Though he plays songs that sound like they have been rattling around the folk canon for half a century, Josh Ritter didn't pick up a guitar until he bought himself one in his senior year of high school. According to reports, he wrote his first song that very evening, unleashing a talent for evocative and involving song-writing that is at once refreshingly new and thoroughly old school.
From the strains of bluegrass to the tales of blue-collar world-weariness, Ritter's sound is genuinely American, without youth-centred irony or any other clever revisionist attempts to contemporise. Though he probably wouldn't be folk enough for the purists, Ritter is true to the genre as much as to himself and the power of his song-writing comes from an instinct that runs far deeper than any formal knowledge of the medium.
Lyrics and lyricism are at the centre of Ritter's talent. He creates brilliant narratives in his songs that are reminiscent of the breezy humour of Arlo Guthrie and the rootsiness of Bob Dylan. His music is preoccupied with movement and motion and his songs are simple evocations of the open spaces and open roads of his country, and the solitude that accompanies the wanderer. He tells stories that describe the human internal conflict created by that solitude, and creates characters full of pathos, wit and optimism.
Gloom never becomes the focal point, and any nostalgia or sentimentality he lets creep in wears a tongue-in-cheek smile worthy of Johnny Cash. It seems unfair, though, to merely cite the greats of the genre, in whose footsteps Ritter inevitably has to tread. He is neither a sound-alike nor a wannabe, and at 24, is already creating powerful music that belies his age and experience.
Just wait until he grows up a bit.
