More Joshing around

Josh Ritter has shown great interest in rummaging through his own back catalogue for some time, with several live albums and acoustic special editions of his first studio albums, and t strikes me as strange that he has yet to revisit the obvious starting point of hid eponymous debut.

I first saw him live in the late lamented Lobby bar venue in Cork, where many US musicians crowded onto a tiny stage in a room that held 200 maximum and was defiantly for listening gigs – silence and attention were demanded when an act was on stage; I think the record for maximum number crowded onto the tiny stage was for Willard Grant Conspiracy, at around 190 band members! Anyway, Josh had just released 'Me and Jiggs', which I had heard, and so I went to the gig and it was clear he had a Cork fan club already, with a general air of adoration afoot which was quite unique/ Anyway, the gig was good and I bought his CD after, in a plain brown card sleeve with his image hastily sketched in the centre.

The album then and now sounds like Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen got mixed up in some giant blender into which someone threw great piles of distilled enthusiasm and essence of joy, to compensate for those gentlemen's lack of demonstrable quantities of either. He plays and sings like he is rooted in his roots but arching to break for the stars, his singing often seeming like he has so many thoughts and words to get out that they can't fit out his mouth properly, and collapse out in a mad rush of jumbled but consistently charming images and melodies.

Some tracks are as pretty as anything he wrote later ('Beautiful night', 'Potter's wheel') and erudite images and references abound, while his trademark wit is everywhere evident (my favourite line being 'she said she was from Delaware, I said oh it must be gorgeous there'). However, it is the hidden final track which I love most, and which I always called the scientific love song, but is actually (I think) called 'Stuck on you'), which can be seen (and listened carefully to!) here:

I remember hearing that he studied science in university, and it shows in this song's wonderful play on sciency terms and images in something which is so cute it could easily be nauseating, but absolutely isn't. This is probably the only song off his debut which I have heard him play in later gigs, and even then not for a few years. Its spiritual successor is probably 'The temptation of Adam', one of my favourites of his, as below:

However, sticking to his more hard-to-find rarities, particularly those which can be filed under charming, I also love his version of 'Tonight you belong to me' (which I first came across i the Steve Martin film 'The jerk'), which he duets with Erin McKeown (I actually saw her support him once in Cork and they did the duet live) below:

The final clip for now is a new song he played at the Cork Marquee concert recently, called 'the Curse', which seems to continue his occasional fascination with Egypt:

To return to my original point. I have never understood why he seems to have disowned his debut (it is now hard to find and not sold at his gigs); let the campaign to have it reissued start here!