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| Photo by Laura Wilson |
Perhaps the fault was mine
Perhaps I just ignored
Who you were always gonna be
Instead of who I took you for
As if it’s any of our business, Josh Ritter’s broken heart will be on full display throughout his new album, The Beast In Its Tracks (due March 5th). In his own words:
“I wrote and recorded this record in the 18 months after my marriage had fallen apart. All heartbreak is awful – my broken heart wasn’t unique. But writing these songs was helping me get through the night and I didn’t have the strength to care or question.
It felt like a different record from the start. Far from the grand, sweeping feel of the songs on So Runs the World Away, these new ones felt like rocks in the shoe, hard little nuggets of whatever they were, be it spite, remorse, or happiness. I told all this to Sam Kassirer, my producer and friend. If we recorded these songs, which felt so personal, their starkness needed a corresponding simplicity of production. I hadn’t composed this stuff, I’d scrawled it down, just trying to keep ahead of the heartbreak, and they needed to be recorded like that.”
Ritter and the Royal City Band will be performing at Plush in St. Louis on Saturday, April 20th. Each ticket comes with a digital download of The Beast In Its Tracks.