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

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.’”