Patrick Glennon Photo
Ritter on tour.
I hadn’t thought much about Josh Ritter until late August, when I caught him on a bill with the stomping jazz-swing-retro-futuro quartet Lake Street Dive (check out their cover of Hall and Oates’s “Rich Girl”), up in Northampton, Mass. I was planning to read a magazine until Lake Street Dive came on, but the second I heard the sounds of Ritter, an Idaho-born, Oberlin-educated part-time novelist and new dad, I couldn’t stop listening to him. I haven’t stopped since.
And I wonder where I have been all these years, as he has become one of our country’s most innovative songwriters, leading tight, coherent bands in endless tours, amassing fans whom I now seem to meet everywhere. I’ll meet more of them when Ritter plays the College Street Music Hall this coming Saturday, Oct. 8, with opening act Jason Isbell.
I recently interviewed Ritter in advance of his New Haven show.
New Haven Independent: You once scored a documentary about typeface. Do you care about typeface?
Josh Ritter: They took a song that was already written. It’s one of the coolest things that happens with songs. They go all over the place. This movie The Hollows came out, and they used a ton of my songs. I think they did a stellar job on this movie, and music is such an integral part of movies. It’s such an effective thing to use them.
NHI: There’s this weird thing about Americana and folk music, which is that one of the primary consumers is upper-class Americans who aren’t down-home folk like the ones in the music. You’re from a small town in Idaho. But a lot of your music is bought in big cities and college towns. Am I right about that?
JR: I guess that there is [a tension]. I grew up outside a very, very small town in the woods. I feel like I know that life pretty well. You grow up around all kinds of people who are advantaged or disadvantaged according to the surroundings. You don’t want to do a pastiche, and there is so much of that out there. One of the pleasures for me is trying to write about that place and that era in my own life, to make it feel like it isn’t a cliché —to use two very French words. People are surprisingly open-minded about music, I find. I find that fans of Isbell, who I am on tour with right now are pretty open-minded about stuff. I enjoy new country probably more than the next person. I enjoy the writing. When the writing is great its great. When it’s bad it’s also very entertaining.
NHI: Did you watch the [presidential] debate?
JR: We were playing. I was so nervous about all that was going on while we were onstage, it was an odd experience. There was a feeling in the room like we were all in there together.
NHI: What do you think of Donald Trump?
JR: It’s hard to even summarize. It’s like, he’s terrifying, you know. He’s terrifying. I was never brought up to live in fear. That’s how I have come to think about this time in our life. You can lose faith in your neighbors, and the only way to go and fight that is to be with people and try to have a real human connection and not think of other people as enemies. And I feel like that’s what he’s trying to do.
NHI: Which is the song you are most sick of playing?
JR: I don’t have one. I have enough songs I can cycle through, if there is a song that is not touching me at the moment or not feeling right, I should take it out. Also, when you are onstage playing even a song you have played a billion times before, people spent money and came to the show and probably had to get a babysitter. You should play that song like it’s your first time. They deserve that. It’s hard to get tired of a song when you think of it that way.
NHI: Are there any sounds that other musicians make that you have tried your damnedest to make but can’t?
JR: I don’t think there is anybody where I envy them. I don’t think about music that way. But I do feel there are people that really get me going, that I am so impressed me, they make me want to write. Joanna Newsom is absolutely incredible lyrically and in so many ways. I think Gillian Welch is another who I just have to like, marvel at. But there is Kanye, who is a lyrical genius. And there are people who do exciting things in the studio, like Beck. I also have to say this tour with [Jason] Isbell — getting to see him play his songs every night is so inspiring.
NHI: Do you like being on the road?
JR: I think more these days I do miss home. Life on the road has been my life for twenty years, but I have a kid who is in school now, and for the first three and a half years of my life, she and my wife were on the road with me every tour, every day. And now it hurts I am not with them sometimes. But there’s still coming out on the road with me next week — they’ll be there in New Haven. We are doing the best we can crossing these difficult bridges when we can. We live in Brooklyn.
NHI: You used to live in upstate New York, right?
JR: We had to move for more coffee shops.
NHI: When did your novel come out?
JR: My novel came out in 2011. I worked on that book for about a year and a half. I wrote it on the road and edited it on the road. I am working on one right now as well.
NHI: You are with Haley Tanner, a novelist. Do you guys read each other’s drafts?
JR: I still don’t. Our books came out at the same time. We met at a fancy literary party, out of a New Yorker cartoon. She is the real deal. I am an interloper. I am still finding my way in a dark room. The novelists intimidate me, the novelists. The great thing is I feel absolutely at ease giving Haley something to read that I wrote, even if it’s embarrassingly bad. It’s great to live with someone who has their own specific ideas about a particular kind of art. It’s always cool to see her working on an idea.
NHI: “Seeing Me Round” is very bleak — the narrator gets stabbed and shot, his clothes are torn, he is left naked and bleeding. You work in that vein, the vein of big questions, like death and despair and resurrection. Then you think about songs in totally different keys: “Rapper’s Delight” has lyrics about Holiday Inn and Kaopectate. You write about love, death, God. Could you write great songs about mundane things, like toasters or the Wendy’s drive-through?
JR: I have thought about that. I have thought about that exact thing. There’s times I feel like I can get close to it, but I always seem to turn the toaster into a metaphysical experience. In my mind, it always seems to go that bent, even when I wish it wouldn’t. There is a genius to that kind of writing that I aspire to, but there is a bedrock of questioning inside me, and that seems to be what I write about, for better or for worse.
NHI: Writing about these Big Themes, the death and crucifixion and rising, do you worry about the risk of portentousness, of doing bad Leonard Cohen?
JR: I love and respect Leonard Cohen to an enormous degree, but I have staked my place at the party and at that table. The only nervousness I have is that I can’t make it clear. I spend my time polishing my stuff so it comes across right. But I am not afraid of being compared. I have been doing it a long time.
NHI: What’s up with the new album, the one you are touring with?
JR: I’d say Sermon on the Rocks, I had this vision for it for the very beginning. I had an adventure making it, and enjoyed every minute of it. The songs fit into the sit in a beautiful and organic way that I really hoped for. I can’t wait to be able to play them there. This band is such a good one. I am so proud to be playing with them.
Josh Ritter and Jason Isbell play College Street Music Hall on Oct. 8, 7 p.m. Tickets are $25.50-$30. Click here for more information.
