Singer-Songwriter Josh Ritter Performs (Get Lit)

Josh Ritter
( Courtesy of the artist )

[music]

Alison Stewart: You're listening to All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. Well, one of the main characters in Michael Cunningham's novel Day wanted nothing more than to make it as a singer-songwriter. Our Get Lit musical guest is living that dream. Plus, he's a published author himself. Josh Ritter released the album Fever Breaks in April 2019 just a few weeks after the day Michael Cunningham's novel begins. His follow-up to that album came out last year. Can you guess what month? The album, Spectral Lines was released, April 28th, 2023.

Josh is also an author who released a book in between the two albums titled The Great Glorious Goddamn Of It All that came out in 2021. We were thrilled he was able to join us as our musical guest for our January Get Lit event. We'll hear my conversation with Josh in just a minute, but first, here he is with a special performance of his songs, Someday and Truth Is A Dimension (Both Invincible And Blinding).

[MUSIC - Josh Ritter: Someday]

Missionary zeal

Mercenary eyes

The world puts its

Whole foot down

On the little guy

And grinds him on down

Back to the dust from whence he came

Someday there's gonna be justice

Will it be today?

The dark is too hungry

Nothing's ever quite enough

So throw both arms

Round the whole world

And the ones you love

Give them everything you have

From what cannot be repaid

Someday there's gonna be justice

Will it be today?

Yeah. Yeah.

We who cannot get it right

We who try with all our might

To somehow push a mountain up a hill

We who are not deities

We who speak in blasphemies

We whose time has not yet come but will

I've seen a whole lot I remember

Things that I cannot forget

And if the world is getting kinder

I haven't noticed yet

And if we're gonna make it

Things are gonna have to change

Someday there's gonna be justice

Will it be today?

[applause]

Josh Ritter: Thank you. Thank you very much.

[MUSIC - Josh Ritter: Truth Is a Dimension (Both Invisible and Blinding)]

I got off the highway north of Desert Canyon Station

I was driving with my headlights off, just stars for navigation

My telescope and my notes, my ham sandwiches and coffee

Sometimes you must be all alone, there ain't no way to not be

I was thinking about Tonya, how things had rearranged

And everything can come full circle, we were back to being strangers

She was with a man named Neil now, that's all I knew about him

But I was happy she was happy, real happy that she'd found him

It was just after 11 when I pulled off at the lookout

The parking lot was empty though the air still smelled like cookouts

And yes I admit I toked one, that doesn't change what happened

Anyway you're not my parents, and it really helps my mapping

Of the System 611, a Magellanic cluster

I'd been watching for a while, I got my telescope adjusted

And I turned it toward an unassuming patch of dusty sky

That was really fifty million stars a billion lightyears wide

And then all at once it felt as if time had been suspended

And a vision poured into me like a bottle'd been upended

I was filled with revelation both infinite and finite

That filtered down my telescope encoded in the starlight

It said, "Truth is not immutable, itself is a dimension

Truth can be both weighted down and warped in strange directions

Truth has a shape that alters, each according to observer

Sometimes you must be close to it, sometimes you must be further

Truth can bend and truth can break, depends on how you ask it

It frays or it may blaze out at some pall bound for Damascus

And it sometimes gets mistook for God, sometimes for his servant

It both exists and doesn't, like a star that's not observed yet

Which all at once returned my thoughts to System 611

Still twinkling down the telescope into my mind from heaven

And I stood there looking upward as the darkness turned to dawn

And received that strange transmission until finally it was gone

And I knew beyond a shadow my discovery was real

But the person that I longed to tell was sound asleep with Neil

In some parallel dimension maybe Tonya was still mine

But in this one, she loves someone else, that left me to search the sky

So I went ahead and wrote this to alert you to my findings

I call it, "Truth Is a Dimension Both Invisible and Blinding"

You can give me the awards now, you can knight me or whatever

I've got nothing going on now me and Tonya aren't together

Oh go ahead and laugh at me and all of my conclusions

Seminars and seminars and think tank institutions

You may even talk to Tonya, let me ask her if you do

Please tell her I still love her, that will always be the truth

[applause]

Josh Ritter: Thank you.

Alison Stewart: That was romantic-ish. [laughs] We get a little romance in the evening. I read somewhere that you said your first novel actually began as a song.

Josh Ritter: Yes. I was thinking, I grew up reading novels before I really discovered music. I knew that there had to be some part of the house that I hadn't gotten to in my thinking. I've always felt like the words or the inspiration is, it has to fill a bucket, and the form is just that bucket. It always felt like a beautiful way of working the novel, but for me, I was like a baby writer, just learning how to write songs.

I envision songs as, like, what you're doing is you're framing empty space. You're building a hallway with doors that people can listen to and then drift off into their own worlds. I really like that, and I certainly do that with lots of other people's music. That's how, like, a reverie you fall into. And I thought, well, what's behind one of those doors? I've never been back there. Maybe if I follow it, the story will continue and it will blossom.

Alison Stewart: Do your skills as a songwriter and your skills as an author, do they overlap or are they different sets of muscles?

Josh Ritter: They definitely do, because I find that when I'm really actually being able to write better than I can, those moments, there's a rhythm and a syntax and a melody to every line in something of prose that's beautiful. I find that I really relate to a lot of and find appreciation sometimes in even just the flow of the syllables. That's what's primarily the most important thing about songwriting, I find, is the flow of the syllables and the way the words mix together. Also, with a song, you just have to write a short story and just-- it's like writing something on a grain of rice. You have to write pieces so concise, and I love that concision, and so concision and the rhythm of the syllables, and then just the music just jumps out of there.

Alison Stewart: Let's talk about your album, Spectral Lines, came out in April 2023. Did you work on it during the pandemic, or was this material from before?

Josh Ritter: Yes, I started working on this right around the time when we were still wiping off groceries.

Alison Stewart: I feel like that's somebody's next novel, wiping off groceries.

Josh Ritter: Plumes and whatever, all those things that would seem like you could maybe diagnose it with your ring doorbell. It was absolutely a crazy time. It was so weird. My mom was in the end stages of ovarian cancer, which had been a seven long year ordeal for her. In March or February, we found ourselves driving across the country in the middle of the pandemic with the kids, not knowing what the virus really was or where it was coming from. We ate, and this is crazy, but we ate at drive-throughs the whole way. And we never went into places. We took the kids out to the side of the road to pee, and we stayed in empty hotels.

It was such a strange time. Then we arrived in Idaho, and she was passing away. It was a time when I thought, where is the voice that always carries me through? It just carries me. Where is the thing that allows me to internalize and return something in a rhyme that makes sense to me? But none of that was there. The songs didn't come because I thought, when are we ever going to play songs again? Who knows? We couldn't be in the room to record together. The songs really just became just like songs that you had played yourself in the mirror in the bathroom at night after the kids were asleep.

Alison Stewart: Wow.

Josh Ritter: That kind of thing.

Alison Stewart: You're on a 20th-anniversary tour of Hello Starling. You're going to be at Webster Hall on Valentine's Day if anybody has plans.

Josh Ritter: All the lovers.

Alison Stewart: What do anniversaries mean to you? Anniversaries like this.

Josh Ritter: I always think that real creative currency is anticipation of the future. Excitement for what could come next and what ideas might fall into your head. What fun moments like this could happen? That's so fun. Anniversaries and looking backwards has never been something I've been eager to do. When the idea came about, I thought, I don't know about that. That sounds like not my jam, but then I had a chance to play these songs. I was playing them for people that weren't even born yet when it came out. It just made me really happy. I'm happy to be alive. I'm happy to be here. I'm happy to have this experience because, frankly, it's a miracle to me that my songs get listened to. It's amazing.

Alison Stewart: Can we hear a couple more songs?

Josh Ritter: Yes. Thank you.

Alison Stewart: Great.

[applause]

[MUSIC - Josh Ritter: Henrietta, Indiana]

Henrietta, Indiana mill town

Locked the factory down and shut it up tight

My daddy and my brother and sixteen-hundred others

Lost everything they had in the night

Daddy got a taste for the hard stuff

Henrietta, Indiana was dry

We'd ride out to Putney, he'd tell me he loved me

The drive home was always so quiet

He had a devil in his eye, eye

Like a thorn in the paw

Disregard for the law

Disappointment to the Lord on high

My brother practiced preaching in the basement

Perspiration on his face 'til I knew

That something was missing, his spirit was willing

He could not believe it was true

"Blessed be the poor, " he said

"Your treasure is on high."

All of Henrietta, Indiana heard me Hallelujah

When I finally saw the devil in his eyes

Saw the devil in his eye, eye

Alison Stewart: That was singer-songwriter Josh Ritter with a special live performance of his song Henrietta, Indiana, from our January Get Lit with All Of It book club event with author Michael Cunningham. Thanks once again to our partners at the New York Public Library, and to Get Lit producers, Jordan Loft and Simon close. That is All Of It for today. I appreciate you listening and I appreciate you. I will meet you back here next time.

[MUSIC - Josh Ritter: Henrietta, Indiana]

"Can they bring the dogs in?"

"Can they call up the Bureau?"

"Do they have next-of-kin?"

Cameras came to my door.

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