{"id":2944,"date":"2011-08-02T00:57:26","date_gmt":"2011-08-02T07:57:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/?p=2944"},"modified":"2011-08-02T01:19:20","modified_gmt":"2011-08-02T08:19:20","slug":"josh-ritter","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/2011\/08\/josh-ritter\/","title":{"rendered":"JOSH RITTER"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/h2>\n

JOSH RITTER<\/strong><\/h1>\n

He thought he was cursed\u2014until a mummy showed the way home<\/strong><\/h2>\n
\n

Josh Ritter albums have been fueled by one\u00a0dominant emotion\u2014and for the new So Runs the World Away<\/em>,\u00a0that emotion was terror. \u201cFor the first time in my life, I felt, \u2018I\u00a0don\u2019t belong here,\u2019\u201d Ritter says. \u201cI was thinking it was time for me to do something else, to move on to something other than\u00a0music. I felt like a phony, and that terrified me. It was an\u00a0awful feeling.\u201d<\/p>\n

Those are unlikely words from a man whose songwriting has been likened to that of Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen and Leonard Cohen. Beginning with his 1999 self-titled debut, the native of Moscow, Idaho, has recorded a series of albums steeped in vivid characters and literary allusions, shot through with a heartland vibe. Ironically, it was a song titled \u201cThe Curse\u201d that lifted Ritter\u2019s sense of gloom.<\/p>\n

\u201cI was lying in bed when that song came along,\u201d Ritter explains. \u201cAfter months of being unable to write anything I was happy with, the idea came to me for a story about a mummy and an archeologist who fall in love. That song gave me confidence. It became the door in the wall to the rest of the album.\u201d<\/p>\n

Another song that lent direction was \u201cFolk Bloodbath,\u201d a spooky, ambitious ballad that gathers a litany of famous folk-song characters and then kills them off. \u201cI love the characters in all those folk songs, whether it\u2019s Barbara Allen, or Delia, or Stagger Lee, or Louis Collins,\u201d Ritter says. \u201cI wanted them to all meet up. I was sort of like the puppet master, the kid who was going to crash everyone into everything. And this album, as a whole, is about that\u2014it\u2019s an album where bad stuff is going to happen to people. It wasn\u2019t always going to feel tragic, but it was going to feel like I was building things and then burning them down.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ritter opted to set \u201cFolk Bloodbath\u201d not to a standard folk guitar accompaniment, but in haunting sonic textures. Indeed, the bulk of the album features layered instrumentation that imbues the material with an epic, somber quality.<\/p>\n

\u201cI wanted something that felt like big ships in the night,\u201d Ritter explains. \u201cThose ships are amazingly quiet for how big they are.\u00a0I enjoy any music that makes me feel that way, whether it\u2019s\u00a0rock \u2019n\u2019 roll, Beethoven, Count Basie or Gillian Welch. I love the feeling that you\u2019re swimming along the top of something that\u2019s miles deep.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2013Russell Hall<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

JOSH RITTER He thought he was cursed\u2014until a mummy showed the way home Josh Ritter albums have been fueled by one\u00a0dominant emotion\u2014and for the new So Runs the World Away,\u00a0that emotion was terror. \u201cFor the first time in my life, I felt, \u2018I\u00a0don\u2019t belong here,\u2019\u201d Ritter says. \u201cI was thinking it was time for me […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[6],"tags":[2260,70,10156],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2944"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2944"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2944\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2975,"href":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2944\/revisions\/2975"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2944"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2944"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2944"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}