osh Ritter’s folk stylings haven’t always elicited comparisons to Bob Dylan and a young Bruce Springsteen, names that inevitably arise in pre-concert Q & As and album reviews, usually precipitated with a sentence hailing Ritter as the second coming of the folk rock powerhouses of the ’60s.
The comparisons flow freely now. But the success of Ritter’s 2006 album, “The Animal Years,” which horror writer Stephen King said was his favorite album of the year in his Entertainment Weekly column, is a far cry from where Ritter was when he wasn’t compared with anyone at all.
He was merely a man from Idaho, an early-20s singer braving the unforgiving open mic scene in Boston, where he’d migrated to after graduating from Oberlin College in Ohio.
But like many of the characters he sings about in his soothing, unadorned tenor, Ritter took his own life-altering journey. An Irish band called The Frames played in Boston in January 2001 while Ritter fine-tuned his capable guitar skills, and some of its members saw Ritter perform. Intrigued, they approached him about opening for the band in Ireland. One $93 plane ticket later, Ritter was playing opening sets in packed pubs.
“Oh, man, that ticket was so cheap,” Ritter said when reached in Norfolk, Va. on the first day of his current cross-country tour. After pausing a moment to laugh, Ritter grew contemplative, a common temperament for this reflective troubadour.
“It was before all of this stuff (in the world) happened,” he said.
It was before Sept. 11 and the war in Iraq, before nuclear showdowns with countries the White House labeled as rogue nations.
It was a simpler time for Ritter, a time spent honing his performance skills before he started flexing his song-writing chops.
In Ireland, Ritter didn’t let inexperience prod any kind of culture shock.
“I hadn’t really played in front of people before, in actual shows,” he said. “But I discovered that if you love performing, you can do it. And if you love it and are willing to do all the other things around it that you don’t love as much, it’s like 20 minutes of vacation time on the stage.”
Apparently, Ritter made an impression in those 20 minutes. In 2003, his second album, “Hello Starling,” debuted at number two on the Irish charts, and since his first tour with The Frames, Ritter has developed a staunch following in Ireland.
It took a little longer, and considerably more work, for Ritter to reach that point in the United States. For five years, he traversed an endless road of touring, gradually making a name for himself. The critics loved his rural voice and richly woven songs, which were more akin to short stories filled with metaphors and tales of longing. But it wasn’t until the “The Animal Years” that Ritter finally achieved mainstream celebrity.
“I guess you can aim at commercial success, but that doesn’t mean it’s going to be any kind of a good record,” Ritter said. “It just feels good to follow what you think you should record: how you hear something and what you want to talk about. It’s really exciting when it’s received in the same spirit that it’s offered.”
The biggest difference between “The Animal Years” and Ritter’s other albums is the content, which has a decidedly anti-war feel sprinkled among the love-lorn ballads and accounts of travelers far from home. And even though Ritter is often compared with Dylan, Springsteen and Leonard Cohen, associations he has said are flattering, he counts writers and statesmen among his major influences. His affinity for Mark Twain, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams helps explain his feelings about the current state of the world.
“I don’t like the way language is being used right now,” Ritter said. “It bothers me that the language that we use to describe going to war against Iraq is the same language that popped up in the Old Testament.”
Ritter’s feelings are most apparent on “Thin Blue Flame,” a nine-minute articulation of his mounting dread at the world’s use of religious calling to rally troops in a conflict slowly spinning toward apocalypse. But Ritter only offers his thoughts because he has something to say, not because he wants to foist his opinion on others, he said.
“I’ve never believed that song could change people’s lives, that songs could change the world,” Ritter said. “But I do think you can listen to a song and feel like you’re not alone, and I feel like that’s been a really cool thing to find, that there are other people who think the way that I do, or envision things the way I do.”
This vision was shaped in part by his love for the Pacific Northwest. He grew up in Moscow, Idaho, on the state’s Washington border.
“I love the stories and the history; there’s so much that’s gone on there, from the silver mining days to the fake gold rush that started Moscow off,” Ritter said. “And all these weird little things that happened, like Swedes
moving out somewhere, or Jesuits moving up to Coeur d’Alene. It’s a weird place to be, but I love it.”
Spoken like a true storyteller.
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