No Ordinary Conqueror
Josh Ritter Eschews Politics for Heartland Rock on 'Historical Conquests'

By Richard Harrington
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, October 5, 2007

When is Stephen King's writing not scary?

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."

The son of professors of neuroscience at Washington State University, Ritter opted for a different path, fashioning a degree in "American history through narrative folk music" at Oberlin College in Ohio.

After graduating in 1999, he moved to Boston, self-releasing an eponymous album and singing at open mikes. "The great thing about open mikes is you have to grab people in one song," Ritter says, "and you have to grab the most cynical people -- other musicians like yourself."

One night in 2001, Glen Hansard of the Irish band the Frames wandered into a club just as Ritter was set to sing "Potters Wheel," from his first record. Enchanted, Hansard impulsively invited Ritter to Ireland as an opening act for the Frames.

"I was doing temp work, so I jumped at it," Ritter says, laughing and adding that he hadn't really done any full shows at that point. "And the airfare to Dublin was so cheap -- $93 -- that I could afford it at the time."

Long before he gained fame here, Ritter became a sensation in Ireland, quickly headlining major venues. In 2003, Hot Press, the Irish equivalent of Rolling Stone, voted Ritter best international male performer (over Justin Timberlake, among others) and best international songwriter.

Ritter knows, however, that for every high moment, there can be low ones. Consider Jan. 12, when Ritter was the musical guest on "Late Night With David Letterman" -- getting his widest exposure in this country by far. An hour after shaking hands with Letterman, Ritter's label, V2, also home to the White Stripes, Moby and the Raconteurs, shut down. (He's now on Sony/BMG.)

"That a record label can go under while I'm playing for 13 million people -- it's almost like I'm watching it from a distance," Ritter says. But, he adds, "it's become clear to me that I'm the lucky one -- I'm the one who's got the freshwater spring [of creativity], and that will always see me through.

"How it gets turned into a living, that stuff gets complicated, but I've stopped questioning whether that's going to stick around. I know it will if I work."