Dressage Principles Ritter

Idaho-bred singer/songwriter Josh Ritter's V2 Records debut follows in the footsteps of 2003's Hello Starling only in instrumentation. While he retains his literate tongue and expressive voice, there is far less humor on Animal Years than on his previous two outings. Producer Brian Deck (Iron & Wine, Modest Mouse) keeps Animal Years intimate but transient, like a circus train crawling through a small town on a busy Saturday afternoon. Essentially built around two startlingly affecting diatribes on the war in Iraq, Ritter utilizes the voices of Peter and Paul, as well as Laurel & Hardy, to eke some kind of explanation from both the Administration and the Creator.

Few young singer/songwriters have quite so quickly won the sort of acclaim that Idaho-born Josh Ritter gained with his first self-released album, which won rave reviews, earned him slots opening for Bob Dylan, and made him a minor celebrity in Ireland, where he's already headlined several tours. Ritter's second disc (and first nationally released album), Golden Age of Radio, makes it clear that his sudden success is well deserved, and based on genuine talent. Ritter's moody, evocative songs seem to reside in a middle ground between Richard Buckner and Ryan Adams, but without suggesting he's lifted anything from either of those performers.

Hello Starling is the third studio album by American singer-songwriter Josh Ritter. As Ritter's previous albums have done, Hello Starling was compared to other Americana greats such as Woody Guthrie, Townes Van Zandt, Bob Dylan, and Leonard Cohen. His voice on the album was described as smooth with sleepy, rough edges. George Graham praised the lyrics and vocal delivery. Hello Starling was reissued on January 17, 2010 as a two-disc Deluxe Edition. The Deluxe Edition includes the complete original studio album and a second bonus disc. The bonus disc contains solo acoustic versions of all the original tracks (re-recorded by Ritter in Nashville of June 2008) as well as four live bonus tracks, an introduction by Dennis Lehane, and a full color lyric and photo booklet with never-before-seen photos.

Josh Ritter has been thinking a lot about space exploration. It has nothing to do with his spellbinding new album, Spectral Lines, except that in a way, it really does. “The Voyager spacecraft went up in ’77 and now it’s out there in a place that no one’s ever been before, and it’s sending back all these messages,” Ritter says. “I feel like songs do that in their own little way. They’re probes: they go out into the world, and sometimes you hear stories back from them, but really, they go off on their own.”

The follow-up to 2017's loose and versatile Gathering, Fever Breaks sees the lauded Idaho-bred singer/songwriter teaming up with producer and Americana wunderkind Jason Isbell and delivering a taut ten-track set backed by Isbell and his formidable 400 Unit. Less prone to stylistic detours than previous outings, Fever Breaks is a straight-up band album, with Ritter and company administering some serious muscle on cuts like "Old Black Magic" and "Losing Battles," the latter of which gives off a distinct Crazy Horse vibe. Dylanesque opener "Ground Don't Want Me" takes a similar approach, but retains a modicum of heartland folksiness, bringing it more in line with Ritter's earlier works.

In an essay penned for NPR in advance of the release of his ninth studio long-player, Josh Ritter said of creating Gathering: "I had that feeling you get when the sky is suddenly dark before a summer storm; the thunder heads looming at the edge of the fields, the birds quiet. The smell of the gathering electricity in the atmosphere, the certainty of lightning." It's an apt summation of this 12-track set, which eases the listener in with a balmy, a cappella country-gospel opener ("Shaker Love Song [Leah]"), before letting the clouds open up with the one-two punch of "Showboat," a soulful and self-effacing countrypolitan rocker that sounds like a funked-up version of Glen Campbell's "Gentle on My Mind," and "Friendamine," an affable, country-blues boogie with an out-of-nowhere backwards organ solo.