Profile: Josh Ritter
Audiences might think they have singer/songwriter Josh Ritter pegged, but his devotion to musical history has positioned him as a chameleon of Americana.
Ritter, a native of Idaho, recorded his first album in 1997 while he was still in college. He worked open-mike nights throughout New England and other locations, including Ireland. This led him into a recording and performing career that has seen him included in the folk and traditional camps, with rock and country helping to shape his sound.
His most recent album, “The Historical Conquests of Josh Ritter,” was 2007’s rocking and upbeat follow-up to his well-received “The Animal Years” from 2006, which was drenched in politics and religion.
“I felt like everything was so earnest all the time — so earnest in the music that it stopped being interesting,” Ritter said this week. “It wasn’t fun. It was gratifying — but not something I wanted to put on and have a party. There was a lot of soul searching. I just wanted to have a record that wasn’t necessarily about things going on in the world. I wanted to make a record where I was blowing up everything I had done before.”
Ritter began his career at age 16 — literally overnight — after he heard Johnny Cash and Bob Dylan sing the duet “Girl From the North County.” He had no knowledge of Dylan at all, but Cash was a beloved local legend after he had performed at a neighboring lumber town and proclaimed it the meanest town he had every played.
“Hearing them sing in that way — there was no gloss to it, no twang — it was like punk rock,” Ritter said. “They were just singing — they weren’t even concerned with the notes or getting all the words right. It was a moment they captured, and that, to me, was realizing that this is something I have to know more about. Like the songs — I have to know about songs now, because this gave me a view into a way that I could express myself, which you’re looking for in high school.”
Ritter said he went out to Kmart the next day and bought a guitar, along with a chord book to help him learn enough to start writing his own songs right away.
“I didn’t want to emulate — I didn’t just want to go learn Bob Dylan songs or Johnny Cash songs,” Ritter said. “I wanted to write my own stuff — that’s what that song taught me, that you could write something simple that meant everything, and so that’s what I did.”
Ritter grew up playing violin, but this was different, he said. His first song, he feels sure, was about girls. The earliest song he remembers writing was a “Boy Named Sue”-style story song about two miners, one who kills the other and then goes out to buy a water bed.
“I just started writing,” Ritter said. “It was the most natural thing in the world to me — it just made sense.”
In college, he left behind his initial major of neuroscience and crafted his own — American history of folk music. It was his ploy to stay in school and learn something that might contribute to his one career goal — playing music for an audience.
“Everybody assumes they’re going to be the biggest thing since Elvis, but that’s never the way it works,” he said. “I just wanted to play my music for as many people as possible. That’s always been my goal. It’s the only tangible goal.”
His college major opened him up to a history of music he might not have otherwise encountered — Scottish and Irish music, labor songs and murder ballads, engineer songs and cowboy songs, all forms of blues and jazz. It also gave him a context and philosophy for the career in music he had decided to pursue.
“Musicians, no matter how great or terrible people say they are, they’re here and they will be gone — it’s a chain of existence,” Ritter said. “It’s a chain that goes back much farther than Elvis or Jimmie Rodgers or Hank Williams or Robert Johnson. There’s never been a birth of the blues or birth of country, because this music goes back thousands of years, and it’ll keep on going as long as we’re around.
“It makes me feel a lot more comfortable about going to bed every night and I’ve had a good show, or I’ve had a rough show — songs aren’t coming or songs are coming. It’s one of those things that it’s nice to know that people will come after you, and people will come before you, and it’s basically the same existence.”
Ritter doesn’t see much difference in the business of being a musician over the last few hundred years. The specifics of the stakes have changed, but the motivations remain the same, and he sees himself as a part of that thread as well — the music industry as we know it is an historical aberration that has only existed for about 70 years. Modern technology has just helped musicians find their audience easier.
“The great part of things now is that you can record something in the afternoon, and the whole world can hear it by the evening,” Ritter said. “That’s incredible, and that’s one great thing we have now that the singers in the 17th century Highlands didn’t have. But it’s still the same life, and people want those songs and whatever the currency is that people can work out for writing them and singing them — making a living, is how it works.”
Ritter draws inspiration from just about everything. As he tours, he carries around a book he constantly writes in, compiling what he encounters and jotting down ideas.
“It’s impossible to say whether it’s something like the chicken salad sandwich I had in Louisville or the night we stayed up all night and drove through Wyoming — it’s all wrapped in there,” he said.
Ritter also appreciates the lessons of novelists when it comes to writing songs. He says authors including Philip Roth, Muriel Spark and Flannery O’Connor have influenced his songs far more than any musician has.
“A good novelist shows you what you can put a character through — just how far you can push a character, how many characters you can kill off,” Ritter said. “They show you the whole potential for what you can do with a song.”
He has his own particular rules about songwriting that he keeps to — he says he writes what he considers eight bad songs for each good one.
“You take the best parts of the bad stuff, and hopefully you’ll come up with something. It’s like you’re constructing a mutt that can live out on the street.”
His cardinal sin is to write songs that are autobiographical. He feels he is far less interesting than anything in the rest of the world and would rather write about the big themes rather than isolate his own feelings for presentation.
“The last thing I want is for people to be thinking about my experiences when I’m singing a song because that just means I’m doing the wrong thing,” Ritter said. “I’m already up on stage, and I’m already singing into a microphone and playing loud — the last thing I need to do is take even more space by saying, ‘This is a song called ‘Josh Ritter is in Love with X.’ ”
He doesn’t see himself as a folk musician, although that’s the category he is usually lumped into — he and his band employ plenty of electronic sounds on their recordings, and his musical influences go far beyond the folk world — but he doesn’t mind people using that as an easy reference point if it gets them listening.
“I never felt like I was a folk musician; I never felt like I was country or anything,” Ritter said. “I feel like what I do is write rock and roll with lots of words.”
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