Music |
Josh Ritter: So Runs the World Away
By
Published: May 03, 2010
Category:
Rock
I’m one of those rabid fans who thinks Josh Ritter belongs in the same sentence as Springsteen, Simon, Dylan and Cohen — but the first few times I played his new CD, So Runs the World Away, I was seriously unhappy. It was just too different from 2007’s The Historical Conquests of Josh Ritter. And "Historical Conquests" also gave me trouble, for it was too different from Animal Years, which came out in 2006.
I should be used to this discomfort now. Josh Ritter doesn’t repeat. There is no sequel to “Wolves.” There will never be another “Kathleen.” Fans hoping that “Good Man” will be followed by “Great Man” hope in vain.
Josh Ritter takes leaps. It’s what he does, it’s his signature. That constant but asymmetrical flow of creativity makes him happy — more to the point, it keeps him alive. Josh Ritter condemned to repeat himself would be a tragedy. This guy needs freedom to create the next new thing like he needs oxygen.
You can listen to Josh Ritter’s music and think it’s bouncy and fun, though sometimes a little dark and jagged for pop music. Or you can dig in. That is, you can spend time with a Josh Ritter CD as you might with a book that happens to be set to music — you underline, make notes, reread.
I’ve been listening to “So Runs the World Away” for a few months now. “Coming to terms with it” would be more accurate. Some songs are keepers from the get-go: for a rocking affirmation of love, “Lantern” may have extremely unusual lyrics (“The living is desperate/ Precarious and mean/ And getting by is so hard/ That even the rocks are picked clean/ And the bones of small contention/ Are the only food the hungry find”), but it takes repeated play to note that. Other songs are instantly amusing for the musical quotations: a Leonard Cohen piano riff, a lilting line reminiscent of Paul Simon, glockenspiel worthy of Springsteen or Phil Spector. And then there are the songs that challenge you right off — you’ll know them when you hear them.
“So Runs the World Away” is so ambitious and ambitious in so many ways that it may be hard to connect the songs. I’ve done that thinking, and this is what I got. Change is coming, and we’re on our own: “If there’s a Book of Jubillations/ We’ll have to write it for ourselves.” Not everyone will make it: “And around me as I swam/ The drifters who’d gone under.” But this is Josh Ritter, kids, the poet laureate of possibility: “New lands for the living/ I could make it if I tried/ I closed my eyes/ I kept on swimming.”