The surviving document of Ritter’s musical incubation at Oberlin is a self-titled disc he released in 1999 (currently available only on his website, www.joshritter.com). After graduating, Ritter returned to Idaho and, with the help of Zelkha (who hailed from Palo Alto, California), he booked a series of bookstore and small bar gigs along the West Coast. It was Ritter’s first serious attempt at touring. “It wasn’t disheartening,” he says cautiously; “it was a wake-up call. When I first started, Darius was helping me, but there wasn’t really anyone else. I remember getting a book and writing down names and numbers and things I needed to do each day.
“At times I’d go to bed night, just clenched up, and feel like nothing was happening, nothing was going anywhere. I had all these songs, but how was anybody going to hear them, and why did it matter? Those big things don’t make sense. There’s no way to just start going out there to play. I felt that everything was happening inwardly, but not outwardly. Nobody showed up at the shows out there. It’s not like I had friends from Moscow or Oberlin in these different places. It was just hardcore people at the bar. I didn’t even know if the reaction was good or bad.”
A year later, Ritter headed back east, took up residence in Providence, Rhode Island, worked temp jobs, hit any open mike in driving distance, and reunited with Hickman and Zelkha to make Golden Age Of Radio, a record he calls “a trial by fire.” Budgeting a thousand dollars, Ritter booked late-night sessions in tiny studios from New Hampshire to Philadelphia.
“We were strung out on coffee all the time, driving back and forth,” he recalls. “There wasn’t any money. I couldn’t pay Zac, so I gave him a banjo and an accordion I got from a flea market. I put the band through some real hell, but everybody was in it for the long haul. There was no record deal. What else can you do with the songs but record them and get them out there for people to hear? That’s the charm of the record for me; there are no ulterior motives.”
Pitched between delicate ballads and lo-fi, dobro-and-drums folk-rock, Golden Age Of Radio is a record of small-town romances and rural pleasance. “I notice that with each record, you get interested in a certain subject,” he says. “It’s like learning a new vocabulary or language, and putting it all in, and hopefully it will come out in the music. I just wanted [Golden Age] to be a pastorale.”
That concept played into Ritter’s ruminations about leaving his Idaho homeland behind. “It’s not about being a farmer or remaining in one place, but moving around and returning to the same place,” he explains “A feeling of love and nostalgia. It’s about a memory about going to a dance, a memory of your last time. Sort of like American Graffiti, or The Deer Hunter; you want that last night in town to go on forever. You discover things about the places that you’d never noticed before. Moving to Providence and thinking about Idaho all the time, and remembering everything about that place — all the floodgates opened.”
Ritter put out Golden Age Of Radio on his own in 2001; the record was subsequently picked up by Signature Sounds and released nationally in January 2002. A single, “Me And Jiggs”, became a minor hit in Ireland, and touring became both an obsession and a viable option. The leadoff track, “Come And Find Me”, found its way into the closing credits of HBO’s acclaimed series “Six Feet Under”. The song pays unselfconscious homage to the spirit and sound of Nick Drake (as do “You’ve Got The Moon” and “Song For The Fireflies”, two other tracks from Golden Age).
“I wanted to write a Nick Drake song,” Ritter owns up. “I often think that for people who are more knowledgeable about music, the comparisons, if they are offered in good will, I appreciate them. But you have to meet the comparisons head-on.
“I’m the first to admit that I owe a debt to so many musicians, and Nick Drake is one of them. I felt like he had something interesting, and while I’m not a fan of all his songs, he really tapped into something pretty….Songs were just coming out of him. It was music before business rather than business before music.”
Ritter’s success in Ireland, especially, helped shape the contours of his new album, Hello Starling. Taking the advice of producer David Odlum, best known for his work with Irish indie rockers the Frames, and hiring drummer Dave Hingerty, also from Ireland, Ritter chose a remote, rural village in France to set down songs that, if anything, only deepen the gossamer lyricism of his earlier work.
“You can record anywhere, but we just thought, this is our life, let’s do something interesting with it,” he explains. “That area of France reminded me of rural Wisconsin. There was nothing out there, even the village was far away. The studio, Black Box, is this 18th-century dairy barn. It’s one big barn converted into different rooms, very simple, with a large tape machine in the corner. Some of the mikes were Curtis Mayfield’s old mikes.
“There wasn’t much to distract us, nothing to get in the way of getting the songs down….It was late February, early March. The whole place just came alive at night, millions of frogs came out, just thick on the ground. There was a mill pond, with a stand of bamboo, and the wind would blow through it, and you’d hear all the frogs singing.”
Spare and quietly luminous, Hello Starling testifies to an aesthetic principle so simple it sounds sentimental: Beauty is the handmaiden of wisdom and imagination. Opening with the secret poetry of lovers — “Oh Imogene and Abelard, I’m your homeward boy,” he sings on the leadoff track, “Bright Smile” — the album marries Ritter’s scuffed-to-shining voice and guitar with just-shy-of-gospel keyboards (played by Sam Kassirer) and always understated rhythm section of Hickman and Hingerty (his old friend Zelkha drums on one track).
But the songs are what count, with their subtle but certain melodies, and a language steeped not just in romantic and modern poetry — “Snow Is Gone” was written after a heady Yeats jag — but, like Dylan and Cohen, in Biblical cadences and images. “Your eyes were so patient and calm/And green as the grass that might grow on the 23rd Psalm,” Ritter sings on “Rainslicker”.
“So much of a culture has to do with those stories,” he contends. “It’s such deep well of imagery, and it’s not writing that goes out of style. How can you write songs without it? Love and hate and God. There’s no way of getting around those things.
