Josh Ritter – In the moment
“Without sounding like a real hippie, that song is really emotional to play,” Ritter says of “Thin Blue Flame”. “I had never had that feeling playing. It’s like going out on a long run and something happens to you that’s never happened before. It’s exciting, and then it’s sad, and all that stuff. And you’re grateful for having written it, and more grateful that people actually listen to it and respond.”
The album got noticed, by Details magazine (which tagged Ritter as one of its “best new artists bubbling up from the underground”), Entertainment Weekly (“his personal tone poems resonate like big-screen epics”), The New York Times (“his love songs and narratives have grown ever more phantasmagorical, and now he’s writing oracular meditations”) and plenty of others.
The peak, at least in terms of audience reach, came with an appearance on “The Late Show With David Letterman” on January 12 of this year. In the performance (which you can find on YouTube), Ritter leads his band through a barely restrained rendition of “Girl In The War”. When he turns back toward the drum kit between the second and third verses, it’s not hard to see a yearning for another gear to kick into — and in that yearning, the seeds of the new album.
But something else happened that day too. Even as Ritter and the band were getting warmed up for Letterman, they learned that their record label had effectively gone out of business. V2’s North American branch had been bought in 2006 by Sheridan Square Entertainment, a company more interested in catalogue accumulation than new music production and promotion. On January 12, it shut down V2 North America’s offices, laid off its staff, and turned loose its artist roster. (V2 remains a going concern outside North America, under Branson’s stewardship.)
“I was just mad,” Ritter says. “I know eventually, that record, I’m gonna get that stuff back and all that. The contract that we did was great, and the people I worked with at V2 were fantastic people. They just weren’t the ones with the checkbook. It was just an evisceration, it was sad.”
He admits to a wave of fear, having seen from a distance the endless tangles some artists end up in with their labels. “I just felt kind of like, is my career going to get hijacked by paperwork? Is that possible that that could happen? And in a way, it could. They could make it really hard. Unbelievable.” As he warms to the subject, the level of disgust in his voice kicks up a few notches.
“But at the same time,” he continues, “this is the pettiest bullshit for me. I am an artist, I am a writer, that’s what I do. And I am not gonna let that get in my way, by these kind of vultures. Whoever they are. They’ve never returned a call.”
Ritter says he filed contract severance papers with the company, and never heard anything back. But the company made no effort to interfere when he signed with Sony BMG. Meanwhile, Ritter realized that the flipside of being cut loose was complete freedom.
“In a way it was like, I had this breath of relief,” he says. “I’m on nobody’s time schedule; I can just go make a record. I can do it now, I can just go. That was such a cool feeling.”
As fate would have it, he had a record ready to make, and a place to make it. His regular get-togethers with Kassirer over the course of 2006 had produced enough material for an album, and he had also already decided on a producer: Kassirer. Their demo work at Kassirer’s studio in Maine, a converted 18th-century farmhouse dubbed the Great North Sound Society, had captured the unscripted spirit Ritter was looking for.
A Boston native and graduate of New York University, Kassirer had done a little studio work, but Historical Conquests was his first major producing job. He had initially bought the farmhouse as a rural retreat where he could store his pianos and organs, and then retrofitted it into a recording space.
“I’m always working on it,” Kassirer says. “It’s usable for now, but also [has] a lot of long-term potential in the future — a barn we could turn into a live room, maybe, and things like that.”
Ritter has tended to record his albums in remote locales: a French dairy farm for Hello Starling, a barn in rural Washington for The Animal Years. There is, of course, a tradition of this kind of holing-up: Dylan and The Band at Big Pink, the Rolling Stones in their rented chateau. But for Ritter it’s more a matter of familiarity than mythology.
“I’ve always wanted to record in kind of quiet rural places, because that’s kind of how I grew up,” he says. “I feel most comfortable in those situations, that’s the main thing for me. It has the added benefit of the fact that you can’t go and get in a fight with your girlfriend and come back and be in the wrong headspace. You can’t go and spend all night down the street or wherever. And you also don’t have all the gear in the world available to you, which is cool, because then you can be creative. The focus is just whittled down.”
The history buff in Ritter — the one who sprinkles his songs and conversation with allusions to presidents, lumber boats and Calamity Jane — was taken with the house itself. “It was built in like 1790, which is amazing,” he says. “The year that they founded Washington, D.C., you know? Really cool. There’s huge plank floorboards from when Maine had trees that were” — he spreads his hands — “this big. And the walls in certain spots were papered with old Boston Advertisers from back in the day.” Among them he found an original newspaper printing of a Stephen Crane short story.
So with the label affiliation still up in the air, Ritter and Kassirer set aside three weeks in January to record the new album. “We hadn’t really done anything up there in the winter,” Kassirer says. “And I was nervous to see how it would go. It gets extremely cold up there. And there’s all kinds of new factors, like heat that clangs, and drafty windows.”
But both he and Ritter say they had a great time, which is not hard to imagine from the jovial tone of the album. The population of the house eventually swelled to about fifteen people, including a horn section (friends of Kassirer’s).