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 Josh
Ritter's The Animal Years (out April 11, 2006) is the
kind of breakthrough effort that will cause listeners new to
the 29 year-old singer-songwriter's work to wonder where this
guy has been all their lives - and prompt his passionate fan
base to just say, well, we told you so. Following the independent
release of The Golden Age of Radio (2002) and Hello
Starling (2003), Ritter was championed by critics in publications
ranging from the New York Times to Details Magazine,
hailed by fellow artists who shared stages with him, and name-checked
by anyone who happened to catch him on tour during the years
he doggedly worked the road. The music-savvy citizens of the
Republic of Ireland christened him a major star well before
anyone in the states even knew he had a record out. On The
Animal Years, his V2 Records debut, Ritter more than lives
up to the buzz. He embraces the topical while reaching for the
timeless, resulting in an album that's firmly rooted in right
now but guaranteed to resonate for years to come.
Ritter doesn't reinvent himself on The Animal Years;
he simply sets aside traditional ideas of what a guitar-toting,
folk-based troubadour should do. Looking to select a producer,
Ritter chose a smart but decidedly out-of-left-field candidate:
Brian Deck, a one-time member of Chicago indie rockers Red Red
Meat, best known now for his forward-thinking work with Modest
Mouse on The Moon and Antarctica and Iron and Wine
on Our Endless Numbered Days.
"It was great working with Deck," Ritter says. "I was very lucky.
He was a guy, I felt, who was as weird as I was. There was stuff
that I could bring up, like wanting "Monster Ballads" to sound
like Mark Twain's Tom Sawyer, and he didn't bat an eye. He was
just into the idea. So it was great - he was going to be my
collaborator."
They went to Bear Creek, a big barn of a studio outside of Seattle,
isolated enough from the city to make an Idaho native like Ritter
feel right at home. According to Ritter, Deck viewed the studio
"as another instrument and the person playing that instrument
was listening really hard to what was being said and what was
being played." On The Animal Years, the production
never calls attention to itself, even though all the tracks
were artfully layered, all the sounds carefully considered.
It feels as if the songs are just being breathed into life then
and there, and they practically demand to be listened to the
old-fashioned way, start to finish, as an entire album.
Ritter and Deck incorporate subtle electronic elements that
gurgle and bleep underneath the conventional instrumentation
on "Wolves" and they push piano and Hammond Organ to the forefront
of "Monster Ballads," accompanied by a shuffling, brushed snare
rhythm. On the haunting "Idaho," they just rely on a hint of
acoustic guitar, the hum of the room and Ritter's voice, which
leaves words behind to fade out on a note of lonesome falsetto.
As he relates, "I was in a huge barn late at night and I was
playing the guitar as quietly as I could. 'Idaho' was kind of
like a mistake, not something I had planned to record. We had
been working on a song that was going nowhere and we were all
getting frustrated. We took a break and I recorded that off
the cuff just so I could feel like I had done something that
day. It turned out so great and so bizarre. The two mikes on
the vocals were between phases, there were all these things
coming from the other mikes in the room that we had left on.
I tried to do it over, but I couldn't."
Though Ritter places many of his story-songs in intimate settings,
he's not afraid to tackle big ideas and anthemic arrangements.
The riveting opener "Girl in the War" and the dramatic "Thin
Blue Flame," perhaps the most audacious track Ritter has ever
recorded, recall the genre-busting rock of artists like Bright
Eyes and Wilco, but Ritter goes even further conceptually and
emotionally. These songs represent perhaps the most eloquent
expression to date from any pop artist of the physical, emotional
and spiritual consequences of the Iraqi war and the divided
state of our nation. "Girl in the War" is as stark and stirring
as "Born In the U.S.A.," and much more immediate. Ritter explores
the deepening dread of the Middle East conflict, imagining his
words as an epistle to St. Paul: "I've got a girl in the war,
Paul, her eyes are like champagne/They sparkle, bubble over
and in the morning all you've got is rain."
On "Thin Blue Flame" Ritter steps out of the third person to
face his audience directly and articulate his vision of a world
in which religious calling becomes a battle cry and everything
on earth is sacrificed in the name of heaven. His words combine
apocalyptic, gospel-like testifying with dreamy, stream-of-consciousness
poetry. As Ritter explains, "The word 'apocalypse' means unveiling,
you know, not just the end of the world. In some of the real
apocalyptic literature like The Divine Comedy or Paradise Lost,
or even Gravity's Rainbow or Slaughterhouse Five, a person goes
through a long series of trials and tribulations, seeing things
and coming back with new knowledge and maybe new warnings. In
the past year, we didn't have to go anywhere to see those kinds
of things. We all have TV. We all can see what's going on and
there's no one who can say it's a good thing. 'Thin Blue Flame'
is a trip through what everybody can see. I was just writing
down the images I saw as they came to me. I worked on it for
a long time, My notebook was filled with 'Thin Blue Flame' for
a year and a half."
Ritter is comfortable with literary and historical allusions,
and is as much in love with words as music, and that really
shows in his lean, evocative narratives. He envisions The
Animal Years as "an escape from the present," a look back
at an earlier time to make sense of what's happening now. He
likens the album to "a silent film -- a mysterious old movie
reel unearthed somewhere - about America today." For inspiration,
Ritter went back to the work of Mark Twain and the letters of
Thomas Jefferson and John Adams -- writers deeply concerned
with the state of the union -- to study their own escapist impulses
at critical times in our nation's history.
Ritter came to music late in his teenage life, subsisting for
many years on his folks' meager record collection. It wasn't
until the 18 year-old found a copy of Bob Dylan's Nashville
Skyline at a shop in his hometown of Moscow, Idaho and
heard the Dylan/Johnny Cash duet of "Girl From the North Country,"
that he was inspired to pick up a guitar. As he once told
No Depression, "Hearing that record the first time was
like meeting that person you know you're going to marry." When
he moved east to attend Oberlin College in Athens, Ohio, he
thought he'd follow his parents into neuroscience, but soon
switched to an American Studies curriculum that he more or less
devised for himself, with an emphasis on the history of folk
music. Once he'd finished college, he migrated to Boston, determined
to find a niche as a singer-songwriter.
"There were stories about John Prine, Tracy Chapman, Joan Baez,
Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen," he says. "All these people started
playing at these little coffee shops. I figured that was the
way to do it. I was working in Rhode Island at a typically awful
temp job and doing open mikes in Boston, three or four of them
a week. About a year into that, I met the Frames, a great Irish
band, who were playing just down the street at T.T. the Bear's.
They came down to the open mike where I was performing to have
a drink. They heard me play one song and then they invited me
to come over and open all their shows when For The Birds
came out. My first one was at Whelan's in Dublin, opening for
the Frames in front of 400 people. Oh man, it felt like everything
was coming to fruition and I was right. I could do it. People
maybe would want to hear this stuff. I sold 10 CDs that night
and I felt like the richest man in the world."
His success in Ireland soon built to substantially large audiences,
but spreading the word in the United States required even more
hard work, and countless days and nights on the road. His tenacity
paid off as he built a loyal and ever-larger cult following
via word of mouth and some great reviews. The Animal Years
refers to the long, grueling time he spent touring behind Hello
Starling, a Herculean effort that ultimately yielded him
the V2 deal and the chance to kick back -- for a few weeks at
least -- at the new house he bought in rural Idaho.
"The title had been in my head for a while and I tried to convince
myself it wasn't the one I should use," Ritter admits, "but
for me it was perfect. I was thinking back on the period of
my life leading up to this record and my experience up to that
point was, you get up, you start to play music and you tour.
It's such a strange life style. In a lot of ways I felt like
I became this thing, half-man, half-animal, out in the middle
of the country, playing. It was so bizarre. Everyone else is
living their lives and doing things that are bit more normal
…Man, after a year and a half on the road, 16 months of
touring for Hello Starling, I became the proto-hunter-gatherer,
going out wherever and doing stuff and trying to find a way
to make sense in a human way. But, really, in the end, you're
just trying to get food in your mouth. I think back on that
time and feel definitely, those were my animal years."
Ritter has decidedly left those days behind. The Animal
Years is the sound of a profoundly human future.
-- Michael Hill
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