- Laura Wilson
Josh Ritter and the Royal City band perform with Elephant Revival tomorrow night (Friday, January 22) and Saturday, January 23 at Revolution Hall (1300 SE Stark). Details here.
Josh Ritter has been a solo artist for more than 15 years, but not until his seventh studio album, 2013’s The Beast in Its Tracks, did Ritter sound so unaccompanied, so alone. Chronicling his recent divorce from singer Dawn Landes, The Beast in Its Tracks was sparse and largely unadorned, offering the most nakedly personal collection Ritter had ever recorded. But in art, as in life, after the wounds have been licked and healed, what emerges is often stronger, more full of vitality and grace, than what came before.
Sermon on the Rocks, Ritter’s eighth album, is not only a return to his dynamic, spirited, and confident form, it’s one of his strongest collections yet. It is the sound of someone who has found joy again in life and love and wants to preach it from the mountaintop.
“It felt cathartic, in far more of a way than I think Beast in Its Tracks ever did,” Ritter says on the phone from Brooklyn. “Beast in Its Tracks felt like a kind of a dissection, and this one felt just like running down a mountain. It felt really terrific.”
To record the album, Ritter brought his Royal City Band to New Orleans, along with Grammy-winning producer/engineer Trina Shoemaker, who co-produced. Sermon on the Rocks, which Ritter describes, perhaps facetiously, as “messianic oracular honky-tonk,” has a slicker and more percussive sound than its predecessors, though it retains Ritter’s playfulness and wordplay, as well as his ability to shift musical gears from track to track. In Sermon on the Rocks‘ 12 songs, Ritter handles post-punk (“Birds of the Meadow”), jazz noir (“Seeing Me ‘Round”), and bouncy Paul Simon-style folk-pop (“Young Moses” and “Cumberland”).