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.”
