Josh Ritter – Dances with wolves
“There’s times when you’ve just got to keep it together. You’ve got to realize what’s going on, because it’s a dangerous situation. I guess I’ve made it so far without the drugs and all that stuff because I just don’t feel like a rock ‘n’ roller. I feel more like a writer. I get up in the morning and I write, whether it’s a song or something else I’m working on — whatever it is, it’s important to me to have that time.”
Still, Ritter cops to lupine influences. “Wolves are huge on this record,” he says. “When I didn’t mention them, I wanted the sound of wolves, so on almost every song there’s like a howl of wolves.”
“I think there’s…a reason why there are all these stories about werewolves, or being raised by wolves, a metamorphosis that could happen that you wouldn’t even realize. One day you wake up and you’re surrounded by wolves and you don’t know where they came from, and you don’t know why they’re there or what they see in you, and you start to realize that you’re a wolf.”
That scenario, in fact, comes to life on “Wolves”, the second track of The Animal Years. “I was reading that a real wolf howl is like an augmented fourth,” Ritter continues. “It’s a really lonely sound.”
After making Hello Starling overseas, Ritter stayed much closer to home for The Animal Years, recording at Bear Creek Studios just outside Seattle. “I just thought I’d like to move it around a little bit,” says Ritter, though he notes that Bear Creek, like the French studio, was also located on farmland.
“The place I ended up recording…was really similar,” he says. “Outside there were horse barns and old dogs.” The dogs, it seems, provided an object lesson in perspective. “Old dogs are great! They’ve just seen it all, man. You’re out there and you’re recording and you walk out and throw a ball for an old dog and he kind of ambles over, maybe he lies down.”
To produce, Ritter chose Brian Deck, based on Deck’s production of the 2000 Modest Mouse release The Moon & Antarctica. “It’s not a rock record,” Ritter says, “but it sounds like one. I just liked the fact that he’d obviously taken so many chances in the studio.”
Deck says the two connected instantly. “He had a lot more sort of visual and hallucinatory references for how he wanted this to feel than necessarily musical references,” Deck says. “I really enjoy it when I’m working with an artist who fully describes the atmosphere and the world that any particular song or album lives within.
“I think we connected from our first phone conversation when he was talking about wanting this record to have a timeless feel but to be connected in a way to the silent movie era. He just kept talking about these visual references. Not everyone making a record works that way. ‘I want the snare louder and more vocal’ — that’s concrete and easy to work with, rather than ‘I want this to feel like it has a purple aura with a yellow fringe.'”
Deck was even more sanguine about recording at Bear Creek. “The thing that I’m most super happy with on that record I think is the sound of Josh’s voice,” he says. “I had a really nice, vintage tube mike on his face. I also had a Shure SM57, which is the most ubiquitous, commonplace live sound mike ever, which was feeding through a Fender amplifier, and we miked that. We were also taking the vocal sound and putting that back out into the room where he was singing through what basically amounted to a high-quality PA system.
“We were in this huge old barn that I’m guessing was 50 feet in one direction and maybe 45 feet in the other direction, 30-to-35-foot ceilings — it was huge! We were filling up the room with his voice and it just sounded awesome. So the sound of his voice on the record is a combination of those things. It was partly the concept, and it was partly just, ‘Fuck! This sounds cool!'”
Ritter makes the sessions sound like an adventure out of Mark Twain, whose works he cites even more frequently than the Bible. “[Deck] made me feel like we were on the prow of a boat looking at a big continent, a place that nobody’s ever found,” he says. “You see it from a long ways away and it looks really cool, and then you come up close and it’s different than you expect. Maybe there’s some weird animals running around, and you don’t know if the natives are friendly, and you get that feeling of discovery, and, not knowing any rules to make music, every day was exciting.”