Josh Ritter

New York, N.Y. Nov. 18, 2004

“The words on the bone of song were close and small / And though their tongues were dead I found I knew them all”

On the strength of his third release, Hello Starling, Ritter is in town for a Paste ensemble-cover shoot, along with three other up-and-comers—Kathleen Edwards, Sondre Lerche and Erin McKeown. While the twentysomething artists take turns enduring the rigors of hair-and-make-up in our Chinatown hotel suite, they quickly strike up friendships. Ritter will later tour with Edwards in her native Canada before taking her on tour in Ireland, where he’s picked up quite a following since we last met. Glen Hansard (of Irish rockers The Frames) had invited Ritter to join his group on a tour of the Emerald Isle after catching Ritter’s set at a Boston club during the spring of 2002. “I saw him play at Kendall Café,” remembers Hansard, who was in town on a solo tour. “He wasn’t very good on the guitar, and you could tell he was kind of winging it a bit—he was the classic young guy with a few gems, but with something wild in that. He had this really raw thing. It was one of those times where you look at someone onstage and go, ‘I want to hang out with him. I don’t know what it is, but I like this guy.’ I got chattin’ with him after his performance and said, ‘If you come to Dublin, you can open up for me.’ And he seizes the opportunity immediately—he’s like, ‘When?’ So I set it up and he came over.

“Live, he’s this very charming guy, and he’s really warm. And his lyrics are f—ing amazing. He had this very raw thing, where his rhythm playing is really off. It’s kind of like listening to early Dylan or something where everything didn’t quite add up, but you felt really good listening to him. So he came over and opened for me on a tour, then opened up for The Frames on the tour, and after about six months, he was playing the same size venues that we were—on his own. And he was blown away by it. And the confidence he got from playing his own headliners in Dublin in front of 1,000 people really [translated] everywhere else.”

“Stuff took off pretty quickly,” says Ritter. “The first time I played [Dublin club] Whelan’s on my own, I had like 60 people, and it was the only place I was playing that I could get shows. Then I started playing everywhere, playing these little venues. And crowds grew from like 60 to 100, to like 500, to 3,500 or 4,000 in the space of four years.”

It wasn’t long before Ritter’s success in Ireland grabbed the attention of U.S. record labels. A few months after he appeared on the cover of Paste, I was back in New York visiting labels, and two people at different majors gushed excitedly about how they were working on signing him. A bidding war ensued, but Ritter took his time, finally deciding on V2. “It was a whole year of friendship-building,” remembers Ritter’s manager Darius Zelkha. “And our whole stance towards V2 was, ‘You don’t have an artist like this, and we’re fans, and if we’re lucky enough to be able to work with [V2], then great.’ They did the whole pursuit of Josh, but then it just turned into a friendship.”

Chicago, Ill. April 27, 2005

“We were dancing to a song that I heard / Your face was simple and your hands were naked / I was singing without knowing the words”

It’s a chilly spring day, but nowhere near chilly enough to stop the sausage-scarfing, Old Style-beer-guzzling bleacher bums at Wrigley Field. The Cubbies are playing the Reds, and smack in the middle of the raucous die-hard locals—who tossed back Felipe Lopez’s first career home run and cheered loudest when a seagull shat upon some unsuspecting fan’s head—I sit next to Ritter who, until last year, had never been to a baseball game. “We were more into wrestling than baseball growing up,” he explains.

Earlier this morning, I flew up to Chicago to visit Ritter and producer Brian Deck at his Clava Studio where tracks for The Animal Years are being mixed. The pair had just come back from a recording session at Bear Creek—a barn converted into a studio far outside Seattle—where a lot of grunge records were made (Ritter even found Dave Grohl’s old Foo Fighters ring amongst the floor planks). “The sounds out there were bizarre,” says Deck, who’s also produced records by Modest Mouse and Iron & Wine. “Making records at midnight was like—‘the woodspeople are closing in. Close all the doors. Lock in the noise.’”

With a fulltime band in tow—Sam Kassirer on keyboards, Zack Hickman on bass and assorted strings, and Dave Hingerty on drums—Ritter brought another great set of folk-rock songs and let Deck lead everyone down a more experimental path, adding flourishes of keyboards, strings and percussion. The result is Ritter’s most fully realized album yet—and a deviation from the path some labels previously courting him were expecting. “A lot of those people I talked to seemed to think that I had to limit myself to whoever produced John Mayer. That’s just… no way. A lot of [producers] wanted to do a soul record, like a blue-eyed soul record. And that’s just ridiculous. These songs obviously aren’t going to lend themselves to that. I want to make a record that feels like—if Mark Twain had written songs, what would he write about? America, when he was an old man, was like America is today, in so many ways. I thought he’d be an interesting person to think about as I was writing the record. I told that to Brian Deck, and he was the only person that seemed to get it and didn’t seem to bat an eye. When I used non-musical descriptors for what I wanted, he always went for the mood.”