Josh Ritter: Two Different Lenses

The narrators that Josh Ritter has created for his new album, Fever Breaks, often find themselves stranded in an unwelcoming wilderness. On the first track, “Ground Don’t Want Me,” a loner outlaw rides his horse through the Ozarks and comes upon a deserted cemetery filled with the men he has killed. He finds he envies them, sleeping beneath the violets, so peaceful and loved. 

In “Losing Battles,” the same character drifts “down to Tennessee,” falls in love with “a girl of silver,” tries to settle down but it doesn’t take. In “Old Black Magic,” the storyteller wakes up in the middle of the night, sobbing, convinced that the black “wings of a crow” shadow his every hope. In “A New Man,” the protagonist is “a man without a country or a friend” wrapped “in the rain and whipping wind.” In the “Torch Committee,” the chairman of a Kafkaesque panel of judges pressures a bewildered man in chains to inform on his family and friends.

“It’s not something I chose to write about,” Ritter says, “but as I listen to the songs, I hear a feeling of disconnection and a longing to be connected. This record is the most influenced by external events since The Animal Years, which I wrote back in 2006, when we were deep in the Bush presidency. Once again, I’m dealing with the trauma of the choices we have made as a country. It’s a kind of exorcism, a way to deal with my anger, not as a way to find answers but to find comfort in asking the questions.” 

Only one song, “All Some Kind Of Dream,” makes an explicit reference to current events: in this case, an immigration policy that puts “children in holding pens.” The other tracks are nightmarish fables that could have taken place in another place in another century but which nonetheless reflect the violence and unease of our own time. And that pervasive anxiety is reinforced by the album’s producer, Jason Isbell, who leads his band, the 400 Unit, behind Ritter, sometimes as unsettling rock and roll, sometimes as spooky folk-rock.

It’s as if Ritter’s latest compositions were new versions of the Child Ballads, those ancient British folk songs of death and betrayal, such as “Barbara Allen” and “Matty Groves.” The most explicit example is “Silverblade,” a song that first appeared on Joan Baez’s 2018 album, Whistle Down The Wind. When his career was first getting into gear in 2003, Ritter toured the world as Baez’s opening act. 

“She was fantastic to me, made me feel like I had something worth saying,” says Ritter, now 42. “A few years ago, I got a note from her that said, ‘I’m working on a record that’s going to be my last record. If you have songs on tap, turn on the tap.’ Any chance to write for a voice so epic is not a chance to be missed. I went back to her earliest records, and the song that leapt out at me was the old English ballad ‘Silver Dagger.’ I wanted to write a bookend to that, so I wrote about a girl who was raped and then murders the man with the same silver blade he had used against her.”

Ritter takes on the role of the female narrator in his version, sounding more like an instrument of fate than Baez’s feisty avenger. As the story moves implacably from seduction to rape to murder, Ritter’s flattened tenor and fingerpicking guitar are joined only by Isbell’s spare electric-guitar fills and Amanda Shires’ folk-noir fiddle. This creates an unnerving atmosphere that suffuses the entire record.

“I went away to school to study in Scotland,” he remembers, “and heard tons and tons of the Child Ballads, that weird, violent stuff, that pre-rock-and-roll music that turned into rock and roll. I grabbed hold of that rope, and I still think about that stuff a lot. It’s really Biblical writing; it feels like the Bronze Age, a different set of rules than we have now. My new songs are written about such large topics that they have an affinity with those old songs. Even though they’re new songs, they feel like songs from the past.”

Terrible things happen to the characters in these songs. They’re abandoned by lovers, abandoned by friends, jailed by authorities, raped by aristocrats, left out in the rain, stalked by ghosts and chased by tornadoes. But songwriters grow attached to their characters and want to take care of them, as if they were children. That’s an impulse that Ritter tried to resist.

“You have to let those terrible things happen,” he insists, “even if that means ignoring your own best wishes for the characters. You don’t want to harm your own creations, but you have to let them go through it. In the end, words are free; you can be as ruthless and wild as you want.”

Ritter’s character may be “Losing Battles,” as one song puts it, but maybe they’re winning the war. The album’s songs are sequenced so the listener wanders with the characters through the first eight songs, a desolate landscape scorched by pillaging. Families are sundered at the border; outlaws are refused at graveyard gates, and the “Old Black Magic” of depression and pessimism seems to darken the skies. But finally, having crossed this terrible frontier, the listener enters a sunnier land where “A New Man” finds “green hills … waving in abandon,” where “you won’t walk among the dead a moment longer,” where you will find the “Blazing Highway Home.”

“We see a lot of bad characters right now,” he adds. “Sometimes it seems as if the bad guys are winning, and your belief in cosmic justice starts to fail. I’m not writing to get some revenge, but just to describe that loss of optimism. I know I’m not the only one feeling it. I haven’t lost it yet; I believe we’re going through a difficult growing process, and I’m sure other people feel that. Describing that is the job I’ve taken on.”

Describing is not the same as explaining, he emphasizes. The artist’s role is not to solve our problems for us but to clarify those challenges so we can find our own way through them. If we feel estranged from our government or our ex-lovers, the artist’s job is not to relieve that alienation but to cast new light on it — even if that means transplanting the situation to 17^th century England, the 19^th century Ozarks or early-20^th century Prague. 

“When I hear an artist describe an important problem we’re going through, that’s enough,” Ritter says. “I don’t need them to provide the answer. Answers aren’t that interesting. Anyone can see that the answers don’t stop the questions from gnawing at us. That’s why religion hasn’t been satisfying to me. If someone really had the answers, we’d all give a sigh of relief. If a diet book really worked, there’d only be one diet book.”

By early 2018, Ritter had 16 or 17 songs he liked, including some leftovers from 2017’s Gathering, and he could tell that more were on the way. It was time to record them, but how? He could go back into the studio with the Royal City Band, his beloved road ensemble that has backed him on most of his albums. But somehow that didn’t seem right.

“I’ve made records for the past 20 years with the same personnel,” Ritter explains, “people I love and respect. Gathering, which I produced and recorded with the Royal City Band and Trina Shoemaker, turned out fantastic, but I knew I couldn’t go back and do the same thing again. With this record, I wanted something different, because you don’t want to sacrifice artistic wildness for security. I needed an infusion of new ideas for the songs. I love the wild places my band takes me, but I needed to be even less sure of myself, even more nervous. I wanted to go into a recording session not knowing what was going to happen.”

Ritter and Isbell (who declined repeated requests to talk about the collaboration) have long admired each other as songwriters. “We’re not under water yet,” Isbell says in the album’s liner notes, “but we are stuck on the rocks. Josh’s music is a perfect document of these times.” “Jason’s stories jump out at you as if they’d been written by an invisible hand,” Ritter says during our conversation, “as if they’d existed without being written.” And a big tour together in 2016 made them equally comfortable as friends.

“As you get older,” Ritter points out, “it’s rarer and rarer to make friends with someone who does the same thing you do. It helps that you can talk about that little club in Cleveland you both played or about what you do when an amp conks out on stage. I didn’t know it would be so great to work with an artist who’s doing something similar from a different background, but it was.”

Before they went into the studio, Isbell and his wife Amanda Shires invited Ritter down to their home in Nashville. The days were spent getting to know each other — walking down to the river to hunt for crawdads, eating pie at the local diner. In the evenings, though, the three would sit out on the back porch as Ritter played his new songs.

“They had lots of ideas right away,” Ritter recalls. “They kept saying, ‘This is good, but maybe you take it further.’ They pushed me to continue working on the songs. So I took the songs home and wrote and wrote and pushed them further. I haven’t always been open to other people’s ideas in my songs, but I’d been co-writing with Bob Weir on his album, and I found I could be more of a collaborative artist than I had been. So I was open to Jason and Amanda’s suggestions, and the songs got wilder and weirder.”

The Weir connection was made by Josh Kaufman, who played on Ritter’s three 2013-2017 albums and who was producing the Grateful Dead guitarist’s 2016 solo album, Blue Mountain. Weir had loved the cowboy songs he learned while working on Wyoming’s Bar Cross Ranch as a teenager, and he wanted to create some new songs in the same vein for his first solo record since 1978. Kaufman and Ritter (who grew up in Idaho) served as co-writers on all dozen tracks for an album that was warmly received.

Ritter is not one to confuse songwriting with arranging. You have to do a good job on phase one for phase two to matter. “I’ve always believed that a song should be able to stand on its own two feet,” he argues. “You should be able to pick up a guitar or sit down at a piano and not be a very good player, which I’m not, and the song should work.” So he made sure the songs were in good shape before he went into the studio with Isbell.

Once he did, however, he was open to anything that might be done to the songs, because he had faith in their inner strength. The site was Nashville’s historic RCA Studios, where the ghosts of Willie Nelson, Dolly Parton and Elvis Presley are still knocking around. Now that the songs were in order, Isbell was decisive in knowing how to attack them.

Ritter had written “Old Black Magic,” for example, as a quiet song for Gathering, but it hadn’t quite worked. But when Isbell recast it as a rocker, it snapped into focus, even though Ritter had never heard it that way. “You never set out to write a rock song,” Isbell told him. “You write something, and it turns into a rock song.” Isbell knew the precise riff that “Losing Battles” needed. Shires knew how her violin could fit “Silverblade.” (When Ritter hits the road this summer, he will be back with the Royal City Band, but Shires will be the opener on about half the dates.)

“When we got in the studio,” Ritter says, “suddenly the songs went from being solo to having six musicians playing them. And the songs changed. It’s like a strange flower; you plant the seed, but you never know what they’re going to look like. That’s the joy of collaborating with someone, and I felt a kinship with Jason. I wanted to work with a peer, with someone who was singing their own songs every night. Those two different lenses, when they come together, shine a whole new light.”