Josh Ritter: The Beast In Its Tracks

Ireland’s favourite heartfelt American delivers a wrenching break-up record
From Sinatra’s In The Wee Small Hours to Springsteen’s Tunnel Of Love, Dylan’s Blood On The Tracks to Blur’s 13, Beck’s Sea Change to Kanye West’s 808s & Heartbreak, there’s been a long tradition of singer-songwriters mining their misery over failed relationships to create great art. In some cases, the suspicion is that they deliberately sabotaged their love-lives precisely for that reason. As Bono sang on ‘The Fly’ from Achtung Baby! (itself an album largely inspired by the break-up of Edge’s marriage), “Every artist is a cannibal, every poet is a thief/All kill their inspiration and sing about their grief.”
Josh Ritter’s 18-month marriage to fellow musician Dawn Landes ended with a phone call on November 1, 2010, but, by his own account, the acclaimed Idahoan didn’t want to split up. His parents had been together for over 40 years, and divorce simply wasn’t in his vocabulary. Unfortunately, it seems he wasn’t given a choice in the matter. So ran his world away…
Heartbroken and near suicidal, he did the usual things men do when they’re going through the horrors of a marital implosion. He hit the booze hard, and drank his way through a blurry period in New York (“Someone said they had seen me wearing a cowboy hat, but I don’t remember that”). Although they gave him vivid nightmares, he started taking sleeping pills to get through the empty nights. He went to New Orleans and visited a store filled with vengeance powders. He kept well away from bridges.
Of course, he worked too. He wrote and published his debut novel, the well-received Bright’s Passage, but songs also flowed from his poisoned pen. Lots of songs. “I wrote, because that’s how I try to deal with everything in life, but the songs that came were unfocused, full of hatred and self-pity,” he now says of the genesis of The Beast In Its Tracks. “I could have recorded them, but these lines I was singing weren’t songs yet, just stillborn, terrifying things.”
Eventually he met a girl just as messed up and heartbroken as he was, and they got together for comfort. Gradually their relationship strengthened and his bitterness towards Landes began to fade. Months passed. By the time he was halfway healed, he realised that he had more new songs than he’d ever had at one time before. “Far from the grand, sweeping feel of the songs on So Runs The World Away, these new ones felt like rocks in the shoe, hard little nuggets of whatever they were, be it spite, remorse or happiness.”
You’d be hard-pressed to name a songsmith who hasn’t written about love and heartbreak at some stage, especially one coming from the folk tradition, but while Ritter has delivered his fair share of lovelorn cuts in the past, he has never actually been an autobiographical songwriter. That all changes here on this seventh studio album, easily his most personal ever.
“I can’t pretend that all is well,” he wails at one point. ‘“t’s like I’m haunted by a ghost/ There are times I cannot speak your name for the catching in my throat.”
Beast was produced by longtime collaborator Sam Kassirer, and recorded with Josh Kaufman and members of the Royal City Band at the Great North Sound Society in Parsonsfield, Maine. Over its 13 tracks, Ritter relays the deeply personal story of his emotional journey from heartbreak to happiness, with all the messiness, confusion, hope, despair, frustration and rage in between. It’s difficult to work out the chronology, and just exactly which relationship he’s singing about at times, but it’s hardly important.
Proceedings open with the short and sparse ‘Third Arm’, just a mournful sounding Ritter and a lone guitar. “Last night I saw someone with your eyes/ Someone with your smile/ We danced, and though glad that she had asked me to/ She didn’t have your arms.” In less than a minute, the sorrowful scene is set. The album closes on a much gentler note with ‘Lights’: “I cannot recall when I felt like this/ It’s been a long old time/ If I ever did.”
What happens between those two songs is an emotionally turbulent rollercoaster of bittersweet symphonies to Landes (‘A Certain Light’) and the slow realisation that he’s falling in love with someone else (‘In Your Arms Awhile’). It’s musically tight and melodic throughout, deliberately sparse and rarely fancy. While his anger is evident on some of the songs, and he’s not above taking occasional lyrical stabs at his ex-wife, it never really comes across in the music. There are no guitar-smashing moments or tortured wails of feedback. Often mellow and melancholic, some songs could be filed under alt. country balladry (‘The Appleblossom Rag’).
He doesn’t necessarily spare himself either. On ‘New Lover, he sings: “I feel like a miser/ I feel low and mean/ For accusing you of stealing what I offered you for free/ Still it baffles the belief sometimes/ What thieves we lovers be.”
The standout track, and first cut, is ‘Joy To You Baby’, a song of hard-won wisdom about acceptance and reconciliation: “There’s pain and whatever/ We stumble upon/ I’d never have met you, you couldn’t have gone/ Then I wouldn’t have met you we couldn’t have been/ I guess it all adds up/ To joy in the end.”
Incidentally, Ritter and his new partner became parents to a baby girl late last year. So double congratulations are due. While not quite up there with The Animal Years, this heartfelt, heartbroken album is the second-best thing he’s brought into this world in recent times.
Key Track: ‘Joy To You Baby’