For Who the Bell Tolls For

As one half of Foxygen, Jonathan Rado rode shotgun with one of the most notoriously volatile indie acts of the early 2010s. His duo with Sam France balanced classic-rock worship and home-recording hijinks with Behind the Music-worthy drama and onstage meltdowns, but out of that dysfunction came another, less sensationalistic narrative: the emergence of Rado as the go-to producer for fellow retro-minded mavericks like the Lemon Twigs and Father John Misty. With Foxygen inactive since 2019’s Seeing Other People, Rado has been free to adapt his old-school aesthetic to the modern pop marketplace, giving him a foothold in the liners of buzzworthy records by the likes of Weyes Blood and Crumb. And through his associations with Aussie eccentric Alex Cameron—aka Brandon Flowers’ bestie—he wound up co-producing and co-writing the most recent albums by the Killers, a gig that completed his transformation into something akin to a West Coast-reared Jack Antonoff.

But if his career trajectory suggests a desire to trade the hand-to-mouth drudgery of band life for a more stable seat behind the mixing desk, Rado isn’t farming out all of his good ideas to his high-profile clients. For Who the Bell Tolls For is technically Rado’s third solo release, following a pair of low-stakes records that reconfirmed what we already knew about him—he’s a fan of lo-fi lunacy (2013’s glorified demo collection Law and Order) and a student of classic-rock mythology (a faithful 2017 full-album cover of Bruce Springsteen’s Born to Run). But For Who the Bell Tolls For feels like a proper coming-out party for Rado the artist/auteur, an opportunity to flex his elevated production chops on a set of songs that embody his cavalier boho spirit while striking a more personal chord. For Who the Bell Tolls For was written in response to the deaths of two dear friends: musician/producer (and early Foxygen champion) Richard Swift and actor/visual artist Danny Lacy. But the album is less an act of mourning than a celebration of life, befitting its simultaneously serious and tongue-in-cheek title. For Who the Bell Tolls For is equally profound and playful, a work of art-pop grandeur that’s grounded by its self-effacing, homespun charm.

As a producer, Rado is quick to cite the influence of Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategies on his process, but as a songwriter he remains very much in thrall to a familiar Foxygen influence: Todd Rundgren. And so on the album’s momentous title track, he rolls the sumptuous songcraft of Something/Anything? into the theatrical irreverence of Here Comes the Warm Jets, creating a runaway snowball of a song that—thanks to guests like Brad Oberhofer and the Lemon Twigs’ D’Addario brothers—accumulates layers of brass, choral harmonies, and crashing percussion until it’s big enough to flatten cities. On top of serving as a business card for a producer who can nurture a simple repeated melody into a skyscraping epic, the song also establishes the album’s defiant, life-goes-on tenor, and its refusal to be overcome with grief.

But Rado need not always trigger an orchestral avalanche in order to get his feelings across. For Who the Bell Tolls For is anchored by more compact delights like “Easier,” where Rado speaks directly to Swift over a jaunty piano-pop arrangement that could’ve come out of his mentor’s playbook, while threading in symphonic textures that heighten the poignancy without getting schmaltzy. Likewise, “Blue Moon” invokes Lacy’s death by suicide—“I could see there was something wrong/Gone forever, took too long/Now you vanished behind the seas”—yet it’s an infectiously upbeat glam-soul romp thrown delightfully off balance by twinkling marimbas and mechanistic shocks of distortion.

For Who the Bell Tolls For is the musical equivalent of reacting to awful news with a nervous laugh—a perfectly irrational yet natural response to life-altering events that seem too inconceivable to fathom. True to that counterintuitive logic, the album’s purest expression of sorrow is the one song with no words in it. Though the title “Yer Funeral” references a Swiftian inside joke, this seven-minute hymnstrumental is like Rado’s very own “Here Come the Warm Jets”-style curtain closer, albeit one that avoids liftoff to marinate in its vibraphone-gilded, slide-guitar-stained melancholy. For its final minute, Rado lets the arrangement slowly corrode and decompose into the ether, until it sounds like some muffled transmission from the afterlife. It’s a sobering finale to an otherwise vivacious record, but a necessary one: Rado spends the bulk of For Who the Bell Tolls For putting on a brave face and powering his way through the pain, but he leaves us with a reminder that it’s healthy to cry once in a while.

Jonathan Rado: For Who the Bell Tolls For

$25 at Rough Trade