Josh Ritter – In the moment
“You’ve got all these friends out there, and you’re hanging out,” Ritter says. “Existence is, start working at 10 in the morning, have coffee, listen to stuff. Sometimes there were like ten people there, we’d all just sit there, drinking coffee, kind of mosey in. And then work through the day, and have a big dinner and shut it down for the night. You don’t need anything, you know? We had BB guns, I think we did BB guns most of the time. No TVs, but we had just a blast. And after three weeks you’re ready to get gone, but it’s such an amazing place.”
Amidst and between all the recording, Ritter was still constantly writing and rewriting lyrics. His breakthrough, he says, came with the song “Mind’s Eye”, a sneering bit of braggadocio in which Ritter — improbably, but convincingly — stares down a rival. “My day might be comin’, yours is comin’ first,” he warns. “I’ll knock you outta your daylights.”
What Ritter discovered with the song, and with Kassirer’s range of vocal effects, was the joy of writing and playing a character. “If you’re writing for the character,” he says, “then you write what the character would say without thinking about how you feel about it or what you think about it. You can do it and just jump in.”
When I note that this is the same way rappers often approach their material, Ritter nods enthusiastically over his chicken Caesar salad (we did eventually manage to order food). “I love some of the stuff, like Biggie,” he says. “That guy could go from funny to heartbreak in just seconds. Lupe Fiasco, he’s my favorite right now, that guy is so good. I just love the way he delivers stuff. I listen to a lot of that, just lots of vocals. That’s one of the few places where I feel like there’s really the most genius stuff going on, lyrically.”
Not that Historical Conquests is in any way a hip-hop record. Musically, its touchstones are more along the lines of Mermaid Avenue and World Party. But Ritter’s role-playing produces some inspired verbal riffs, many of them delivered with tongue in cheek even when there is an underlying seriousness.
“My orchestra is gigantic/This thing could sink the Titanic,” he boasts on “Rumors”, the humor in the line and the glee in his delivery only partly masking the song’s romantic anxiety. There is “Next To The Last True Romantic”, on which Ritter affects a shameless Steve Earle-ish drawl to tell the story of an outlaw who has “stolen hearts like they’re horses, and horses when hearts can’t be found.” On “Real Long Distance”, you can almost feel him daring himself to be sexy, dropping lines such as, “You’re a real big momma, but you gotta lotta time for me,” which would seem more likely coming from Robert Plant, say, or at least Jack White. But his commitment to the vocal sells the sizzle, irony and all, and illustrates how comfortable he’s become with the “singer” part of singer-songwriter.
“I never really had realized, it’s about the delivery as much as it’s about any lyrics or anything,” he says of his newfound confidence at the microphone.
But his more established strengths as a lyricist and song craftsman have hardly gone missing here. Standing a bit apart from the flow of Conquests is an odd little song called “The Temptation Of Adam”, which, with its fingerpicking, lilting melody and gently husked vocals, at first blush seems more of a piece with his earlier albums. But its lyrics tell a darkly whimsical parable about a love affair in a missile bunker. The narrator falls for his companion while the two of them are manning the button in an underground silo, in case war breaks out up on the surface.
As war doesn’t come and their time alone seems likely to end, the narrator has fantasies that the two of them could stay below forever: “Pretend this giant missile is an old oak tree instead/Carve our name in hearts into the warhead.” Inevitably, as the song closes, the fantasies turn darker: “Would we ever really care the world had ended?” he wonders. “You could hold me here forever like you’re holding me tonight/I think about that great big button, and I’m tempted.”
The ballad is as ambitious in its own way as anything Ritter has written, a thoroughly imagined and grimly funny narrative that owes more to Rod Serling than to Bob Dylan. It also neatly inverts the strategy of “Girl In The War”: Where that was a song about war disguised as a love song, “The Temptation Of Adam” is a song about love disguised as a war song.
“I just had the idea in my head of that moment where it’s like, ‘Everything is so fucking perfect right now, if the world ended now, it would be perfect,'” he says. “Or that thing where you’re in this relationship with somebody, and it’s one that you know can’t last and only is there because of the situation. The idea of the missile silo was just in my head, it just popped in.”
It was the only song Ritter brought to the sessions fully formed, and he admits to some satisfaction with it. “It felt like a play to me,” he says. “I’m so proud of that song. That’s just one of those ones where, like, who knows how that happens? I was on Cloud 9 for a month after that.”
As for the title of the album, and the Roman centurion helmet on its cover, Ritter says he wanted something outsized to match the outsized characters and big sound of the songs.
“I liked it because it felt like that same sort of big, brash thing, but also it felt really funny to me,” he says. “Like, if this is going to be over the top, just go all the way. And hopefully people will think it’s as funny as I do. Probably people will think that it’s just a really egotistical title. But who cares?”
He grins again — he grins a lot — and it is hard not to think that, in fact, Josh Ritter is not really intimidated by much these days. He has a girlfriend in New York, a fine new album, a comfortable new record deal, and a band (now augmented with an electric guitarist) getting ready to head out on the road.
“I just wanted to cut loose,” he says, summing up Historical Conquests. “I wanted it to be exciting and spontaneous. I feel like that’s the way I normally play my shows. I think this is the first time we really got that onto a record. You’ve got to trust that that’s the right feeling, and sometimes that’s really hard to do. You’ve got to trust that what you like is something anybody else is going to like, or understand.”
ND contributing editor Jesse Fox Mayshark lives in New York City but would really like a farmhouse in Maine.