Josh & Go

A friend of mine described Josh Ritter as “a big Labrador puppy” upon seeing the hugely talented Idaho boy beaming from the stage at Lisdoonvarna this year. And it’s a brilliant, if a little rough around the edges, description of the man.

Josh is, quite simply, the nicest man in the music business and an absolute pleasure to interview: friendly, polite, enthusiastic, articulate, funny and honest. However, all this would mean little if the boy Ritter didn’t write such incredible tunes. His fantastic new album, Hello Starling, more than delivers on the early promise of his eponymous 1999 debut and the record that introduced him to Ireland, Golden Age Of Radio. As I mentioned in my hotpress review, it’s a massive leap forward for a man who now seems a lot more confident as a songwriter.
“I guess,” he muses, although he doesn’t seem too sure. “The amazing thing about Golden Age Of Radio is that I made it with no real expectations involved. I was selling it out of the back of my car and at open mic nights. It was amazing how far that record took me. I got to meet so many people and travel all over as a result of that.
“At the same time, I feel like I’ve stuck to some of the same rules [with Hello Starling]. I try not to write songs that are autobiographical about problems and things like that. I love writing songs that I feel apply to me but aren’t exclusive to me. So I think, that where Golden Age is an introverted record, I feel that I’m looking up in Hello Starling.”
This theme of universality is evident on tracks like ‘Kathleen’, where Josh is waiting around all night at a party just to drive the object of his affections home, even though she has been lapping up the attention of other potential suitors all night. Know the feeling, readers?
“The reason why I love songwriting and performing so much is the feeling that maybe that’s me the way I’d like me to be,” Josh smiles. “It’s a chance to convince yourself that you’re not pretty awkward around people. You can have it all planned out: all the words are perfect, everything you’d say. I guess the confidence comes in there, whereas it might disappear in a real situation.”
The aforementioned ‘Kathleen’ has long been a favourite at Ritter’s shows, as has the plaintive ‘Rainslicker’, both of which were written on the road. He obviously doesn’t suffer from writer’s block while touring then.
“When I write, I seem to pour a whole bunch of different things into my head and stuff comes out at different times,” he recalls. “I remember writing ‘Bad Actress’ and ‘You Don’t Make It Easy Babe’ one morning I woke up in Dublin after coming over on a flight, waking up at four in the morning with jetlag.
“I don’t think being on the road has an impact on whether I can write or not but the experiences and things you get on the road, the books you read during the long hours of travelling, the music you listen to, it all filters in there. I actually think it’s really good because when you’re travelling between places, there isn’t much to do except pour stuff into your head,” he laughs, “in so many ways.”
It’s not just reviewers who have picked up on the quality of Josh’s songwriting. One of the album’s standouts, ‘Wings’, has been covered by Joan Baez on her latest album. Quite a coup for the young songwriter.
“It’s such a huge compliment from her,” he gushes. ”Her record has a Gillian Welch song and one from Steve Earle, and it’s just amazing to find my name there. She really understood the song. She talked about how it’s a Canadian border ballad, which is cool, because there is so much imagery in the South-West, with the southern border ballad, with bands like Calexico, and I like the fact that there’s a good Idaho-Canadian border ballad out there.”
Another of Josh’s compositions made its way onto the soundtrack to the hit TV series Six Feet Under, a good calling card for him, particularly in the US.
“When we were making Hello Starling, we came over here to Dublin for about four days before we went to France to record. I was up in the hotel room when they called and I couldn’t believe it. My family on my dad’s side have been undertakers for a couple of hundred years, so that was big news in the Ritter family,” he laughs. “And it really helped to finance the record and make it possible. It was a real windfall and a great compliment too.”
Earlier this year, Ritter was presented with the Sammy Conn Award, a songwriting gong which is given in honour of the famous songsmith, whose writing credits include some of Sinatra’s best-known songs.
“The awards ceremony was at the Beverly Hilton, which really was a case of seeing how the other half lives over there,” he grins. “I saw somebody actually drink wheatgrass juice, which was a pretty cool thing. And I think I frightened Elvis Costello a bit.”
Tell me more…
“He frightened me: he was sneaking up on me and I threatened him with a pencil,” Ritter laughs. “That’s the last time he’ll try that.”
Being lauded by critics and rewarded by his peers hasn’t gone to Ritter’s head, however. Refreshingly honest (he confesses to a sleepless night before the new album’s release), and incredibly sincere, he’s less concerned with being a ‘cool’ songwriter than just doing what he has to do, which is write songs.
“The thing that scares me is that I don’t want to be part of a fad,” he confesses. “I don’t want Hello Starling to be the breakthrough record. I don’t want it to be something where you can be picked out as being a certain specific style. There is some great music being made at the moment but I don’t want to be a thing of the moment. I want it to be something that you can listen to in 30 years, like the way you can listen to Blood On The Tracks, or New Skin For the Old Ceremony: those are timeless records. I’d rather have a beautiful slow build of people that hear it than to have something that can’t be sustained. Everything seems so turbo-charged.”
Where Golden Age was structurally and even thematically quite similar, Hello Starling has a lot of variation in terms of both style and content, from the relatively simple ‘Bright Smile’ to the vaulting ambition of ‘Bone Of Song’. Was that deliberate?
“It’s so early in my writing – I wanna be doing this for years and years. This feels like just the beginning and that’s one of the great things about this record,” he admits. “I’m learning what I like to do in the studio, how I want to work and what kind of records I want to make. A lot of that was a case of trying things out as I was going. I feel like this album has a whole bunch of moods and I don’t have any shame in the fact that I’m trying things out. I just want to make good songs and get them down right. I don’t want pretence.
“I think it’s important to have an album that has songs that are a little more long-lasting, that have a different ambition to a short, simple song,” he continues. “I don’t think it’s necessarily a better song but it has something else, a different engine, that will keep it going.”
Hello Starling was recorded in France’s Black Box studios with former Frames axeman and celebrated knob-twiddler Dave Odlum at the controls. “He’s a good ‘no man’. He wouldn’t be bashful about telling me what he thought and what he wanted,” Ritter acknowledges. “He’s famed for working harder than anybody else and the hours we kept were from 12 noon until six in the morning, then we’d have about two and a half hours off for dinner and start working again at nine. Dave was always the last one to bed and he never flagged. We recorded in seven days, mixed in another seven.”
In classic last-minute mythology, Odlum ended up passing the finished mixes to Josh through the window of a taxi, as they rushed from the studio to catch a plane back to the US. While this might sound like a pressure cooker environment, it was in fact a hugely enjoyable experience for all involved.
“There were times when I kicked everybody out of the studio except Dave Odlum and played a whole bunch of songs. ‘You Don’t Make It Easy Babe’, ‘Wings’ and ‘Bone Of Song’ were all done at three o’clock in the morning in the middle of nowhere. It was great,” he remembers. “There was a stand of bamboo and one warm night, millions of frogs came out on the ground all around the studio and it suddenly became this tropical place. We dimmed the lights, everybody else left and there was just this one microphone in the studio. It was such a really calm thing.
“Two weeks in Black Box felt like a huge luxury because I’d been on the road for eight months, so just hanging out and playing music was easily the best money I’ve ever spent,” he notes. “Being able to take my band to France for two weeks was like an early Christmas present for all of us.”
At the time of this interview, Josh was unaware that Hello Starling was going to make such a big impact on the Irish charts, where it entered at Number 2. He shouldn’t be surprised, though. The Idaho singer has enjoyed a unique relationship with Irish audiences from the very beginning, when he supported The Frames on a national tour.
“From that moment, I thought this was like paradise and it’s never really changed. I’ve never had an experience here where I felt that this is a place that does not like music,” he says sincerely. “Nobody looks at you like you’re anything different than just a person but they also appreciate what you’re doing. That doesn’t just extend to musicians: it seems to extend to lots of things. It’s probably an overly romantic viewpoint, but it is also something I really value about playing here. It’s a feeling you want to foster wherever you go, and that’s a great thing.”
Josh’s Irish fans will be able to savour that unique atmosphere when he returns to these shores for an Irish tour, this time with a full band.
“By about week three of a tour, if you’re travelling on your own, you’re an animal at that point. The great thing about travelling with a band is that you’re all animals. It’s kind of a pack thing and it’s great. So I’m thrilled to be touring with them.”
Considering how much his profile and popularity has grown in the last couple of years, I wondered if Josh is concerned that it might become something he can’t control, that it will be taken out of his hands.
“I don’t know,” he shrugs. “There are good things about that too. There is a Nebraska for every Born In The USA. That is where your courage gets called to the test. It’s easy to make records when you don’t feel a huge amount of pressure to do something specific. To make something like Neil Young’s, Harvest, which was the best-selling record of 1972, and then to go out and do something completely different, I find that really attractive.
“I’m now able to make a living songwriting and if I can do that for 30 years, there’s going to be amazing opportunities to make so many records. That’s the long-term view. If it gets away from me, I’m not sure if I’ll know when that happens but I think you have to realise it and reign it in somehow.”
What then are Josh’s hopes for Hello Starling?
“I think it’s a matter of real perspective,” he ponders. “When I was writing songs and travelling around to shows where nobody was there, when I was working in a lumber yard, I never thought I would come this far. I hope people like the songs, because that allows me to do more. I’ll be doing it anyway but it’s great to take that support and turn it into more music. But my hopes have already been fulfilled, really. This is like a dream.” Josh Ritter plays Spirit Store, Dundalk (October 11); Auntie Annie’s , Belfast (12); An Grianan, Letterkenny (13); Red Room, Limerick (14); Town Hall Theatre, Galway (16); Vicar Street, Dublin (17) and Everyman Palace Theatre, Cork (19)