(((withoutsound)))

Have you ever met someone who always has a smile on his face? Someone who you can’t quite figure out what the hell he has to be happy about? But that smile… that smile never disappears and in the end it somehow makes you happy, too.

Last night at the Southgate House in Newport, Kentucky, I met a man that fits that description. A man who, if you listen to what he has to say, sounds like he’s rather pissed. Yet there Josh Ritter stood, grinning ear to ear from the moment he bounded onto the stage to the moment he left. And the longer I watched him, the bigger my smile grew.

Now I should admit that my exposure to Josh Ritter prior to this Sunday night was fairly limited. I’d heard him on All Songs Considered and the track Girl in the War was on a recent Paste Magazine sampler, which apparently my wife has been wearing out on her drive to and from work, but I”ve frequently confused him with Josh Rouse. This confusion stems partly from their similar western plains roots, but is probably more fueled by my decaying memory and the fact that they have the same initials. Something akin to the way I often confuse Bill Pullman with Bill Paxton.

The Idaho-born songwriter has been around for a while, but his 2006 album The Animal Years may be the indicator he’s finally realized himself as a songwriter. Ritter’s fearlessness to mix politics with music has rightfully earned him comparisons to Dylan and Springsteen, but there’s also a certain amount of introspection, poking around with the idea of getting older that evokes Jackson Browne. His lyrics, which are erudite and subtly poltical, reveal an underlying incredulity. Aren’t we better than this? Can’t we somehow do better? Heavily influenced by the writings of Mark Twain, Ritter isn’t pointing fingers, he’s simply asking questions. It just seems that many of these questions are directed at another guy who’s frequently caught smiling when he probably shouldn’t be - a guy known simply as W.

You can download a 2-part podcast of an interview with Ritter on Paste Magazine’s Culture Club here and here.

• Listen to Wolves.
• Listen to Thin Blue Flame.

Buy The Animal Years from Idaho’s Record Exchange.