Josh Ritter has above average writing ability

Worthy interpreter of stars and stripes author’s music today Josh Ritter turns 48. Behind him he left a career that is about to span thirty years, dotted with a dozen albums. To celebrate him we suggest you read the review of his latest album, released last year, “Spectral lines”.

Josh Ritter is 46 years old and in about 25 years of career he has so far released eleven albums. These records all have one characteristic in common: quality, or at least the search for quality. For lovers of the Americana genre, Ritter has long been a reliable name, a point of reference, and each of his releases is always an event to be greeted with joy. His are songs sung without raising the voice, which prefer to speak rather than scream at people’s souls. Without tricks and deceptions, without overproduction to alter the final product. The boy from Idaho has a decidedly above-average writing ability (among other things, he has also published a couple of novels) and to write his songs he draws inspiration from observation, with consequent reflection, on the cases of life. This was also the case for “Spectral lines”, an album dedicated to the memory of her mother which, perhaps for this reason, is crossed by a persistent vein of sadness and transience.

As we said, Josh knows how to speak to people’s hearts and he doesn’t fail to do so with his decisive speech in “Sawgrass” (“I was told there’s a star for every dreamer”).

“Honey I do” is musically delicate, positive and sunny but is counterbalanced by enigmatic and even disturbing lyrics. While more suspended and nocturnal is “Horse no rider”, where the protagonist without love simply feels like a horse without a rider. Beatles-esque nuances characterize “For your soul”, a lightness that is immediately swept away by the melancholic “Black crown”, punctuated by an acid guitar solo. “Strong swimmer,” the most narrative track on the entire album, opens with the words “On the night that you were born/Your mama who had many friends.” The sad “Whatever burns will burn” has musical atmospheres indebted to the Old European songwriting of a few decades ago, a Luigi Tenco-style song controlled by the sound of a piano and a female operatic voice in the background. “Any way they come” starts like a painful gospel to strip away all ambitions at the end. Josh Ritter sings the poetic “In fields” accompanied by the guitar and his voice soars very high. “Someday” is the worthy closing of the new work by Josh Ritter who here wonders a little disconsolately if one day there will ever be justice in this world.

When we talk about this American musician we often hear that he deserved greater success and that few know how to write songs like his. “Spectral lines” only confirms the rumors going around about him: certainly in the annals he will not be remembered like Bob Dylan or Leonard Cohen, but it is equally certain that he is a singer-songwriter with a capital C and remains among ours favorite singers of that most hidden America that we have learned to love by reading a certain genre of novels and seeing a certain genre of films.