Josh Ritter interview: 'I don't trust answers in songs. It's more fun to write about questions'

Josh Ritter feels luckier with each record he releases. The miracle to him is “survival”, he says.

“I’m so lucky that I’ve been playing music for a while now, and that I’ve continued to feel like I’ve brought something new out of myself. Everybody fears becoming a ‘medley’ artist.”

He’s endearingly happy through the interview – he repeats a sincere “thank you” several times at the slightest compliment and smiles bashfully at a mention of Bruce Springsteen, who’s visited Ritter at his shows on more than one occasion.

“He came backstage and was in our band huddle before a show,” he chuckles. “He’s an amazing person. He took me all over town one night, showed me some of his haunts and was an incredible gentleman to me. His autobiography where he talks about the thousands of songs he must have learned…

“I’ve always felt so inspired just by the fact that Bruce Springsteen is out there, man. More and more my heroes are people who have done things for their whole career, managed to have lives in the meantime, do good things and still be hungry, still put out this amazing music.”

Ritter’s own, most recent record Gathering – his ninth – is his most diverse to date, exploring in superb detail a new freedom, where he untangles himself from expectation and creates a series of characters who battle weather along with their internal demons.

On his 2015 record Sermon On The Rocks, he opened with “Birds On The Meadow” and a sense that something big was approaching. Without being explicit about anything, Ritter captured the foreboding that had seeped into the collective American consciousness and continued to work through the powerlessness one would also feel as an individual.

“It’s weird, people have asked me why I’m not writing protest songs, and it’s just not my medium,” he says. “For me there are so many ways for us to share our ideas now, there’s a point at which I find trying to reflect the times through your music is writing down what you’re thinking, honestly, and no matter if it fits with the current political climate or not.

“There’s been records that have been born out of rage. The Animal Years (2006) was where I was trying to exorcise an anger out of myself. And others... you’re getting swept up and the only thing you can do is write without an editor, try to capture a moment in amber rather than create something.”

Mark Twain’s memoir Life on the Mississippi is what brought him to The Animal Years: a “beautiful love song” to the river Twain lived on before the American Civil War.

“I was thinking about my time growing up in Idaho and feeling like I wanted to address some of these things I saw going on around me, but not so head-on that they were like a blunt instrument,” Ritter says. “I’m not out there to be a preacher or to try and educate anybody. My job is to describe the things I see going by me as realistically as I can.

“I feel a listener should be able to make the judgement if the song is well-written enough. A song is like a hallway with lots of doors – we all go through on our own, into our worlds – that’s what’s so beautiful about it.”

On Gathering, Ritter teamed up with the legendary Bob Weir after working on Blue Mountain; the Grateful Dead founder member’s first solo album in decades. That record came after Weir decided to make an album of songs from the time he was in Wyoming, before the Grateful Dead – a cowboy on a ranch aged 15 or 16, “doing whatever Bob Weir would do”, Ritter grins. He “begged” to write something for Weir, who liked what he came up with enough to ask for more.

“We ended up really getting to know each other in a creative way, and then ‘When Will I Be Changed’ happened, which I cared so much about. For him to bring his experienced voice to a song... I thought it would be magic, but I didn’t know it would be such a beautiful rendition. I’m in his debt. In his voice there is just a depth of something you can’t achieve any other way than living a whole life, a career.”

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Earlier this year in an interview with The Guardian, a disgruntled Steve Earle commented how modern country artists “make hip hop for people who are afraid of black people”. But as the debate around genre-hopping and cultural appropriation rumbles on, Ritter remains happy to find influences all over. He stitches together railroad jaunts, country-western campfire and gospel, anchoring everything with that Weir track at the centre.

“I think the more you have a defined style, the more there can be a conservative nucleus to it,” he suggests. “That’s fine, there are purists in every disciple. I just find that there’s a lot of interesting stuff all over the place. I will happily embrace any title to my music that allows people to come and find it, but I’ve never felt excluded by any type of music. I like a lot of stuff.

“Certain things served as touchstones on Gathering. Waylon Jennings was like a character to sing about. I love the new Jay Z record [4:44]. I’m a learning hip-hop fan – the lyrics in hip hop are the most exciting going on right now.”

He still believes there are core themes that lie at the centre of every song – “big, open-ended huge things that have no answer”.

“It’s so much more fun to write about questions,” he says. “’Where Have All The Flowers Gone?’ [Pete Seeger] or ‘Blowing In The Wind’ [Bob Dylan] are taken as protest songs, but they’re powerful because they ask questions and don’t give any answers. I don’t trust answers in songs.”

Growing up in “the middle of nowhere on the edge of a mountain”, where the bus ride to school took an hour and a half, it took Ritter some time getting used to living in New York. He’d go to sleep at night then think it was morning, because the street lights were on. But he found something moving in that journey to a big city.

“You need all the energy you can muster because so much is happening,” he says. “It’s probably something that’s familiar to people living in London, as though any minute you’re about to go down a wormhole. And good coffee’s right down the street.”

It’s an energy he brings to the album, how it chops and changes with a similar approach to production as some of the greats of hip hop; causing an arresting dynamic that keeps the listener on their toes. Ritter designed it in a similar way to how he’d make a setlist for a live show: “There were no rules, the dynamic should go up and down”.

“People have been talking about the death of the album for so long,” he adds. “But novels aren’t dead either. I have favourite passages, and I have favourite songs, but there’s something beautiful to be able to put out a record that is a fully fledged character. However people want to listen to music is great.”

The artwork on Gathering is his, he reveals: “I was writing these songs about storms, I didn’t realise there were storms all over the record. I was doing all this painting and the paintings were very stormy. Then I stepped back and it all jumped out.”

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We come back to how he’s feeling lucky, for going from being in a van travelling to shows, sleeping on couches, “then suddenly you’re playing music for a living”.

“You meet other musicians, you get to be friends for a night then you’re both off on tour again. And it doesn’t really matter where they live. You can fall in with one another after years and meet again for one night and nothing has changed. Those ones you feel like you have to keep up out of guilt or obligation, they tend to fall away.

“This sounds funny but I would say... I’ve been lucky in the way that my career has been an incremental one, over almost two decades. When I started, selling a record at an open mic, I was king of the world. Nothing beats working hard. With all the things changing in music, how we listen to it, how we go to shows.

“There’s still nothing that beats working hard. You put all this energy in and it’s impossible to say how it’ll come back. You can spend a ton of money and energy putting your records in stores, but it doesn’t mean that it’ll come back to you in the way you expect.”

‘Gathering’, the latest album by Josh Ritter, is out now