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.
Hauntingly beautiful vocals are juxtaposed by giggles that erupt from
pianist Alison Sudol as she receives audience applause. After one
performance on her VH1 You Oughta Know Tour, she blogged: “Lately,
people have been singing along… I don’t care if it’s uncool to show you
care about that kind of stuff... Cool is not my forte.”
This is surely the year of reunion tours by bands born decades ago that quickly ran out of steam, sometimes after only a few albums. During this year’s prog-rock/pop/metal renaissance, it’s easy to miss one of the classic bands that have launched a new tour. Perhaps that’s because Jethro Tull has been a constant since it broke out of the pack during the Sunbury Jazz and Blues Festival in August 1968.
For almost a decade, Kevin Drew has been the lynchpin holding together Broken Social Scene, a family-size collective whose members have forged other Canadian sensations like Metric, Stars, Apostle of Hustle, Jason Collett and Feist (whose infectious “1234” is currently featured in an iPod Nano advertisement). It wasn’t until recently that the indie wunderkind had the opportunity to step out under his own name.
Manu Chao looks terribly nervous backstage at Philly’s Electric Factory club during his biggest North American tour in over 15 years. Although I’d interviewed him by phone a weekearlier, I wanted to see how the real Chao stacked up against the almost mythological Chao—the world-traveling musician known for going into remote villages in Africa and Latin America to jam with locals. After pacing around like a nervous boxer before his bout, he walks toward me—a total stranger—extends his hand and says, “Hi,I’m Manu.”
