The Animal Years, Josh Ritter’s latest album is, in brief, a simply incredible album. I’m a proud Americana lover and anyone who follows in the footsteps of Dylan, Cash and Springsteen in order to talk about the regular Joe in the coffee shop and his place in the big canvas of life is already on my “f-ing awesome” list and Josh Ritter is able to rightfully step up with these guys after this album.
‘Thin Blue Flame’ is Ritter’s most direct commentary on today’s bad and dark world in a gorgeous nine and half minute, two-chord, Whitman-esqe epic of a song loaded with the imagery of Twain, Shakespeare, and the regular Joe in the coffee shop. But figuring this all out isn’t easy, nor does he mean it to be…you have to stop and figure out what these songs are all really about; you have to interpret the meaning. Peter and Paul, whom I consider to be the two most fascinating characters in the New Testament, talk among themselves in the ‘Girl in the War’ lamenting how their rules “were the first to go” in this chaotic world, the absence of God and the divergence of good intentions and the reality of those intentions put to practice. Paul the evangelist, stern and orthodox, pushes for acceptance and patience…Peter the leader, but the grayer of the two, seeks within and everywhere else for his answers.
Ritter leaves us at the end of the album aware that the world can be a dark, desolate and lonely place full of selfishness, greed and bad men…but he also leaves us very aware that the entire point of all the darkness is to not only find the potential for light and joy, but to create it where ever we go.
Idaho, thank you for producing a son such as Ritter.