Josh Ritter: First A Songwriter, Now A Novelist
Were leavened with touches of humor.Ritter's voice doesn't particularly sound like Dylan's or Cohen's, but he's got a similar ambition and mastery of words; critics use literary references in discussing his music. So maybe it's fitting that these days, you might just as easily find him at a book reading as on a concert stage. Ritter's debut novel, Bright's Passage, comes out this week.
The novel is the story of Henry Bright, a young West Virginian who has just come home from serving in World War I in France. After his young wife dies in childbirth, Bright is left with his infant son to flee a raging wildfire and a trio of avengers. The fantastic hasn't been left behind — one character is an angel who has taken over the body of Bright's horse.
."I made a real decision to not be precious with where I wrote. Most days I'm traveling and if you're in an airport lounge or a hotel room or a tour bus, or backstage before a show, they're all places that you can write if you set your mind to it," he says.
No cabin in the woods required, though Ritter adds with a chuckle that he wouldn't turn one of those down. Besides, he says, writing the novel felt, a lot of the time, like writing songs:
"You take all your interests and all your preoccupations and you kind of fill up a bucket. And the stuff that runs off, over the top, is a song or is a novel, like Bright's Passage . You can't really direct where it's going to go."
He started writing the book on a tour bus.
"The story kind of exploded out of me as if it had been there for a long time," he says. "I had been interested in the first World War, which I really feel is one of the great forgotten episodes in U.S. history, and out of that came this idea of the angel, angels being something that I have always thought about in my songs [as being] far from benign characters."
The angel in Bright's Passage fits that description; sometimes a guardian to Henry Bright, sometimes malevolent.
"I always have found that contrary to what we look at a lot of times in popular culture, we kind of take all the spice out of the angel," Ritter says. "You know, I see angels as many times on desktop calendars as I see kittens. I feel that angels, when they show up in the Bible or wherever they show up, that's rarely a good thing."
At times, Bright's story flashes back to wartime trenches in France; Ritter fills these passages with harrowing violence but also transcendent awareness. An exploding bomb fills the air with "capsized calm, in which the world seemed viewed from beneath a great depth of water. It was as if all the sound and feeling were gone suddenly and within that watery silence, death was not something hurtled from above but more like a meadow of wildflowers that blossomed from the ground.
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