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Josh Ritter: The Gathering

By Jesse Kornbluth
Published: Sep 21, 2017
Category: Rock

In a parallel life, I’m in a band with Zach Hickman, Sam Kassirer, Josh Kaufman and Ray Rizzo.

I’ve been voted one of the hundred best living songwriters. You hear my songs on college FM stations and at the end of popular TV shows.

I’ve published a novel. I paint.

Onstage, I am the happiest performer you’ll ever see. Even when the song’s a heartbreaker, I am fairly bouncing with the joy of singing for an audience.

I’m Josh Ritter.

My unlikely, definitely way post-adolescent identification with Josh Ritter began in 2006. Late one warm night, my wife and I were driving home after dinner with friends. The sunroof was open, the lights on Madison Avenue were synched. As we cruised, WFUV played a song we’d never heard: Thin Blue Flame. When it ended, nine minutes and forty seconds later, we were pretty much in puddles. Dylan was our god, but a remote, heartless god — he was never on your side, only his own. Josh Ritter was wise like Dylan, but he came from a kinder place. He shared your issues: the tangle of committed relationships, why the world is the way it is. He could be your friend.

We met. We became friends, though not quite equal. A writer penning novels has limited tools. But there’s no higher art than music; a singer-songwriter is a bard. And then there was the problem of comprehension; every time Josh released a new record, I had just finished coming to an understanding of the last record. Although I’d write about the new one on the day of release, there was befuddlement between the lines.

But I think I’ve got a handle on his ninth release, “The Gathering.” [To buy the CD from Amazon and get a free MP3 download, click here. For the MP3 download, click here. And here’s histour schedule.]

He’s talked about “The Gathering,” mostly about the process of its creation:

“This record is the product of a strange and interesting time. When I started writing Gathering, I felt tired of living in the shadow of my earlier self, my earlier work — but more than discouraged, I felt charged with the possibility and the freedom of cutting myself loose from my own and others’ expectations. I began with an exciting sense of dissatisfaction, and what emerged, as I began to find my voice, was a record full of storms.”

He knows that those storms aren’t metaphorical:

“The fact is that we’re living in such an actual storm — in an actual time where there’s this intense upheaval. I think that storm ended up on the record … it had to. It’s what was happening. I couldn’t write enough.”

So while it’s tempting to hear “Gathering” as a random harvest, a demonstration of an actual artist taking his talent out for a spin, this is deceptively urgent music. Maybe I’m gridding my personal dramas over these songs, but I find them an examination of the greatest — maybe the only — power available to us in a time when someone is riding roughshod over all norms. That is the power to care for one another, to get close, closer than we’ve ever been before. A gathering of two. And then a collection of gatherings: a community, an Ark.

Easier said than done. Someone wants the intimacy more, someone needs it more than the other person wants it. And the emotions get in the way of the words; even the eloquent have mouths full of marbles. “Thunderbolt’s Goodnight,” for example, seems like a straightforward love song, supported by acoustic guitar, piano and a choir:

But consider the lyrics:

Oh, my love
You been crying, oh, honey, baby, please
We can work it out
I can’t survive unless you’re next to me

And all my life
Before I met you, when I was trying hard in love
I thought the sun
Was going down, but the sun was comin’ up

All those others
That I stayed with, their eyes are polished stone
And all my devils
That I made deals with so I wouldn’t have to sleep alone

I see your face
In the window, I see your face in the reflections of the moon
I feel my own
Ancient shadows disappear when I am near to you
So take this heart
Take this feeling, take my dark and reeling mind
From these poor words
Find a meaning far deeper than these clumsy lines

And this… exquisite:

I could play the English major and trace this theme, but it’s more to the point to encourage you to grapple with this record. It’s seductive as music, alternately fun and gorgeous. But if you pay attention, a singer-songwriter who does nothing casual or superficial is spinning a tale that cuts deep. “Gathering” is not memoir. It’s more like a gift.