Josh Ritter rarely writes about himself. The singer-songwriter is more at home building narratives and dipping into the lives of fictional characters in his songs. “The Curse,” off his 2010 album “So Runs the World Away,” chronicles the doomed love between an archaeologist and the mummy she exhumes from an ancient pyramid, while “The Temptation of Adam,” on 2007’s “The Historical Conquests of Josh Ritter,” follows an affair between a man and woman in control of a nuclear missile silo.
That’s why his 2013 album, “The Beast in Its Tracks,” was such a departure. About the break-up of his marriage with singer-songwriter Dawn Landes, the album was more autobiographical than Ritter had ever been before, trading in his usual layered arrangements and tightly-crafted lyrics for a sparser, rawer sound.
“It was the first time that I felt like, wow, this is an undeniable subject, and if I want to move through my life, I’ve got to write about this,” Ritter said by phone from his home in New York City. “You shouldn’t write records like that more than once or twice in a career, because they’re exhausting. I don’t want to be an autobiographer.”
In the intervening two years, Ritter met someone new, had a daughter, and started work on a new album, “Sermon on the Rocks,” which comes out in October. It’s a “record about mountaintops and a strange sort of American religious visionary stuff … there’s more blood in the songs. It feels very biological,” Ritter said. A prolific writer and relentless touring artist, he kicks off a slate of fall performances with a show in Prescott Park in Portsmouth on Wednesday, Sept. 2.
“The last record I did was very personal … and you always want to stomp around a little bit after something like that, clear the dust, clear the air. I wanted to make a kind of romper-stomper record,” he said.
If the album’s first single, “Getting Ready to Get Down,” is any indication, there’ll be plenty of bombast on the new record, which was recorded in New Orleans with producer Trina Shoemaker. “Getting Ready” is about a young woman who gets shipped off from her conservative hometown to a small Bible college in Missouri and comes home a little more worldly than she — and everyone else — thought she would. The song is a “frame for the rest of this record,” Ritter said. “I had a thing I was going to do, and I wasn’t going to tone it down. I wanted it to be as wild as I wanted it.”
Like many of Ritter’s songs, it’s catchy, almost an anthem, populated with a vivid cast of characters and a strong sense of place. But it took a couple of years for the song to come to fruition, Ritter said.
“I’d been writing songs for a while that I didn’t really care for that involved a little tiny town. They were fun to write, because I felt like I knew them, and felt like they had a precursor in ‘Harper Valley P.T.A.,’ that take pleasure in this funny little town and somebody kicking up against it,” he said. “Then, one day, I was playing and that line got into it, ‘Mama got a look at you and got a little worried, papa got a look at you and got a little worried,’ and it just wrote itself after that. It was just so fun … there was no puzzling over it.”
Ritter grew up in Moscow, Idaho. His parents were neuroscientists, a field Ritter almost went into himself when he went to college. He soon decided to study music instead, and started performing in 1997. His first, self-titled album came out in 1999, and he recorded part of his second album, “Golden Age of Radio” in 2000 at the Electric Cave in Portsmouth. The albums and the accolades soon piled up — in 2006, Paste magazine named him one of the “100 Greatest Living Songwriters.” “Sermon on the Rocks” is his eighth studio album.
It’s also, Ritter said, his most “musically free” record. “I was more free with myself, and more free with the material. I had a much clearer idea of what I wanted out of it, a much clearer idea of who I was. … You come to a spot in life where you have to take stock of where you are and where you’d like to go, and so much of art is about being excited for the progress and moving forward, not about anything else but what will happen next. … And I felt this was the best way to do it … to make it more my own than I have in the past.”
“Songs aren’t usually about going to the store — songs are about life and death, about love and lost love.” — Josh Ritter
For Ritter, it’s good to be back writing big, rollicking songs about love and death and heroes and heartbreak. “I never thought a song was worth much unless there was something in it you could relate to on a major scale,” he said. “Songs aren’t usually about going to the store — songs are about life and death, about love and lost love … it’s so much fun to write big. The language is cheap, so you can be extravagant.”
Ritter said his days recording in Portsmouth in 2000 were an especially exciting time. “That was such a ball, and I did so many things that were so new to me for the first time,” he said.
And if he could go back in time and talk to the Josh Ritter of 2000 who was just starting out? “I’d probably warn myself against certain relationships,” he said, laughing. “In general, my ideas of what could happen and what have happened … are pretty similar. … I never expected all that much, to be famous or to be on the cover of Rolling Stone. It would seem like a miracle if somebody bought a record, and it still does. It’s nice having a life where I can support my family. I don’t think you can really expect too much more except the happiness of being an artist.”
Josh Ritter comes to the Prescott Park Arts Festival in Portsmouth on Wednesday, Sept. 2 at 7 p.m. Bhi Bhiman opens. $8-$10 suggested donation, tickets at prescottpark.org.
Top of page: Josh Ritter. photo by Laura Wilson