Josh Ritter is a polymath onamission
Songsmith, painter, novelist... Josh Ritter can’t stop creating
For Josh Ritter, life begins at 40. Or, to be more exact, he has reached a point in life where he can properly explore all his artistic impulses. And that’s a good thing for a polymath and renaissance man like Ritter.
The Idaho native is lauded as one of the great songwriters by everyone from Glen Hansard to Bruce Springsteen. The talented wordsmith wrote a novel, Bright’s Passage that ended up on the New York Times’ Best Seller list. The striking artwork for his latest album, Gathering, is by his own hand. And he may have become a neuroscientist if music hadn’t lured him away from his studies in the mid-Nineties.
As he approaches each project, he says his creative drive is fuelled by ‘a new electric dissatisfaction’.
‘I always imagine from one record to the next I carry a little piece of fire. I have this fear that the fire will go out somewhere along the way,’ he says. ‘Worse than that, that I won’t even know it. I find myself hoping that the feeling will come and that I’ve continued on the path that I’ve have pledged to tread.’
Ritter does not set himself any hard and fast rules. Sometimes he will compartmentalise and focus solely on one project. In other instances, he will go wherever the artistic flow takes him.
‘What I’ve come to realise over time is that there is a time to be super-disciplined about a project and at other times to let things just lie fallow,’ he says.
‘Right now, it’s all about music because I’m about to go on the road. At the end of that, I’m going to be at home. Maybe I’ll just rest my voice and go back and look at one of those first drafts [of a novel]. I’ll go to bed early and get up at nine o’clock and just write.’
He continues: ‘I had a lifelong desire to write a novel because I love reading them. When it is not happening, when the brainwaves aren’t right it is very difficult to overcome. I have a couple of crazy first drafts to wrangle. I find the same with painting. It’s as if there are occasions when there is a backlog of what you want to express, each competing for its own form of expression and it just won’t happen.’
Ritter divides his time between New York where he mostly lives and Idaho where he was ‘brought up far out of town.’ His music has been variously described as country rock and alt-folk and there is a mostly rustic feel to Gathering, his ninth album. Rockabilly energy is underpinned with gospel harmonies and though on Thunderbolt’s Goodnight he sings of having nothing but ‘these clumsy lines’ listening to Ritter you feel he would rather slap himself repeatedly than let a lazily curated couplet leak into a song.
‘Oh, that’s quite true’ he laughs. ‘I’m lucky that words and songwriting is my preferred method of communication. But what that line refers to is the understanding that no matter how long you labour over a line or a verse it still might not convey exactly what you are trying to express. Sometimes there are days when you are just really hitting all the points creatively, that you throw in a line like that just for the fun of it. But you are right I would go to extreme lengths to actually prevent a clumsy line passing through the filter.’
The man has been greatly appreciated in Ireland since being spotted by Glen Hansard in the early part of the millennium. He came to Ireland and opened for The Frames on many occasions. Those support slots gave him that all-important first break.
‘The response I got in Ireland convinced me to quit my job and go full time,’ he recalls. ‘I’ll be back in Ireland in December to play some concerts. So many familiar places to revisit, so many friends to see. Ah I just can’t wait!’ His many Irish fans no doubt feel the same.
Josh Ritter – Gathering is out now. Ritter is on tour in Ireland in December. See www.joshritter.com for details