Over the past decade, US songwriter Josh Ritter has familiarised audiences with the reality of life in his native place – an Idaho town with the unlikely name of Moscow. Writing of ‘dirt roads and dryland farming’, his evocative slices of Americana have been lapped up in Ireland, where we have adopted him as one of our own.
Indeed, as Hot Press played his new offering, Sermon On The Rocks, a lot of those old traits were found shining through; tales of bible camp and bourbon; bouncing from the corn fields of his birthplace to Henrietta, Indiana. It’s a typically vivid and vivacious journey through the US heartlands.
Which is why we’re shocked and appalled when we ring Josh at home and hear...well, is that traffic?!
“My family and I just moved to Brooklyn,” he explains. “We were living about two hours north of the city, in this old draughty house. I decided that life is just too short.”
And how, praytell, has this master of open roads and big skies adjusted to city life?
“Are you kidding me?” he laughs. “Like a fish to water. It’s tremendous. To walk down the street for a cup of coffee – you can’t put a price on that.”
Already, the low chuckle and engaging personality of the singer-songwriter signal things are a little different to the last time he spoke to Hot Press. At that point, he had just made The Beast In Its Tracks, a hugely personal album inspired in large part by the split from his wife Dawn Landes. If the weighty subject matter of that record saw him a little more subdued than usual, then hints of what to expect from the new LP are betrayed by his boundless enthusiasm when discussing it.
“I had an amazing time,” he confesses. “I have fun making every record – I’m not one to talk about ‘birthing an album’ or anything like that – but it was so much fun. Making an album is like a party for me.”
The party started in earnest when, upon completion of touring the last album, he relocated to the foot of the Catskill Mountains. “We got into an old house built in the 1770s – and then sat around a wood stove shivering! But coming out of the tour to this very sedate and idyllic place, with a stream running through a field and my daughter out there picking apples, was an amazing place to find yourself. For me, it was a chance to get to grips with what I saw as shortcomings in my artistic life, and finding ways to fix them. I was nearing a whole bunch of decisions that led to the making of the record.
“I’d been dissatisfied when it came to my commitment, as far as taking the reins on a record,” he continues. “I’ve always believed in the purity of writing songs – that if the songs were good enough, they’d sound the way I wanted. I got tired of knowing what was going to come next, and knowing it wouldn’t be as exciting as it could be. I mean, I believe in all of my records, which all came together in ways that I loved, but I was sitting on this porch realising that if it’s up to anybody, it’s up to me. I can’t expect anybody else to read my mind.”
The key, it seems, was a little bit of selfishness. At one point, Josh was quoted as saying he ‘wanted to make something important to me and to no one else’.
“I didn’t mean that in the sense of excluding people,” he explains. “I just wanted to make it without thought for anybody else. I feel like that gets harder to do – it’s difficult not to think of an audience sometimes.”
The eureka moment actually arrived on tour. “On tour, every time you go to a city, you’re there for a night, maybe less. But I remember pulling into New Orleans early in the morning, and getting off the bus to smell the city. I walked across the street, and there’s this huge shelf piled high with blood oranges. I realised that’s what I wanted to do – go to New Orleans and make a record. Everything else after that decision just followed so naturally.”
Naturally, perhaps, but not necessarily easily. When nappy-changing and bottle feeding take up more time than writing and playing music, it’s a bit of an adjustment. Josh smiles when thinking about working with daughter Bea as priority No. 1. “Being the parents of a new baby means your hands are always full. Ideas are rolling around your head like marbles. You’re trying to hold onto them but they’re getting rounder and smoother. By the time the kid was asleep, I’d have two verses and a whole bunch of ideas that needed to be written down. But when you have a couple of hours it’s joyful, because you’ve been looking forward so much.
“It used to be that I’d have 12 hours, and I’d stare at the dog all day, trying to come up with something great. Now, I wanted to make something fun.”
And fun it most certainly is. The hard-hitting introspection of The Beast In Its Tracks is largely in the past, the familiar storytelling style that we’ve come to know returned.
“It’s like there’s one-nineteenth of my brain back there, working on some weird problems,” Josh notes, when considering the outwards lens through which the album is crafted. “I’d had this notion that there was something really interesting and exciting about all the archetypes you find in a town: the doctor, the lawyer, the teacher, the school secretary. I worked on a bunch of songs, but I hadn’t been able to find them for a while. Then, ‘Getting Ready To Get Down’ just jumped into my head and from there, there was such a rich vein."
Indeed, the aforementioned early single – a jaunty tongue-in-cheek anthem of the incompatibility of bible school and carnal lust – set a tone for the record. Clever without being contrived, and gleeful without being gratuitous, it’s Josh’s narrative style at its incisive and entertaining best.
“It was very easy to write about these things,” he says. “Writing about going home, and the places that I remember – as long as you don’t put in too many specific details – can speak to a lot of different people’s experiences.”
Another rather more unlikely theme throughout the album is religion.
“Over the last 20 years, my views have changed so much," he reflects. "I grew up in a religious household. My parents are these beautiful, caring people – scientists, in fact, and they’re amazing – but we went to church, and Sunday School, and bible camp, and all sorts of things. I’ve gone from being angry, to thinking a few moments and sayings still gleam out, but we have problems with them because they’re so dry now. There’s such a lack of actual empathy, or care. On the album, I wanted to focus on regular human situations, with regular people involved. As Bill Hicks said, there’s no need for a middleman.”
And while that might be the case for religion, it’s not the case when making a record. Once the material was in some shape, Josh turned to Trina Shoemaker, whose celebrated knob-twiddling career has seen her work with everyone from Queens Of The Stone Age to Sheryl Crow.
“She’s a genius, and a really cool and interesting producer," he enthuses. "She came back and said, ‘These are the tracks we’re going to work on, in this order’. I was down for the adventure. I didn’t have an album in mind. If I had a bite, then I followed it. I didn’t think about where it might go.”
If this album, his eighth studio effort, finally sees Josh step towards superstardom, it will be the result of leaving much of what he had learned behind.
“When you don’t know what you’re doing, you make some cool decisions,” he reflects. “I think it’s important, and that that’s where good stuff happens. There’s a story of a Nashville songwriter – every time he writes a hit, he buys a new guitar. I think there’s something to that.”
If Josh buys into that habit, then there may be a new six-stringer or two coming his way very soon.