Cover Story: Josh Ritter

A few discomforting minutes into this interview, Hot Press feels compelled to point out to Josh Ritter that he’s had his head bowed low, fists tightly clenched, and eyes squeezed shut from the moment the digital recorder’s red light came on. He blinks them open, shifts in his seat, and apologises with an embarrassed wave of his hand. “Oh sorry, man, it’s just… you know.”

Sharply dressed in a black suit and shirt, the tousle-haired and boyishly handsome 36-year-old seems tense. The words have been tumbling from his mouth so urgently that the acclaimed Idahoan singer-songwriter has sounded more like someone guiltily confessing something that he’s relieved to finally get off his chest than a rock star promoting his latest release.
“This feels a bit weird,” he admits. “It’s a strange thing to talk about, you know. Like, the last couple of albums, I could talk about the influences and things like that, and how I made the record. But this is bigger because I do feel like, in one way, I exposed myself for the person that I might be a little more than normal.”
We’re sitting in a Dublin hotel discussing the genesis of his seventh studio album, The Beast In Its Tracks. Unlike previous Ritter offerings, which have rarely if ever strayed into autobiographical territory, it’s a deeply personal record, more heartfelt than anything he’s delivered before.
“I never really liked the idea of imposing the story of one’s own personal experiences on other people,” he says. “There’s a lot of that out there already. I always feel that a concert or an album is like you’re being invited to a party. But you’re not the guest of honour. It’s a good house party with lots going on, and your album or song kind of slips in, stays a while, and then goes. You don’t want to be the last person at the party, you know? And you also don’t want to be the bore, who’s telling everybody everything about yourself.”
He scratches his head contemplatively before continuing.
“So those are things I geberally like to stay away from. With this record, that changed slightly. This is a record of an experience I had, the largest in my life at that point, which I couldn’t deny. Like, to back away from it, and never acknowledge it, felt like I would be betraying the chance to do something with the one talent I feel
I have.”
Actually, Josh Ritter is a man of numerous talents. But song-writing is definitely his greatest strength. Inspired by his relatively recent divorce from fellow American musician Dawn Landes, the 13 songs on The Beast In Its Tracks largely chart the story of that marital implosion, sparing the listener none of the messiness, confusion, hope, despair, frustration and rage that he experienced during what was a bitter break-up.
“I can’t pretend that all is well,” he wails at one point. “It’s like I’m haunted by a ghost/ There are times I cannot speak your name for the catching in my throat.”
The title is obviously a nod to Dylan’s Blood On The Tracks, considered by many to be the greatest break-up album of all time.
“I guess it was an influence, but only to a small extent – and especially in the beginning,” he says. “Dylan was had taken an experience in his life and turned it into art. I don’t care if he tells the truth or not. You know, I’d never have cared if he told the truth about anything. There’s so much fact finding and blood-hounding of what actually happened, when, really, it doesn’t matter. But what I did like about it was that he went and followed through and he wrote.
“I thought that I was going to have the courage to speak really angrily and with a lot of rage and a kind of unrelenting spite about something and, frankly, I thought that that was what the brave part was. So I looked at Dylan and Blood On The Tracks and said, ‘Well, he can do it and that seemed to be a good experience for him’. As time went on though, it became less and less about that, and more and more about all the stuff that happened after. And it wasn’t as much about the anger, more how that anger turned into other things.”
He obviously put himself through the mill in the writing and recording of this record. He’s not enjoying the promotion of it a whole lot more.
“I feel exposed and I feel self-conscious about some of the stuff that’s on it,” he shrugs. “I feel like most of the time you have these kind of channels in your heart, and it’s dark in there. Everything is all kind of blended together, your emotions and what have you. And then there are these moments that are just these bright flashes, and you get a pure stream of love or hatred or fury. And then, you know, forgiveness or whatever – and they’re pure streams. They’re not mixed,
they’re unalloyed.
“They’re really powerful and they flash out and you can see who you really are. It’s like when they put barium in your blood and you can see where it goes. You see yourself, really who you are, in flashes. I saw myself in that way, and in ways that I never really cared to look before.”
While their marriage lasted just 18 months, he had known Landes, a folk singer from Kentucky, for a while before dating her.
“We were together a couple of years before we married,” he explains. “And then I’d known her almost a decade, you know, just as someone whose music I really admired.”
Although a couple of Beast’s songs hint at infidelity (on ‘Nightmares’ he sadly croons “I knew that you had been untrue/ I didn’t know how, but I knew”), he’s not specific about what actually happened between them. However, he’s not unaware of his own failings in the blissful domesticity department.
“I guess I have never been a super-easy person to live with,” he admits. “I’m an artist, I’m a writer, I’m driven. I have intense periods of mania, followed by really bad periods. On stage I can kind of escape that, or I can live it. It’s amazing and it always turns into something good.
“I’ve gotten to be so I can do that, but it’s never been easy. Certainly, when all of that stuff was going on, I know I was really struggling to find a way to deal with those problems. But really you can only be who you are, and you can intend, and you can try for, the best, and it still can fall short. That’s not her fault and it’s not mine. It’s just something that happened.”
He bursts out laughing when it’s put to him that perhaps it’s not really all that surprising that a marital union between two creative, ambitious and constantly touring musicians didn’t last the course.
“It’s funny, I thought it would be great!” he guffaws. “Dawn is like a fantastically talented person, and that kind of talent and joy, musically, is something that is so intoxicating. But maybe it just wasn’t right. Certainly it was a much darker period for those around me than I knew. My band and family and friends, definitely felt something that they were, in a lot of ways, kind enough to coast along the top of. They knew how much I was trying to make that thing work.”

Whatever efforts Josh made were ultimately in vain. The marriage ended with a phone call on November 1, 2010, while he was holed-up in a lonesome hotel room in Calgary, Alberta, coming towards the close of a tour to promote his last album (somewhat ironically titled So Runs The World Away).
“A bridge too far had been crossed,” he states. “I basically ended the thing in a way that really, you know, I had to do. And when I got back to New York, it was raining like hell and a good friend put me up and let me stay in his apartment in Brooklyn while he was away. And for the next six months or so, I just went wild.”
He shakes his head in bewilderment. Heartbreak is never an easy ride, no matter who you are or what the circumstances. While he admits to having entertained suicidal thoughts (“I kept away from bridges for a while”), he says it wasn’t all bad, finding himself youngish, free and single again.
“You know, there’s stuff about that time that was awesome,” he smiles. “Suddenly you’re free, and while you’re completely shamefaced and all your self-confidence has been taken away and you’re debased (laughs) and everything about it… it’s also very liberating to think that no matter what you do, there are things that you can’t stop happening.”
An artist to the core, he was writing during this period, too. Songs were flowing, or at least snatches of songs. But they weren’t fully-formed and he was in no fit mental shape to record them anyway.
“I started writing, but I was crazy,” he sighs. “I was manic, so I was not stopping. I wrote a weird book about a guy trying to cross the country in the 1880s. I don’t know if it’s any good, but it was not sane. But you know, my writing was mostly directed towards trying to write these songs, and trying to figure out how to make this experience into songs that had humanity in them, not just anger, if you know what I mean.”
When he wasn’t drinking himself into a stupor or feverishly writing songs, he passed his time soaking up some of the myriad cultural delights NYC has to offer.
“Yeah, I was going around town hammered and wearing a cowboy hat – I don’t even remember the hat, but somebody told me!. Like, that was not who I am, but certainly I guess at that time it certainly was. But there are things about that period that I look back on with a lot of fondness. There were these long days which I would spend going to museums or I’d go down and watch movies in the middle of the day. I’d go to, like, Buster Keaton movies. I saw a ton of them.”
At one point he even took himself down to New Orleans and considered some of the voodoo options available to jilted spouses and heartbroken lovers.
“Yeah, I flew to New Orleans and walked around the stores there and just didn’t have any agenda,” he recalls. “It was amazing. They’ve got all these powders and potions, and instructions to tell you what to do. One of the ones I thought was great, was how to get someone back – and it was this one that was, like, go to their house and wait by their bathroom window. And when they’re drawing a bath, wait until they go into the next room to take off their clothes, and then sneak in and pour this powder in their bath, and then sneak out again – and they’ll be yours forever! I thought, like –that is so fantastically optimistic!”
Somewhat stalker-like as well!
“Yeah, totally! Like, you could almost do it, but in a lot of ways that was the worst time, and in other ways it was like this moment when suddenly I saw who I was and I was like… (shakes head). It was a time of real clarity in my thinking about who I am and what I want in my life. I wouldn’t like to go back there.”

This wasn’t the first time Ritter had his heart broken. He smiles sheepishly when I remind him that his last long-term girlfriend broke-up with him on the very same day he first appeared on the cover of Hot Press.
“I actually think about that a lot,” he admits. “All heartbreak is tough. Whether you’re six years old on the playground or you’re married and getting a divorce. It’s a feeling of, like, ‘Why didn’t this happen, man, what is it with me?’
“As time has gone on, I’ve thought about that period a lot, especially in the light of this. Like, that girl is super-cool, she is an awesome person, and it wasn’t the right thing, and I just didn’t know it. I know it now. Like, she did it right. You know, when you’re going to break up with somebody, you’re always going to let them down, that’s just unavoidable, and feelings will always be hurt. But she’s classy. Yeah – wherever she is!”
Somewhere in the middle of all of his heartbreak over Dawn, Josh’s life took an unexpected swerve. Ritter’s debut novel, Bright’s Passage, was published by Random House in 2011. Through his publishers he met and fell head over heels in love with fellow author Haley Tanner.
“It’s the most incredible thing,” he says. “I met Haley; she’s a writer. Her first novel, Vaclav & Lena, is just a beautiful love story. It came out on Random House the same time as mine two years ago. She had been through a real difficult time. Her husband had died of cancer, and she was in the teeth of that. We met and really fell in love instantly.”
Tanner had met her husband two months after he learned that he had Stage 3 melanoma. He died in February 2011, after a nearly six-year battle with the disease.
“We saw each other for who we were because – we didn’t care. She wasn’t trying to impress me, for sure. I wasn’t trying to impress her. We saw something in each other and, you know, she turned my life around. She made me proud of who I am. She made me proud of the things I’ve done. She won’t accept it when I tiptoe around about how excited I am about things that happen. She wants to hear me play music, and she encourages me in my writing. She loves what I do, and I feel the same. All I really want to do is encourage somebody in what they do.”
As his broken heart gradually began to heal, Ritter suddenly realised that he had more new songs than ever before.
“Far from the grand, sweeping feel of the songs on So Runs The World Away, these new ones felt like rocks in the shoe, hard little nuggets of spite, remorse – or happiness.”
The Beast In Its Tracks was produced by long-time collaborator Sam Kassirer, and recorded with Josh Kaufman and members of the Royal City Band at the Great North Sound Society in Parsonsfield, Maine.
“The recording thing was interesting because it was so different to So Runs The World Away, where we would not only have a French horn, like, we would have a bunch of French horns. Like, it was big, and I think Sam and I both felt that these songs were not the type to support that production. Also I think Sam had a really good insight into my own state of mind, and probably realised that I just didn’t have the energy to put into making larger stuff. There were no large narrative songs in here. He also realised that I was very conflicted about what I was going to put on the record.”
He credits Kassirer with pulling the songs out of him.
“Sam doesn’t come from the Dylan school. He’s new to that whole thing. When I said I was nervous about recording – ‘I don’t really have anything’ – he was like, ‘come up and record everything that you have. No matter what it is’. And over the course of a weekend we recorded 38 or 40 things. Some of them whole songs, some of them just little bits. And in that way he stoked my fire.
“He watched that flame grow until it turned into something where I could see the scope of what I was writing about, and sort of see the cloud of this album, and the ideas and what it could be. He let me figure that out by just sitting there with a microphone and throwing everything onto it.”
Some songs came together almost immediately.
“There were some that we got from that very first whirlwind that are on the record like ‘Evil Eye’ and ‘A Certain Light’,” he recalls. “I wrote most of ‘A Certain Light’ in the studio because I had a verse. ‘Appleblossom Rag’ I recorded in the kitchen while some fellas were making dinner: it was really cool. So yeah, it’s so important when you have a producer who can see inside your head and get you to do stuff without you knowing it. That’s what he’s really good at.”
The album is tight and melodic throughout, deliberately sparse and rarely fancy. While his anger is evident on some of the songs, and he’s not above taking lyrical stabs at his ex-wife, it never really comes across in the music. There are no guitar-smashing moments or tortured wails of feedback. Occasionally joyous, most often the sound is mellow.
“The band was pared down for this, partially because there were some things that I felt could be done better by my friend Josh Kaufman, who I recorded a small EP with,” he explains. “Josh is a really versatile guitar player. He writes beautiful songs himself. He gave me a lot of confidence, and we moved fast, which he’s very comfortable doing. So a large portion of it just turned out to be my drummer, Liam Hurley, and Josh Kaufman and Sam and I, and that felt right.”
Beast isn’t just a break-up album, wailing about his heartbreak over Dawn. Some of the songs are about joyous new beginnings, and are lovingly addressed to Haley. However, the chronology is ambiguous at times, and it can be difficult to work out who he’s singing to.
“I felt initially that I wanted the album to be an actual arc from real anger to a place where I had reached a point of happiness,” he explains. “But as I looked at the songs they just didn’t fit together that way and I realised, it’s never that way. I never have a moment where I could say that I don’t care for that time I spent with her. There’s always good and bad stuff, so I felt like those songs would work just as well mixed together – the new love versus the old, and all that. The album felt more genuine that way – and it also felt like it would be less like a concept.”
Has Dawn heard the album?
He shrugs and shakes his head: “I don’t know, I don’t know.”
You haven’t spoken to her?
“No, I mean…” He pauses, choosing his words carefully. “I would hope if she heard it, she would hear the good stuff as well.”
It’s ultimately not a very bitter album…
“I would feel like I want to be honest about my own experiences and not try and kind of… Like, there’s no emotional bludgeoning. I don’t think that’s attractive and I don’t think it’s useful and, anyway, what’s the point? I just don’t want to be that guy. Also, it’s easy to write songs that are mean. I think it’s harder to write songs where there’s other, more complicated things going on.”

Late last year, soon after the album was finally mastered, Haley Tanner gave birth to Josh Ritter’s daughter, Beatrix. Needless to say, like most new fathers, he’s both overjoyed and overwhelmed. Has he changed any nappies yet?
“I have!” he laughs. “Actually they’re going to be joining me on tour. Haley is a novelist so she’s going to be with me on the road. Her and Beatrix on the road with me for the rest of the year. You know, the bus has a bed in the back and we’ve had a crib put in, so hopefully it will go well.”
Ritter’s own parents are both neuroscientists, and still living in his conservative hometown of Moscow, Idaho. Married for more than 40 years, he has previously said that “divorce isn’t in their vocabulary.” So what’s their take on all that’s happened?
He hesitates: “Initially when Dawn and I broke up, there was a real feeling, in the best way, from my friends and family of, like, ‘You guys need to work this out’. I knew that wasn’t the case, but I really, really appreciated that they thought that. That speaks really well of everybody that I was with at the time, that they were so concerned for both of us. But now they’ve this amazing new girl in their life. This person who watches over people and will fight to the death for anybody. Anybody who is my friend is her friend, you know? And they also have a granddaughter, and they’re just so thrilled about that.”
Only time will tell just how much fatherhood will change him. It’s already changed his perspective on his debut novel Bright’s Passage – a widely praised historical story about a journey undertaken by a recently bereaved father and his infant son, overseen by a smartass angel.
“Now I look at Bright’s Passage differently. I always thought it was about one thing, which was God and the age-old ‘why do bad things happen to good people?’ and ‘why do we have war if we have a benevolent God?’ All expressed through the kind of comedy team of the angel and Henry Bright. I thought that’s what it was about – but now I see that it was about fatherhood, and it’s about marriage, and it’s about being completely confused in the woods of all that, and a lot of being frightened of those things or being perplexed by them. That’s what I see in Bright’s Passage now.”
Sometimes you’re the very last person to realise what you’ve actually written…
“Yeah!” he enthuses. “That’s the best thing in the world, just how, like, weird that is.”
Is there a new book on the way?
“Yeah. It’s set in Northern Idaho in the ‘20s. It’s a big rowdy book with lots of terrible language.”
Another historical novel?
“Yeah,” he nods (his 2007 album was entitled The Historical Conquests Of…). “One of the things I like about history is that there’s this stuff that you can be interested in and there’s other stuff that you can leave completely out. I like it as a setting and plus I really love the research. I love tracking stuff down and then, even if I don’t use it, it’s fun to read. You get, like, one phrase and then you’re onto something.”
He does a lot of his fiction writing in airports or when he’s on the road.
“It’s great because, unlike song-writing where you have to get out the guitar and have it with you in a spot where there’s not a lot of people around, I can write on the plane or in the airport lounge or on the bus or wherever. If I have 15 minutes and my headphones, I can listen to some music and write for a while.”

It’s been three years since he last had an album out, and a lot has happened in the interim. This is one of his first promotional interviews, but there’s a lot more pencilled in including an important appearance on Letterman. Is he looking forward to hitting the road again?
“Well, I think I’m a performer,” he laughs. “I love the attention.”
But there’s a shyness to him, too…
“Being on stage is a chance for you to be who you really are. Or who you think you are. Or who you would like to be.”
Does he enjoy the promotional stuff? The TV appearances, the interviews, seeing his face on the side of buses?
“I don’t mind the pictures and the celebrity stuff,” he admits. “It’s cool, it’s fun. You can’t take it too seriously. I still think the biggest thing is: you don’t have to wait in lines. Like, if you’re Brad Pitt, you don’t have to wait in line at the airport. I don’t know what else there really is after that.”
That’s because Pitt’s fabulously wealthy. Is Josh fabulously wealthy?
“Well, I’m still waiting in line at the airport but, yeah, I like that stuff. The thing is, the very first time I ever saw my face on a bus I thought, ‘I know where that came from, I know what led up to that, I know there’s money for that and I know that I’m probably paying for it’. So it doesn’t matter quite as much.”
Is he worried that when Beatrix gets older and starts going to school, he won’t be able to spend so much time out on the road?
“We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it,” he shrugs. “Who knows how touring will change? I’m not worried. I know things will change, but things have changed on a dime in every way.”
Having stopped the beast in its tracks, for the moment at least, Josh Ritter is now quite philosophical about it all.
“One of the things that this whole experience has brought home to me is that you can make all the plans you want, and it doesn’t matter. You just have to take things as they come.”

The Beast In Its Tracks is out now.