JOSH RITTER loves writing, loves the process of it, and takes great care over the words, images, and phrases he uses in his songs to get his message across, and one of his finest, ‘The Bone of Song’, is a deep meditation on songwriting and nature of artistic inspiration.
Given the quality of Josh’s lyrics it is no surprise that he is participating in this year’s Cúirt International Festival of Literature. Indeed he has a doubly good reason to be here as the Idaho native is about to become a published author with his debut novel set to appear next year.
Josh’s sixth studio album, So Runs The World Away (Independent Records ) will be released on Friday April 23, while on Saturday 24 he will be in Galway for two performances. Josh will be in the Druid Lane Theatre at 2pm for a public interview with broadcaster Philip King as part of Cúirt. Then at 8pm he plays a ‘Róisín Dubh presents...’ show at The Radisson Blu Hotel’s Live Lounge.
During his interview in the Druid Theatre, Josh is certain to speak about his forthcoming novel, Bright’s Passage will be published by Random House in summer 2011. So what is the novel about?
“It’s about a man who comes back home to West Virginia after the First World War,” Josh tells me during our Monday afternoon interview. “He comes back with an angle that attaches itself to him and it’s about that week in his life. I also wanted to show in the novel how wide and broken open the world became after that war. I think it’s a comedy, I think it’s a pretty funny book, but I also put the main character through his paces.”
What inspired Josh to write Bright’s Passage? “A book I was reading that I really enjoyed, The Proud Tower by Barbara Tuchman, it’s about the quarter century up to the First World War,” he replies. “It shows the level the world had come to and it was reaching boiling point but no one knew this was happening. It was the idea of not being prepared that interested me. I was also inspired by some beautiful churches I saw as I’ve gone around on tour.”
Josh’s lyrics always contain a strong narrative sense, with a keen eye for small, telling, details, so was natural he should now turn his talents to prose, but how long has the idea for the novel been in his mind?
“I’ve been planning it for years,” says Josh, “but I didn’t have the tools, I didn’t realise it would be like running a marathon. Everything in modern life is geared towards the instant, it’s a microwave culture. That’s not a bad thing, if I want information on anything I can get it instantly, but it can also make us believe we are entitled to everything and can do anything instantly.”
The marathon simile is apt as Josh drew on his experience of runner to help him with his ambition of completing a novel.
“It was always my dream to run a marathon and I’ve run three of them now,” he says. “It told me you can’t do something like this in an afternoon, it takes time and endurance, and you have to build up to it, and that’s what happened with writing this novel. I would sat to myself ‘Do 1,000 pages a day’ and don’t think too much about it.”
So how did Josh find the experience of writing a novel compared to songwriting?
“Songwriting is a very pure form of writing. It’s concision. You’re telling a story and you need to say it as clearly as possible and make it rhyme, whereas in a novel you have as many words as you want,” he says. “I’m now in the deep editing stages of the novel and it’s bothering me, looking over every line and seeing what needs editing, or re-writing. I love it though. I don’t know if I’m good at it but it’s fun and a challenge, and it’s how I feel about songwriting, it’s fun.”
While we will have to wait until 2011 for the novel to appear, Josh the songwriter will be available next week on So The World Runs Away. Some of the themes and ideas he explores in Bright’s Passage will also be found on the new album, as well as ideas about trust, punishment and redemption, and the need to be able to rely on and have faith in someone.
“All the characters in the album feel the world is getting away from them,” says Josh. “Things are happening to them, but what they go through is solitary and there are a lot of lonesome ballads. The TS Eliot line “the spinning world still spins” is an idea that appeals to me, the idea of time passing no matter what you do, so there are reference s to numbers and spiral galaxies and big sounding phrases to take it all in.”
Tickets for the Radisson concert are available from the Róisín Dubh and Zhivago. Support on the night will be from Chicago singer-songwriter Joe Pug. Tickets for the Druid show are available from the Town Hall on 091 - 569777.
