No Ordinary Conqueror

Josh Ritter Eschews Politics for Heartland Rock on 'Historical Conquests'

When is Stephen King's writing not scary?

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When you're singer-songwriter Josh Ritter and King is calling 2006's "The Animal Years" the best album of the year "in a walk"! King went on to describe Ritter's music as "mysterious, melancholy, melodic . . . and those are only the M's."

The album's signature song is "Thin Blue Flame," a visionary folk epic that intertwines love, war, faith and politics over a bracing 9 1/2 minutes. King called it "the most exuberant outburst of imagery since Bob Dylan's 'A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall' in 1963."

"That was amazing," says the 30-year-old Ritter, who got the news of King's Entertainment Weekly column while on tour in the Shetland Islands, northeast of Scotland. "I was playing in a 400-year-old manor-house-turned-hotel that was supposed to have its own ghosts, so it was the coolest way to find out about that."

King was joining a growing chorus of critics praising Ritter's beautifully crafted literary folk-rock. Ritter, whose songs invoke broad metaphorical themes with haunting melodies and dense lyrics, draws frequent comparisons to Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen. Another gem on "The Animal Years" is "Girl in the War," a spirited discussion between the apostles Peter and Paul about the human cost of the Iraq war.

Ritter's new album, "The Historical Conquests of Josh Ritter," leaves politics behind. On it, he seems eager to reinvent himself as a heartland rocker testing boundaries of tone, texture and expression. The songs are lighter and at times quite funny, including "The Temptation of Adam," a meditative seduction conducted in a fully armed underground missile silo.

Ritter seems flattered and frustrated by the endless Dylan comparisons. To be sure, the biblical and historical imagery in the new album's opening song, "To the Dogs or Whoever," can only be called Dylanesque. "I never hid the fact that I loved, and still love, Dylan," says Ritter, acknowledging that if such comparisons "help people get into the music, that's great. But he didn't write any of my songs."

As for "Historical Conquests," he says: "It's not so much a rejection of any of the foggy values I set out in 'Animal Years' or that the war or religion has gotten any less important, but a lot of times I've seen people wear out their welcome on that type of writing. There's a reason why some of the really great and really profound political comment has been fairly short, taking the pamphlet form rather than the saga."

Ritter says the new album's expanded sonic palate was fueled by his sense that he is "inside a tent and pushing outward -- I don't know what's out there, but I get little glimpses from record to record of places that I want to take the stuff."

The "stuff" has taken Ritter from his home town of Moscow, Idaho, to venues around the world. He says he was set on his path at 18, when he discovered Dylan just in time to win the Moscow High School talent show with an earnest rendition of "Rainy Day Women #12 & 35."

"I just clamped on to him and understood why someone would want to write songs in a whole different bunch of types of music," Ritter explains.

He picked "Rainy Day Women" "because I was just learning how to play guitar and it was easy," he says. The singer-songwriter identity was particularly attractive, too, Ritter says, because "growing up, and still, most everything I like to do is really solitary, and I don't mean that in a good or bad way. In school, I was a wrestler, runner, swimmer; team sports were never my thing. I always really loved those things you could practice on your own, and when it came to music, it was the same."