SpringsteenDrakeCohenVanZandtYoungDylan.

There we go. Nobody who reviews this album, Golden Age of Radio, can resist dropping at least some combination of those six names. I figured I’d get them all out of my system in one blurting mention so I can devote the bulk of this story to Josh Ritter, an artist who – despite some inevitable (and immensely flattering) comparisons – has contributed a refreshingly new voice to the American musical landscape. A new old voice, if you will.

Hailing from Moscow, Idaho, Ritter has taken a familiar small-town motif and written it much, much larger. You might say he’s penned a collection of ballads for the backroads or composed an opus for Mayberry’s Opie. Regardless of what you choose to call it, the disconsolate edginess of Ritter’s vocals and effortless poeticism create a thing of beauty, rife with feeling.

These songs are at times fragile, intimate, brokenhearted; in other moments, however, they are jubilant, celebrating the simplest pleasures of living – walking in tall grass with a lover, reclining on someone’s roof beneath star-littered heaven, Saturday nights spent in the company of friends.

Golden Age of Radio, a mostly acoustic album influenced heavily by the tradition of American roots music, charts the emotional terrain of somebody who feels trapped by life, yet constantly dreams of escaping. These songs are about separation, living your life in two places at once – an often-desperate reality and the more wistful realm of fantasy. In the song, Leaving, Ritter sings:

Every time I turn around /
Something else just floated away /
There ain’t a single thing I’ve found /
That decided to stay

These are the songs you imagine crackling faintly on a beat-up AM/FM car radio at 2am while you’re driving through the night, headlights tracing some endless stretch of asphalt winding into nowhere. Or rattling out of a jukebox while you’re busy devising how best to start a conversation with someone whose smile glows like a 1000-watt bulb in the barroom haze. These are the songs you listen to in your dark bedroom on long nights when the snow keeps coming but sleep just refuses.

For a guy in his mid-20s, Ritter’s music opens up to reveal an old soul pulsing beneath, his maturity continually evident in between each line, verse, and chorus. Golden Age of Radio introduces the world to a writer skilled at untangling life’s mystery, weaving those same threads into bittersweet mosaics. In the album’s title track, Ritter sings:

Standing in line to get my self-book signed off on /
By the Reverend who shouts to the converted /
Have mercy on this boy who did all by the book /
And still kind of has his doubts

Songwriting isn’t always about resolving the tension of living and banishing doubt. Josh Ritter reminds us that there can be a certain beauty in just writing about life as it happens to us: the good, the bad, the lovely.

Related Links:
Buy Josh Ritter’s Golden Age of Radio at Amazon.com

***
Jason Killingsworth lives in Gainesville, FL where he is currently whiling away his early 20s trying to break free from the clutches of the town in which he attended college. Once (if) he breaks free he plans to go somewhere else and do something with his life before it is over.