Like the Northern Lights
It had been two years since I saw Josh Ritter in concert. His was one of the first shows to be causally postponed in early March of 2020. “We hope to find a date to reschedule in June!” came the chirpy email from the venue. I still laugh and laugh and laugh when I think of how dopily optimistic we all were that we were looking at, what, a week or so, maybe, curtailing a few big events like live performances. Reschedule in June, right. You and the rest of the Universe
I’ve been a fan of Josh’s music (in my mind we are definitely on a first name basis) since his break-out, melt-every-molecule-in-your-body hit in the early 2000s, “Kathleen” splash landed him on THE MAP. “All the other girls here are stars/You are the Northern Lights,” croons Josh in the first lines of the song. He vocally saunters in with an achingly weathered mid-western lilt, borrowing a trace of Dylan. “What a pick-up line!” sighed my friend, Nicole, one day when we were driving somewhere and “Kathleen” came on the radio. THE RADIO was still a big deal back then and also still key to putting an artist on THE MAP. And it is a great line made even more so because it’s sung by a narrator who has no romantic game, who knows Kathleen is worlds out of his league, but luck and timing are on his side:
I know you are waiting and I know that it’s not for me
But I’m here and I’m ready and I’ve saved you the passenger seat.
And I won’t be your last dance, just your last good-night
Every heart is a package tied up in knots someone else tied.
I’ll be the one to drive you back home, Kathleen.
Have mercy on us all, Josh Ritter!
That song came out in 2003 and Josh performs it at every single show without fail. It’s become his “Piano Man,” a sort of signature tune and sometimes all he has to do is kick things off and let the crowd do the rest. By now he has easily sang that song literally thousands of times, which you might think he’d use to lean on during the live shows, use it to take a kind of energy breather and let the audience carry him for a few minutes. Nope. In the twenty years I’ve been going to see him perform, which probably comes out to somewhere between 50 and 60 concerts and counting, Josh winds up and releases his exuberance for “Kathleen” as if it just charted on pop radio for the first time that day. But it’s not just that song, the one that, you can tell, he’s sending up a prayer of gratitude for the doors it opened to him in a business that makes it easier for you to remove your own appendix than sustain a viable career. It’s the whole damn show. I’m in that audience for the music, absolutely, but I’m a fan for life because the unfiltered joy Josh Ritter exudes at getting to play his songs for people is the real, real deal and who wouldn’t want to spend two hours in the presence of that kind of raw, uncut, happy-goodness?
I’m currently reading the book, This Is What It Sounds Like by Susan Rogers. Rogers is a PhD cognitive neuroscientist and professor at Berklee School of Music, but in the first act of her life she was the sound engineer on Prince’s Purple Rain album, ever heard of it? Yeah, me neither. Rogers discusses how our unique brain alchemy plays a role in the music we not just gravitate towards, but covet; the albums we’d slip into the desert island trunk along with the book we’d actually read (The Twilight Trilogy) instead of the book we’d tell everyone we’d read (War and Peace). There are a range of musical elements that factor into what resonates with us on neurological levels and one of those is authenticity. She writes: “Authenticity is the subjective conviction that the emotion expressed in a musical performance is genuine and uncontrived.” Or as Kim Gordon from Sonic Youth said, “Most of the time people don’t pay money to see someone perform or make art to see someone who is perfect. They go to see someone who believes in themselves.”
The night my friend, Nicole (same one), and I saw Josh he was wearing these garish fuchsia-patterned pants that can only be described as the unholy alliance of wallpaper in a 1920s New Orleans bordello and your Nana’s couch upholstery. Two songs in and as he started strumming the intro to the next tune, Josh quips, “I’ve had these pants charging for, like, two years.” He’s not a polished speaker—he stutters, he blanks getting from one thought to another, he’ll choose the non-sequitor over the polished “story” every time. It’s wonderfully, refreshingly awkward to witness. Josh Ritter may be smart, artistically gifted (in addition to his albums he’s written two novels and paints), and accomplished, but he’s also just a person, a flawed, weird, beautiful individual just trying to be human like everyone else. That he gets to share and express that humanity with us through his art is really just a sweet, lucky deal.
I have seen Josh with a full band, which inevitably requires dancing at some point in the night, even if it’s in the aisles of a posh theatre. I’ve seen him solo in large and intimate spaces; I’ve waited two hours to catch him play a short, free set at an outdoor lunchtime type concert series. The set list is always different; the pants are increasingly unique, but I always leave transformed and lifted and inspired to reinvest my belief in what such a genuine offering of art can do and be.
And when he smiles? Man, it’s like the Northern Lights.
Here is a brief “joy ride” with Josh!
The rest of these were taken at shows ranging between 2015 and 2019 and, believe me, barely come close to capturing the ebullient energy of this mere mortal. Mercy, I say again, on us all Josh Ritter!
