Singer/songwriter/guitarist Josh Ritter has been writing music his entire life and recording it since graduating from Oberlin College in 1999. Since that time he’s earned a dedicated following, which has dubbed him “the next Bob Dylan, the next Joan Baez or the next Leonard Cohen.” His 2006 release, The Animal Years, even turned Stephen King into a fan. Last year Ritter retreated to an 18th century farmhouse in Maine to record The Animal Years’ adventurous follow-up, The Historical Conquests of Josh Ritter. Unlike The Animal Years, which found Ritter writing a series of straightforward love songs, The Historical Conquests of Josh Ritter was built from a series of melodic fragments that Ritter recorded over time and then massaged into a series of short, direct numbers. Once known for his long, epic stories, Ritter also looked to Buddy Holly’s apocryphal The Apartment Tapes as a major influence, boiling his ideas down into two-minute pop nuggets. Below, Ritter talks with Relix about his new album, current tour and why he admires public speakers.

You are now a few weeks into an extensive tour in support of The Historical Conquests of Josh Ritter. How has this tour compared to your past outings?

It’s just been amazing… amazing. I’ve never had more fun playing shows than right now. I find the mix of songs, between The Animal Years and The Historical Conquests of Josh Ritter is just…they work together so well because you can kind of go really full-blown with Conquests and then it really adds the subtlety—it lets the subtlety of The Animal Years kind of come out. It’s exciting.

Certainly the biggest compliment is that people keep coming back. In terms of a live compliment, if people relate to the fact that you love what you do that’s important. That is the most, ya know? I love singing my songs and I love what I do. I feel like that’s the craft to sustain through hard work and love and, if you can love what you do on a rainy night in Tuscaloosa, ya know? If that love comes through that is a huge compliment.

Having now been on the road for some time, what have been some of the highlights of this outing so far?

It’s pretty unbelievable that the crowds are coming; it’s pretty fantastic. Most of the shows have been sold out. D.C. was incredible to play to like 1,200 people and it sold out in advance, which was an amazing thing. Chicago… what a fantastic place to play. And then there have been places like Mountain Stage in Colorado or the Cedar Cultural Center in Minneapolis and, on a good night, everywhere feels exactly the same. There is a great energy moving around the room and there is a real connection . It feels more like we are kind of like hunkered down in a snow storm and we are just gonna spend a couple hours together and not think about anything else. It’s fantastic. I’ve loved having horns on some of the shows where the horns have actually been available. That’s been exciting. It’s just all around a pretty much dream-come-true type tour.

The Historical Conquests of Josh Ritter was recorded in a very different way than your past records. Can you talk about your creative approach for this project?

A lot of it was based on a few piano bits and pieces that I’ve been working on for a while. Just little things I’ve been collecting that kind of turned into these ideas. When it was time to record, I started stringing those things together to make songs and to make arrangements of songs. It was much more of a homegrown process this time around, which is very different than the types of ways that I’ve written before. It’s such a different approach. But in a lot of ways, the common denominator for all that stuff is you need a lot of time on your own or time to your self.

Was this new approach in any way a reaction to The Animal Years?

You get bored of the single approach. It stops being interesting… you stop surprising yourself. And I know there is more in there in my head than I’ll ever have time to write about, so it’s worth looking around for the good stuff and really pushing yourself to find new ways to talk about things, and new ways to describe things and new sounds, just kind of a new personality to write with it. After making The Animal Years the last thing I wanted to do was make another The Animal Years kind of by mistake.

I’ve also heard that you were inspired to try this approach after studying Buddy Holly.

I was inspired by Buddy Holly, in particular, because you hear the bones of a song and that was important for me to hear after The Animal Years. After I sang like a nine-minute song and heard that Buddy Holly could write about something in one and a half minutes, I wanted to see if I could do that.

Is your current backing band part of this new approach?

Well, [bassist] Zack Hickman and [keyboardist] Sam Kassirer have been in the band in the past. And I have a new drummer, Liam Hurley, and a new guitar player, Austin Nevins. Austin’s been around the Boston scene for a while and Liam comes out of the New York kind of jazz and punk scene, so he plays all kinds of stuff. He was in a band called Nakatomi Plaza, and he is also a puppeteer for a renaissance band. I think there is a lot of gun fighting on it. And a lot of things breaking. Windows getting shot out, things exploding, all for the record [laughter].

Given the variance in length and directness between your new and old songs, how difficult have you found it to create a cohesive setlist?

Well, there are songs that instantly lend themselves to the types of shows I want to play right now. And a lot of those are kind of the louder ones. We have been playing

“Rumors,” “Open Doors,” “Mind’s Eye,” “To the Dogs or Whoever” and “Empty Hearts.” We are playing mostly songs on the record, from night to night and, like I said, the new and the old songs lean on each other really well.

Well, they seem to at least form a nice yin and yang.

Yeah, totally. I think of the beauty of any performance is range… range and dynamic are really important.

I think the greatest live band I’ve ever seen is The Frames. They are friends of mine, and that is how I got started, through them. I really grew up watching those guys, learning a lot about performance from them. I wouldn’t be the performer I am today without them. And certainly, Tom Waits’ style is just incredible. Just the aesthetic of what he does is amazing. I think that seeing Springsteen, of course, is always totally an amazing moment and you learn a lot just from watching. I love the Arcade Fire show I saw last year in Canada.

There are great performers out there. And a lot of times not just performers but people who are speakers as well. Real public speakers and people on the radio who are into their evangelical preachers or something like that. But just how they use their voice and how they carry their idea is really amazing or how they describe their idea can be really cool.

Can you talk about The Historical Conquests of Josh Ritter’s title?

Does it refer to a personal conquest or more global conquests?

That’s really it. The world is in a crazy place right now, I mean it always is but it certainly is a surreal time to be around it. I definitely have been thinking what the idea of the conquest means… writing about that stuff is good to reflect it.

I just love playing. It’s like, I just wanted the biggest, most absurd title I could come up with. But mostly there aren’t a lot of people that really get a chance to make a living making music. So any, every, any show that you can do, walk away from happy.