“The Bible, it’s always been something I’ve been ambivalent about. But The Book of Job, that’s some of the most beautiful poetry I’ve ever read. ‘Where were you when I stretched lines across the deep?’ That’s just incredible. Or the Apostle John, who was supposed to be the youngest, and he was 12 or 13 when he knew Jesus, but he was an old man writing the gospel on this island off by himself, remembering that time. There’s this great nostalgia in what he writes. I’m not a religious writer, but in the Bible there’s that slap in the face, where you get this understanding all at once.”
That shock of insight most often flares up in Ritter’s unapologetic romanticism — a mysticism unique to nature and the mystery unique to one in love. “Lucky are you who finds me in the wilderness,” Ritter sings in “Bone Of Song”, translating for his muse. “I am the only unquiet ghost that does not seek rest.”
“Sometimes when you’re singing,” Ritter suggests, “it can be a like serenade, and you’re underneath their window, and you’re so in love with them and with the song. You hope your singing will make the love mutual. But if it doesn’t, you still have the song. Even birds sing so that others will love them. There are different kinds of love: wanting the love of having sold three million records, or wanting the love of singing for the people that are genuinely there to hear.”
Among those who heard Ritter is Joan Baez, who invited him to open some shows and also recorded his song “Wings” the most enigmatic epic on Hello Starling, for her recent release Dark Chords On A Big Guitar.
“She gets mad if you treat her any differently than anyone else,” Ritter says of meeting Baez, “so you try to act like you’re treating her normally and that’s just worse. I wanted that song, ‘Wings’, to have in every couplet a strong image. I was thinking about Cataldo Mission, a Jesuit mission near the Canadian border. It was going to be about travel, but it ended up being about people changing and the land changing, and who those people were was being taken away. It’s a little like traveling through time and geography; it paints around the edges and never quite says what it’s about.”
All of 27, Ritter knows his art is just beginning: he approaches songwriting and performing with humility, respect, and one value above all else: unforced and unaffected honesty.
“Yes, there are things I know now that I didn’t know before,” he says. “But a record should be a document of who you are and what you’re thinking about at the time. The records I love now are the ones where the message is more important than the medium, where the music doesn’t get in the way of the song.
“In a great song, you don’t think about the person singing it, but you think about yourself. It’s like that Leonard Cohen quote, when you say poetry you say it and then get out of the way. I wanted it retain that sense that it’s a real person singing about something. I didn’t want to lose that.”
ND contributing editor Roy Kasten lives and writes in St. Louis, Missouri.
