Josh Ritter

Jan. 12, 2006 Moscow, Idaho

“The only ghost I’m haunted by / I hear her howling down below / Idaho oh Idaho”

Josh Ritter is hard to keep up with. Despite my long legs, he scampers up a steep embankment while I’m left grasping at flimsy reeds. In my defense, Ritter is only two days from running his first marathon—a fundraiser for Doctors Without Borders. But this offers little comfort as his Jack Russell terrier, Punkin, bounces circles around me like a rabbit shot full of amphetamines. We’re in the woods behind Ritter’s parents’ house, a dozen or so miles outside Moscow, Idaho, and the land is completely untamed. A few minutes earlier, down by the creek, we spotted a bald eagle flying overhead; it landed, shrieking, in the upper branches of a tree taller than any building within 100 miles. The family’s bull terrier, Curley, is in the habit of snacking on young birds living in nests along the trail embankment. And Punkin recently came home bleeding from the throat, luckier than his predecessor, Jiggs, who fell victim to the local coyotes. “That was the first time I heard my dad sound like George Bush,” the young singer/songwriter remembers. “He said, ‘Well, I guess we’re going to have to go shoot ’em. Teach ’em that there are lines you don’t cross.’”

With his curly mop, scraggly beard, sweater and secondhand corduroy jacket, Ritter looks more like a college professor than either of his parents, who both teach neuroscience at Washington State University, just across the state line. Though he left Idaho after high school, he’s at home in the woods of the Northwest, where he first began writing songs. He points out the different types of trees—enormous cedars, cottonwoods, ponderosas, willows and Douglas firs. Further up the mountain from Ritter’s childhood home, his best friend Rocky Weitz’s family owns hundreds of acres. “I could disappear into those woods for hours,” Ritter says. “Just take a book and spend the day by myself.”

Ritter’s family lived near the last bus stop for Moscow High School. Any further and Josh would’ve gone to Potlatch, the meanest town Johnny Cash says he ever played, according to a legend locals retell with great pride. “Those were the kids,” Ritter says, “you didn’t want to wrestle.”

Ritter returned home last fall after signing a record deal with V2 for his fourth album, The Animal Years. Though his first three haven’t received enormous attention in the U.S., he’s become something of a star in Ireland, where he even has his own tribute band, Sleepy Hollow. Between healthy CD and ticket sales abroad and his new contract at home, Ritter was able to buy a house in Moscow last fall, where he’s resting before a massive PR-and-touring blitz to support the new album. For Ritter, buying a home with money made playing music still feels surreal. Only a few years ago, he was just one of thousands of singer/songwriters playing open-mic nights in front of tiny audiences, and dreaming of doing it for a living.

Feb. 7, 2003 Nashville, Tenn.

“I’m singing for the love of it / Mercy on the man who sings to be adored”

Josh Ritter is opening for Amy Rigby at the end of a long hallway in a hotel in Nashville. The 20 or so folks awkwardly lining the walls constitute a decent crowd for Folk Alliance—a convention that turns every suite, many single rooms and even some elevators into concert venues. Ritter’s showcase is a way for Jim Olsen (of Boston-based indie label Signature Sounds) to show off his latest discovery to a handful of music execs. I’ve already been won over by Ritter’s sophomore effort Golden Age of Radio and, more particularly, the song “Harrisburg,” a driving folk ballad full of heaven, hell and trains—themes that’ll creep throughout his next two albums. Even here in these awkward environs, one of the most striking things about Ritter when he performs is how much fun it seems he’s having. From Kurt Cobain to Elliott Smith, much of the best rock ’n’ roll has come from tortured artists, but Ritter’s music, like his attitude, is filled with optimism.

“I can have hard days or bad days, but I know what I’m supposed to do. I have a job that makes me feel like I’m doing something important. When I’m home, it’s just pure bliss to sit there with instant coffee in my kitchen and work on a song. And when I write a song, I think, ‘Oh my gosh—I could be doing this for at least 40 more years. There’s just so much in my life that I feel lucky and grateful for.” Olsen discovered the elusive songwriter while Ritter was playing the Boston open-mic circuit. The Oberlin College grad had continued east to Providence, R.I., working an odd array of jobs during the day and playing venues like Kendall Café and Club Passim at night. “I took it really seriously, as a job,” he says. “You get your one song, and everybody’s there, and everybody wants to play. It’s like going from zero to 60 and seeing how fast you can do it.” Ritter already had a self-titled CD under his belt that he recorded while still in college, though he’d left high school on the same trajectory as his parents, headed for a career in neuroscience. “My parents loved it, so I thought I’d love it. I had a science teacher, who after a test said maybe science wasn’t for me. I was so mad at the time, but now I think that if it hadn’t been for him, I might have stayed with science. I could have probably gotten a job somewhere as a neuroscientist, but I would’ve been a bad neuroscientist. “[Playing music] made me happy, but I didn’t know if I was going to make any kind of living at it. I had no idea how to do it, but I knew I wasn’t going to be happy until I tried. [So] I created my own major—‘American history through narrative folk music.’ I made it ‘narrative’ folk music so they couldn’t make me take any more theory. It was great. I got to go to Scotland and study the roots of Appalachian folk.”

Oberlin was filled with bands, but Ritter never formed his own, believing his lack of rhythm a detriment. Instead, he began soaking up as much new music as he could. “When you discover music everything else takes a backseat,” he says. “I think the later you discover it, the more you feel you have to catch up. Every new person I discovered—it’s like, ‘Whoa! Townes Van Zandt and Tom Waits!” The same girl gave me both those CDs in the same night. Every time you hear something new, you can’t even believe it. I was obsessing about The Band or Silver Jews or Lucinda Williams, all these people—Pavement, the Pixies, Magnetic Fields.” Through college Ritter kept writing his own songs. But the day before he was supposed to record his first album, his girlfriend of three years broke up with him—and started dating the guy who’d volunteered to record it. “I hated that guy and sang those songs about her through the glass to him. They’re still together. I’ve had a few girlfriends since then, but it’s tough when you’re touring. I always liked touring more than dating those girls.”