Josh Ritter, folk-pop-poet-storyteller-singer/songwriter, holds a permanent place in my “favorite artists” list. His album, “The Animal Years,” seemed to make it on every playlist I put together during my first two years in St. Louis. Ritter’s most recent album (May 2010), “So Runs the World Away,” possesses the same type of promise for me.
Check out the video (with puppets!) for his new song, “The Curse.” Ritter has to be one of the few people who can (and would) pull off a love song about a mummy and an archaeologist.
If you’re a fan, or just interested in songwriting, I encourage you to read Ritter’s insightful post on the album. He discusses how changing as a person affected his work as an artist.
There’s some interesting perspective on struggling to write:
“I had lost my confidence in the force and originality of my own work. I wrote and wrote. Nothing came and if it did, it was the same old stuff as before. My old songs came ringing back, silly, bereft to my ears of their original love or intent. I felt at times as if I was hovering just above myself, watching the mediocrity of my afternoon threatening to spread across months and years into a lost decade.”
Finally finding the right words:
“Then one night, lying awake and looking at the ceiling, with the sound of taxis and garbage trucks trolling the streets outside our window, a story came. It wasn’t just a verse, it was a story, whole, ripe for the writing as if dropped from some apple tree down on my sleepless head … I got up and wrote it in the bathroom, sitting on the edge of the bathtub. I thought the story was fiendish and tense and sad and funny. I was proud of it.”
Letting “The Curse” guide the rest of the album:
“I liked the idea of a Victorian archaeologist, and began looking at all kinds of late 19th and early 20th century science books … I found myself reading about orbital decay, the Martian canals of Percival Lowell, the apocryphal hibernation of birds, polar exploration, the golden ratio. At the time I saw no threads running through my library wandering, but looking back now, I can see a common preoccupation with exploration, regardless of the journeys’ outcome.”
I don’t know if it makes me weird or not, but when I read a songwriter talk about how Percival Lowell and the apocryphal hibernation of birds influenced an album, it makes me want to hear it and like it even more.