Josh Ritter Readies Album No. 5

“If you love music and have a device on which to play it, you should listen to Josh Ritter…”

—Mary-Louise Parker in Esquire

On May 4, singer-songwriter Josh Ritter will release So Runs The World Away, his fifth album, on  Pytheas Recordings. The album is the followup to 2007’s critically acclaimed The Historical Conquests of Josh Ritter.

So Runs The World Away features Ritter’s longtime band mates, and was recorded over 15 months in Brooklyn and Maine.

Of the record, Ritter says, “I think of the songs on So Runs the World Away like pictures painted in oil on large canvasses. It’s a record preoccupied with the extremes of scale, from infinitesimal particles to the nearly incomprehensible distances between the head of a pin and a nebula. Where the songs felt large to me, I wanted them to be huge, both musically and lyrically. I wanted them to feel like the steel hulls of massive ships sliding by deeply from below. Where they were small, I concentrated in on the smallest details that I could and we tried to make the music and the words work together. I love writing, and this was the most fulfilling record I’ve yet written.”

Ritter will tour the country with his band in May. Here are the preliminary dates.

May 7 Philadelphia, PA Theater of Living Arts/ May 8 Washington, DC 9:30 Club/ May 10 Baltimore, MD Ram’s Head Live/ May 11 Durham, NC Carolina Theater/ May 15 Chicago, IL Vic Theatre/ May 19 & 20 New York, NY Town Hall