Published at 9:20 AM on October 2, 2007

By Austin L. Ray

Josh Ritter - 10/1/07 - An Introduction

Dear Diary

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Hey Everyone!

It’s 10 p.m., we’re ensconced in a hotel in Medford, Massachusetts and we’ve just gotten back from kicking these songs around a final time before we head out on the road tomorrow, and the Rittorical conquests begin.  I’ve got Alfred Deller on and he’s singing a beautiful song called “Peg-a-Ramsay.” The guy’s voice could break your heart.  Right now it’s about as quiet as it’s going to be for the next five weeks and I am fast falling asleep.

I first toured around the country in 2003 when my album, Hello Starling, was released.  My band and I toured in the Green Machine, a sixteen passenger van half filled with gear and half filled with guys.  We slept six to a room.  Seriously.  We slept six to a room, and before this little autobiography drifts into the “Back in the day, we were so poor we couldn’t even afford a last name” territory, I’ll just say that I have been around the country many times and I’m excited to be documenting this trip for Paste because there are a lot of places I want people to see.

I remember reading Johnny Cash saying that he could pinpoint where he was in the country within 10 miles just by looking out the window of his tour bus at any given moment.  I didn’t used to believe him, but after just four years on the interstates, state highways and occasional back roads I’ve learned how to pick out a few places myself.  The muggy pull of air thick with oxygen that is cornfields in Nebraska in summer, the steep and curvy roads that mix with the smell of cloud and pine that is Snoqualmie Pass headed down into Seattle.  There is a stretch of Indiana road that is so straight even your hair loses its curl until it’s snarled up again in the traffic of Gary, Indiana at the gates of Chicago.

I know Bozeman, Montana and Dallas, Texas by their respective skylines.  The sky scrapers of Dallas seem like those laboratory-grown crystals that you can buy on late night shopping programs; smoked and ambitious and fragile.  Bozeman, which I have only ever seen in the early morning twilight, is built low to the ground and owns what I consider to be the nation’s most beautiful collection of small town movie marquees.  The town, which we always stop in for breakfast on the long dead-head drive from Minnesota to Seattle, is permanently wrapped up in the smell of bacon for me, though we once bought perfume on the street here from a British girl trying to get gas money for the trip to Taos, New Mexico at 7:30 in the morning.

I think it’s a fairly universal experience finding the familiar rendered new again by witnessing through someone else’s eyes.  A friend of mine from Ireland once visited me in my hometown of Moscow, Idaho.  She couldn’t believe the gun selection at Tri-State (“Idaho’s Most Interesting Store”), the number of Christian denominational coffeehouses, and our strange reliance on the huckleberry.  Seeing it through her eyes made me appreciate my town in a deeper way.

This tour is a big one for me.  It’s my first time having a tour bus in the States, the shows are the biggest of my career, and I have a kick-ass new record to play with my band and friends.  The country is huge and it’s sewn together by roads that we’ll be traveling by night and day over the next month and a half, playing radio shows, eating breakfast, running, reading, carousing all hours and most of all playing music late into the night.  In his essay “Walking,” which accompanies me on the road this trip, Thoreau dissects one of the possible meanings for the word “saunter” as, “sans terre, without land or home, which, therefore, in the good sense, will mean, having no particular home, but equally at home everywhere.”

For the next five weeks my band and I will have no particular home and yet try our best to be at home everywhere.  It’s an experience well worth the having, and folks, I hope you can share in it as we go sauntering along.

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