samples. The lyrics reflect on grief, separation, regrets and memories, but also on survivorship — on what comes afterward.
'I didn't want to make a miserable record,' Russell, 53, said via video from the Copper House, his studio in London, where many of the conversations and most of the album were recorded. 'It's not meant to be that. It's meant to be joyous, and it was quite joyous to make it.
'In a way it's about loss,' he continued. 'But it's about how to be all right with loss, how to accept it, how to embrace it, to not resist it. Obviously, music can be a huge part of that. Music is one of the things that can provide genuine solace.'
Wearing an olive-drab T-shirt, Russell gave a virtual tour of the main studio, a brick-walled space with synthesizers, mixers, an upright piano and an old-fashioned recording console. A wooden wall sculpture from India hung overhead, adding color as well as sound diffusion for live recording. It's a carving of birds; the album begins and ends with bird songs. 'There's a nice Gil Scott-Heron lyric in the song 'I Think I'll Call It Morning,'' he noted, referring to an older track, 'where he says, 'Birds got something to teach us all about being free.''
Russell has had the career trajectory of a committed, crate-digging music fan. 'I mostly see myself as a non-musician,' he said. 'I try to make that a strength. I'm not a virtuoso player of any instrument, but I like to be involved and to facilitate people to do stuff. And I'm not afraid of getting things wrong.'
In the 1980s and early 1990s, he worked at record stores in England and the United States, including a stint at the New York City dance-music epicenter Vinylmania. He was a D.J. and party promoter in England during the rave movement's idealistic heyday. He learned to use sampling to produce tracks, and in 1992 he had a Top 10 single in England, 'The Bouncer,' with Kicks Like a Mule, his duo with a founder of the XL label, Nick Halkes. Russell moved to the business side of music as an A&R scout, and in 1994 he became the head of XL Recordings.
With a roster that, through the decades, included the Prodigy, the White Stripes, Vampire Weekend and FKA twigs, XL has lived up to Russell's stated ambition: to merge — as he wrote in 'Liberation Through Hearing,' his 2020 memoir — 'artistic otherness and commercial savvy.'
While the label thrived, Russell decided not to expand too far. He decreed that XL would only release five albums a year. 'It's anti-business. It's anti-growth,' he said. 'It was the realization for me that this thing will lose what it has if it starts doing too much stuff.'
In the 2010s, Russell moved back into production. He signed longtime American musicians that he admired — Scott-Heron and Bobby Womack — to make what would be their last studio albums. Construction had already begun on the Copper House when, in 2013, Russell was immobilized with a severe case of an autoimmune disease, Guillain-Barré syndrome, that left him paralyzed and then bedridden for months of recovery.
'That experience of not being able to do stuff, of being incapacitated, and then being able to do everything again was an incredible gift,' he said. 'It really gave me pleasure in small things, like being able to walk up to Portobello Road and get a coffee with my dog.'
While day-to-day operations at XL continued in trusted hands, Russell produced albums by Ibeyi, a duo of twin sisters born in France to a Cuban father and a French-Venezuelan mother, and began assembling material for Everything Is Recorded, which released its first album in 2018. He also gathered musicians at the Copper House for extended, free-form, seasonal jams to mark solstices and equinoxes, which he then edited and reshaped into song-length tracks that he released free on Bandcamp.
'With record-making, there's the childlike stage — the mess-making — and then there's the grown-up stage, the tidying up,' he said. 'I enjoy both of those parts. In the first stage, there's no boundaries. But in the second stage I'm trying to be absolutely creatively acute. There's a sort of ruthlessness to that. Like, what's really necessary here?'
Jah Wobble, who played bass in Public Image Ltd. and many subsequent projects, anchored the 'Autumn Equinox' jams and appears on 'Temporary.' For him, Russell's Copper House sessions were a happy throwback.
'You're sitting in a room, you're chatting, the other musicians are very nice,' he said. 'There's a nice balance between men and women, so it's not a macho kind of vibe. You play for a long time, but it's just fun, it's kind of meditational. There's not really any sort of crude, crass direction.
'It allows everything to happen in its own time,' he continued. 'No one records like that anymore that I know of. It's kind of a psychedelic, '60s kind of mentality. There's a desire to get away from hierarchies and boundaries, so there's a state of flow, a state of flux.'
The first two Everything Is Recorded albums were grounded in riffs and electronic rhythms that echoed Russell's formative years, when punk, hip-hop, reggae and dance music converged. Back then, he said, 'There was no interest in the past. It was all just, like, forward! I think that was very optimistic. It was like, 'Technology, great! What could go wrong?''
But on 'Temporary,' Russell vastly expands his time frame, drawing on samples from a more distant past: folk-rooted sounds from Jackson C. Frank and Molly Drake, 1960s soul from Camille Yarbrough and gospel from Edna Gallmon Cooke.
The album features some of Russell's previous Everything Is Recorded collaborators, among them the rapper Berwyn, the saxophonist Kamasi Washington and the doleful, liquid-voiced singer and songwriter Sampha, who has worked on all three albums. 'A lot of the process is us jamming and Richard editing and notating things,' Sampha said in a phone interview. 'Sometimes he'll show me music and I'll just freestyle over something very quickly. And then I'll come back, like, a couple of months later and he'll show me something: 'Remember this?''
Samantha Morton, the Oscar-nominated English actress, writer and director, made a soul-baring 2024 album with Russell, 'Daffodils & Dirt,' and also appears on 'Temporary.' In a phone interview, Morton said that working with Russell was 'like when you're dancing with somebody and you both know the steps. And it's really weird because you haven't rehearsed any of the dance moves, but you're able to not tread on each other's toes. We seem to speak the same language without identifying what language we're speaking.'
Other contributors on 'Temporary' include Florence Welch of Florence + the Machine, the saxophonist and songwriter Alabaster DePlume, the trad-rock singer Maddy Prior (delivering 'Ether,' a song with lyrics by Ezra Koenig of Vampire Weekend) and the sepulchral-voiced indie-rock songwriter Bill Callahan in a remote duet — using Callahan's iPhone voice-memo vocals and guitar — with Noah Cyrus. In a video interview, Callahan recalled that Russell asked, ''Is there anyone that you would like to write a song for?' I said, 'Noah Cyrus.' And he was, like, 'I'll see what I can do.''
Russell also asked Callahan for a second track, requesting 'an a cappella song about loss.' Callahan supplied 'Norm,' a tribute to the comedian Norm MacDonald, who died in 2021. A friend who heard it suggested, ''Well, you should do a whole record like this,'' Callahan said. 'And then I said that to Richard. And he was like, 'Let's do it.' Now it's up to me to send a cappella songs.'
In 'Norm,' Callahan sings, 'Voice and face live on / Norm's gone'; Russell added excerpts from MacDonald's performances. Much of 'Temporary' comes across as a dialogue between the living and the dead. In packaging the album, Russell had portraits made of both the sampled performers and the ones he recorded, displaying them side by side. On 'Temporary,' recording is a step toward immortality.
'This must have always been, from when people started making marks on cave walls,' Russell said. 'It must be in our DNA. People are just relentless in wanting to make things, and it has now become very apparent that the stuff lasts longer than the people. Maybe that's why it's such an important part of human existence to make art.'