Strummer Of Discontent

A singer, a writer, an artist, works for years to find their own voice. But what if, after some measure of success and affirmation, they grow sick of the sound of that voice?

Five albums into his career, and approaching the age of Jesus, Idaho-born songwriter Josh Ritter thought his goose was cooked, al Dante. Midway through his allotted years, he came to himself with a start and realised that he had strayed from the True Way into the Dark Wood of Error. In February 2010, from the safety of retrospect, he would later write:
“After my last record, Historical Conquests, a feeling came stealing over me that I had a reckoning of sorts in store for myself. It was a new feeling, sinister in its emptiness, and it came falling across me unawares and inexplicably quickly, like a cold shadow, and then passed.”
And well it might have passed, for Ritter was, on the face of it, in a very good place. His records were selling well in his native US as well as his adopted Ireland. He was playing prestigious shows like his 2007 set at the 9.30 Club in Washington DC, broadcast on NPR and released as a live album. Newly married to Kentucky singer-songwriter Dawn Landes, he had achieved financial security and attracted praise from peers like Bruce Springsteen, Stephen King and Dennis Lehane. All was rosy in the garden. Until, that is, he began to write songs for his sixth album. Day after day he sought a theme, and sought it in vain. The circus animals had deserted.
“One day the shadow fell across me and it stayed there,” he wrote. “I wanted to write and I wanted to play, but nothing, nothing felt right. And more than that, nothing felt original. 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 of 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 the month and years into a lost decade. And when someone asked me in the future what had I done, would they ever believe how hard I had worked for nothing? The shadow hung and I held on, hated and hoped for a single verse of something, anything at all that I could love.”
“I used to talk really blithely about writing and work, and just did not believe in things like writer’s block,” Ritter says now, taking a break from a video shoot in The People’s Court studio set in New York. “I used to think you either write or you don’t, and it was a real strange feeling when I realised I was having trouble writing, the thing I based my life on. What a crazy place to be in. And I didn’t know why. It was an awful experience ‘cos I didn’t understand it, and I still don’t really.”
It certainly seems like a paradoxical situation. All the financial pressures of his apprenticeship years were gone. Ritter was free to do as he pleased. But options can be bewildering, and, as the old saw goes, pressure creates diamonds.
“You have to find out what makes you hungry, and work it,” Ritter maintains. “As things got more comfortable, I got to a point where I didn’t have to worry about rent every month, I didn’t have to worry about being able to pay my band, it wasn’t like I was scrounging, and that’s a really great thing, a place few musicians get to really. But I was also less worried about my reputation, and I think that’s the important thing about all this. When you’re 20 you want to prove to the world that you exist, every waking moment, and I guess I became less concerned with that. And I’m not as concerned with that anymore, but I am trying to realise how to stay fulfilled and hungry when you don’t have to worry about rent.”
Loss of confidence is kryptonite to any writer. The mind goes into a downward spiral, and fear of not being able to deliver the goods becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy. That loss of faith in one’s own abilities, Ritter reckons, was a serious psychological impediment.
“It’s true,” he admits, “I feel like I know when a song is done, and I also know when a song is a good one and it needs to keep on going. I really love those couple of weeks after a really good song comes along, you feel great. And I was just missing that feeling of hunger.”
Such is the loneliness of the long distance songwriter. But some of the most fascinating sections in Bob Dylan’s Chronicles describe how he lost his way – lost his voice – throughout the 1980s.
“Yeah, something like Empire Burlesque, he ends it with ‘Dark Eyes’ which is an amazing song, and feels just effortless, it’s this beautiful moment at the end of a record that feels so forced and so strained – he rhymes ‘Peter O’Toole’ with ‘swimming pool’! I don’t think I would trust a career that didn’t have some bad records come out of it. It’s about keeping that hunger. I don’t know that (the work) is any good, but I do know that I’m happiest when I think I’m writing well.”
So Ritter persevered, searching for the key to unlock the theme of what would become So Runs the World Away. The turning point, he says, came with the writing of a ghostly little waltz called ‘The Curse’ one insomniac New York night. Speaking of that moment today, he describes it almost as a moment of amazing grace.
“Up until writing that song I was just totally lost,” he confesses. “I had no idea about the sound of this record or the subject matter. I felt I’d written all I really had to say. I felt I’d been born with or given a certain number of things that I was gonna be able to talk about in my life. There are novelists and they write their novel and it’s beautiful and that’s it. And there was part of me that felt like, ‘These were my records, and I really, really, really want to write more, but I don’t feel like I have anything else.’ And it was a really strange feeling. I kept on battering against the wall every morning when I wasn’t on the road, I was really trying, and... nothing.
“And then I was lying in bed listening to the garbage trucks outside in New York, three in the morning, so many garbage trucks, way more than there needed to be, it felt like, and I just got the idea of this Mummy lying in a bed and being discovered and falling in love. The story just popped into my head, really crystalline, so I got up and I went to the bathroom and I just sort of sat on the edge of the tub and wrote down a bunch of ideas. I didn’t really play any music, I had a general idea that I wanted it to be a waltz, but that was it. And then I wrote it over the next week. It was a great feeling. I’m not exactly sure, but maybe it was a feeling of being in the wrong place, or lying awake at the bottom of something, the bottom of the pyramid.”
Ritter later wrote at some length about the song he now regards – ironically enough, given the title – as a talisman:
“I thought the story was fiendish and tense and sad and funny. I was proud of it. The pride I had in it propelled me forward in a mad rush. With each record there is a song which forms the palette by which the other songs may be painted. For So Runs the World Away, ‘The Curse’, my mummy song, was that song. I liked the idea of a Victorian archaeologist, and began looking at all kinds of late 19th and early 20th century science books. These led me, as most science histories lead, back farther, to Newton and his gravity, his wonder, his restless curiosity, and his bewildered religious questing. I found myself reading about gravity, the martian canals of Percival Lowell, the apocryphal hibernation of birds, polar exploration, the golden ratio.”
From that song, Ritter had found the analogue for a whole cosmology, a universe, out of which emerged an album rich in atmosphere and substance, and also a novel entitled Bright’s Passage, which will be published by The Dial Press next year. Securing a sense of place and identity, Ritter says, was crucial.
“A lot of times your ability to create anything is based on your idea of who you are,” he explains. “I always feel like I’m from Idaho, that’s who I am, I’m from this place that I’ve really staked as my own, a very particular region. But it’s also coming to terms with your beliefs in all kinds of things. As a guy that’s growing up, I’ve come to realise things about myself that I didn’t really know before. I love playing music and I love writing songs, but I don’t believe I’m a rock ‘n’ roller at heart. I’m a writer. There’s a lot of things that I thought I wanted that I don’t necessarily want. I want to write and I want keep playing music for people, but I don’t want to be alone and on the road.”
Fair enough. It’s only in rock ‘n’ roll that you’re expected to be at death’s door and still create vital work. Novelists and filmmakers are allowed, even expected, to cultivate a decent, quiet existence. Cue Flaubert’s famous quote about being regular and ordered in your life that you may be violent and original in the work.
“I think of that Lucinda Williams line, ‘Shouldn’t I have all of this?’” Josh says. “Why can’t I sit in the kitchen and work? More and more I’ve come to really respect somebody like Tom Waits, for reasons completely beside his music, which is that he’s figured out a way to enjoy the rewards of what he does and still have a good family life.”
And like Tom Waits, that sense of security has allowed Ritter’s work to become darker and bloodier, manifest in songs like ‘Rattling Locks’.
“One of the things I really love about this record is that it feels really tense, and it feels to me like bad stuff happens to a lot of the characters,” he continues. “What I love about Flannery O’Connor and Muriel Spark is the shit’s about to hit the fan. It hasn’t quite yet, but it is about to. And maybe I was more comfortable doing that with this one because I feel much happier. Once I got my teeth sunk in and realised what the record was going to be, it became a lot easier to find darker humour in the characters.”
True enough, a writer is usually better able to look that darkness in the face when they’re not dealing with it on a daily basis. And some of the most positive people are the ones who’ve suffered most. They see no romance in self-destruction.
“Yeah, totally. That is something I still find to be true. There is no joy in tortured art. I don’t see any need to go through it in music. You go through it in other ways.”
As it happens, So Runs The World Away was worth all the bloodshed, sweat and tears. Easily the equal of 2006’s The Animal Years (which was, until now, the barometer by which all Ritter’s other work was measured), it’s a silent movie of an album that is characterised by a pervasive sense of absence and melancholia, a metaphysical ache.
“I think the thing that really drew me the most, looking back, is the passage of time,” Ritter muses. “It just runs through your hands. You have it and then it goes, you can’t hold onto it, and that’s what feels really sad. Not crying sad, but bittersweet. It feels like there’s tears and saltwater all over the record. That no matter what happens, with writing or exploring or dying or falling in or out of love, it all happens to you by yourself, on your own, and that makes a relationship so much more important, ‘cos you have to really work to hold onto that kind of thing. And that’s what the landscapes are on the record, why they feel so big to me. I feel like the end of ‘Another New World’, after the singing is done, I just picture this ship lost in the ice, then pulling away from that ‘til it’s just a speck in the whiteness. It’s very lonesome.”
And this is the first record where Ritter has found a sonic landscape vivid and original enough to match his craftsmanship as a songwriter. It has a tangible sense of place, an empty fairground ambience on a par with Mercury Rev’s Deserters Songs. Much of the credit, Ritter says, goes to producer and keyboardist Sam Kassirer, who also midwifed 2007’s Historical Conquests album.
“It’s the first time I’ve worked with somebody twice,” he says. “Not because I didn’t love working with Brian Deck or Dave Odlum, but this was the first one where I felt, ‘Okay, we’re only scraping the surface here, and I feel there’s a lot more places we can go’. It’s just gotten better, and we’ve learned a real vocabulary of describing things. Sam will know what I’m looking for a lot faster now. Our starting point is way further along.”
Did he learn anything from the approbation of Bruce Springsteen or Stephen King or Dennis Lehane?
“Yeah. This sounds kinda crazy, but I think it’s a little bit like when you’re walking around, say, a departure lounge, and a baby smiles at you, so you feel like you exist. You can take for granted people in your life who know you really well – and know you better sometimes than you wish, all your faults – and it’s a momentary nod. But yeah, getting a compliment from Stephen King is a really cool thing, because I know what he’s gone through to get what he gets. The Shining, however he came up with that, it’s an amazing book. It’s a feeling like you’re on the right track, because here’s somebody telling you that something you’ve done has affected something they’ve done. With Dennis Lehane, when he told me that he was working on his book Any Given Day listening to Hello Starling, I was very honoured.
“But writing songs, that’s the little thing. There’s nothing more important than seeing how somebody has managed to – or not managed to – live their life so that they can continue to create. That’s the stuff that they can’t even possibly begin to put into words. And you can’t get in somebody’s way and ask them either. Bruce Springsteen came to the show a little while ago, and we were talking about books, and I was telling him about my book that I was working on. I told him that while I was writing So Runs the World Away I had this idea for a book and I wasn’t gonna shut it down, I was just gonna start, because everything was coming, finally.
“And he was saying, ‘Yeah, you’re still a songwriter, it’s not like a book is gonna be any easier, every line is still the line of a song.’ And I just loved that, it made me feel like I was okay for obsessing over every single word. It’s just nice to see people work hard. But it should look effortless. It shouldn’t feel put-on. I don’t ever want to feel like somebody was thinking. But there’s so much work that goes into that.”
No kidding. Yeats put it best in ‘Adam’s Curse’: “A line will take us hours maybe/Yet if it does not seem a moment’s thought/Our stitching and unstitching has been naught.”
“This was something I knew nothing about,” Ritter confesses. “I love reading novels but I’ve never written one. Whereas with the songs I feel like I’m putting on suits I’ve made myself. The book feels like I’m walking down the street naked. Writing a longer form thing allows people to see what you’re thinking about and what your preoccupations are in a way that’s much more exposing in a song, where you can obfuscate.
“But writing So Runs the World Away was the big change. That was the one that made me feel, ‘I’ve been as desolate as I can be in my writing. I’ve been to absolute zero, and I found a way out of it.’ And it was just a matter of pushing, and not saying, ‘I’m washed up’. And the way to do that is to keep writing. Just believing in myself. And that was the thing that made me realise I’m not gonna just stop. I’m not gonna become someone who sings just medleys. I’m not gonna be that guy. I’m not gonna settle for my best work being behind me.”