Few artists spend extra time placing the world round them into phrases than Josh Ritter. As a musician, he has launched 13 studio albums and 7 extra EPs since 2000. As an writer, he has printed two novels. As a contemporary blogger, he’s tenacious in recurrently updating Josh Ritter’s Guide of Jubilations, his devoted Substack.
It ought to really feel fairly customary, then, that Ritter has a metaphor readily available when he wants to explain the concept of touring after an album launch.
“My uncle labored with the forest service,” he says, “and they might drop fish into upper-mountain lakes. They might seed these lakes with all these trout and stuff. They might fly over and simply drop ’em in. That’s the way it feels while you’re taking part in reveals with new songs for the primary time. You’re releasing them out into the world.”
On a late November afternoon at Brooklyn Metal, a manufacturing-plant-turned-concert-venue on the outskirts of the Brooklyn neighborhood, Greenpoint, that Ritter calls house, he took a break from soundcheck forward of his remaining present of 2025. Ritter had toured relentlessly for many of the 12 months however particularly after the September launch of I Consider in You, My Honeydew, his third album in three years. He holed up in his dressing room, grabbed a can of beer from the fridge, and lamented the chaos that his ceaseless must create imparts on practically each side of his life.
“I’ve to finish the circle. The circle, for me, begins with writing a ton of songs. I’m all the time writing songs. Once they get to be, like, those that appear to hold collectively, I start to make a file. At that time, I find yourself placing a lot love and work into it, whereas not attending to play it reside,” Ritter says. “The present is the fruits of all of it.”
As soon as he took the stage at Brooklyn Metal, Ritter integrated seven of the ten tracks on I Consider in You, My Honeydew into his 20-song set. About midway by, he performed “Reality Is a Dimension (Each Invisible and Blinding),” which he says is the music that accomplished the circle for this file.
“‘Reality Is a Dimension’ is a music the place I took observe of the truth that I don’t bear in mind writing it,” Ritter tells Rolling Stone. “You already know that feeling of completely being enraptured within the second with the factor you’re doing? In actuality, while you’re creating something, you’re actually not there. You’re gone. That’s an exquisite, stunning feeling, however that additionally means you’re not witnessing your self doing one thing. I began to suppose, how a lot of that is me and the way a lot of it’s this muse that’s throughout and is my fixed companion that helps me write these songs? As I started to think about the muse as this separate entity, I began to comprehend how a lot I get pleasure from bringing the muse into each side of my life.”
Ritter has roughly completed this dance with the muse since he recorded and launched his self-titled debut album whereas a scholar at Oberlin Faculty in 1999. Since then, he’s given his muse extra materials to work with. He’s been lined by Bob Dylan, written songs for Bob Weir, collaborated with Joan Baez, shared the stage with John Prine, and had an album produced by Jason Isbell. However placing himself within the firm of artistic minds is simply a part of what drives Ritter.
Nicely-traveled and curious concerning the world, Ritter, raised in Moscow, Idaho, has lived in a spread of locations from Oberlin to Scotland to Windfall earlier than ultimately settling in Brooklyn. Now 49 and with two younger daughters, he sees his personal creativity as each a connection to and escape from the life he has created.
When Ritter figured that out, he gave his muse a reputation — “my honeydew” — and began writing songs for his inspiration, relatively than the opposite manner round. That’s additionally one of the simplest ways to know the depth of the characters, storytelling, and battles with inside demons on I Consider In You, My Honeydew. Together with the Royal Metropolis Band, he tied these threads collectively in a studio in Cannon Falls, Minnesota, in summer time 2024.
“I’m going by all of the issues that each one of us are on this nation proper now,” he says. “All these monumental emotions and uncertainties. In inviting the muse in to expertise that, I’m inviting it to be witnessed. It helps me to make sense of my very own life and make sense of my very own emotions.”
If there’s one hang-up to such a philosophy, nonetheless, it’s that it doesn’t depart Ritter a lot room to contemplate his personal place in music, or the drive he has develop into over three a long time on the lives of different artists. He’s fast to reminisce about Baez mentoring him on his first European tour and shopping for him a go well with in Rome, however he’s much less apt to see his personal fashion — as a lot poet as musician — as having the identical impression on the generations of folks artists who got here after him.
“It’s very fascinating to me that we consider the final 120 years of music as being perpetually,” he says. “However there was a time, a blink of a watch in the past, when music wasn’t on this commercialized type. Songs simply went out on the earth as songs and broadsheets and had been sung round fires when nobody actually knew the phrases. Whereas I do really feel this nice amazement and honor to have discovered a lot from all these folks, I additionally really feel like we’re all mainly on the identical journey collectively.”
On the alternative facet of his dressing room door, a modern-day cavalcade of household, buddies, bandmates, and crew members waited to see Ritter. When he opened the door, he greeted them with a smile and some hugs and headed down the corridor. That is what present days are like for him, significantly in New York, and the Brooklyn Metal date illustrated simply how a lot of these influences Ritter blends collectively. There have been occasions he evoked Dylan or Prine, in his glowing three-piece go well with, and there have been different moments — like studying a sequence of viewers messages whereas the band performed behind him — that no one might think about coming from anybody however Ritter.
When he hits the highway in 2026, he’ll be doing it solo, on an prolonged tour of theaters and bigger listening rooms that begins in January in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and ends in Could on the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville. In the identical spirit that turned his newest file right into a love letter to the muse, Ritter is viewing this solo run as an appreciation of the particular venues he’ll be taking part in.
“I need the identical factor for everyone that I’ve,” Ritter says. “I really feel that I’ve been protected, for some purpose, from having to make unhealthy choices with my music or make sacrifices, and I simply really feel so grateful. I don’t know that I’ll want issues to be greater, I simply wish to carry on doing issues which can be actually enjoyable. I really like having enjoyable, and I’ve heard that the very best room you may ever play is 800 seats — standing within the entrance, bar on the again. I believe that’s in all probability the case.
“You possibly can all the time have an excessive amount of, however simply sufficient retains you working laborious and doing what you’re keen on. Previous that, I don’t know if it’s helpful.”
Josh Crutchmer is a journalist and writer whose ebook (Nearly) Nearly Well-known will probably be launched April 1 through Again Lounge Publishing.