Josh Ritter’s musical, lyrical conquests

Josh Ritter

Tonight at Diesel Club Lounge

1601 E. Carson St.

412-431-8800

Doors… Josh Ritter

Tonight at Diesel Club Lounge

1601 E. Carson St.

412-431-8800

Doors open at 6 p.m.

Josh Ritter recorded his latest LP in a backwoods farmhouse, he prefers personable Irish pubs to grand-scale venues and he likens autobiographical songwriting to animal torture.

As show-goers will hear at his Diesel Club Lounge performance tonight, Ritter pulled from these preferences to craft innovative tracks for his latest release, Historical Conquests. What listeners might not know is that Ritter jumped through all the pre-production hoops without a record label holding his hand.

The 32-year-old, Idaho-born musician doesn’t believe music needs much label assistance in its creation stages. But Ritter learned this the hands-on hard way while writing and recording Conquests.

Ritter’s former label, V2, went bankrupt while the album was still fighting preliminary battles on the way to production.

“At the moment when I was about to start making a record, all the funding just kind of went away, and it’s a good thing to realize you don’t need all that,” said Ritter in a recent telephone interview. “It’s a very democratic process these days in terms of making music – anybody can do it.”

And that’s how Conquests brought Ritter back to the essentials. While he has since signed with Sony BMG, Ritter put out Conquests on his own.

Instead of recording the album in a studio, the band trekked over to producer and keyboardist Sam Kassirer’s Maine farmhouse.

“I like recording up in the woods. There’s no distractions,” Ritter said. “When you look at all those different studios, they’ve got Nintendo and a bar and a hot tub. All the stuff that will keep you from recording.”

The atmosphere at the farmhouse shifted into the opposite extreme – Ritter and his band mates spent a three-week stint recording in near-isolation.

“There were no phones, no TV, no radio,” Ritter said. “We had BB guns to shoot each other with … and a fair amount of Schlitz beer, which is good – you don’t want to develop a taste for expensive beer in recording.”

But choosing a remote recording location wasn’t the only strategy Ritter employed for Conquests. He also stirred up his usual creative process, right down to the instrument he used to write melodies – piano, instead of guitar – and the manner in which he recorded: Ritter taped instrumental sections first and added lyrics later.

“I think of song writing like almost any other type of writing,” Ritter said. “It’s like a chemical reaction. If you alter the ingredients or the amounts or the steps, what comes out is something different.”

As for his song topics and musical stylings, Ritter doesn’t set limits on his sources of inspiration – literature, music, art and everyday occurrences are all potential vessels of material.

“The thing that I’ve learned in these last couple of years is that if you’re not open to inspiration from all fronts, you’re just gonna end up scraping at the bottom of the well,” Ritter said. “There’s nothing down there. You have to be ready to catch the rain in a bucket, you know? Wherever it comes from, you have to be ready.”

Ritter may be making strides here, but he got his start playing to rowdy crowds in Irish pubs. His record history reflects his musical stint in the Emerald Isle. 2003’s Hello Starling hit No. 2 on Irish Charts, and the 2006 In the Dark – Live at Vicar Street was an Ireland-only release.

Most of all, Ritter values the way Irish pub audiences can knock a performer’s ego out before it has a fighting chance.

“As soon as you get up on stage, people are shouting at you, and you either wither or you shout back,” Ritter said. “That’s exciting because that makes the veil between audience and performer very organic and very movable.”

Ritter stays set on maintaining a small-show feel with his music, even when he’s playing for a huge-venue audience.

“The ideal is that you always feel like you’re playing in a pub, that you always feel like you’re playing for a few people,” Ritter said. “And when things are going and the flow is really there … it’s like the room gets smaller,” he said. “It’s a tremendous feeling, to have that sense of all those people turning into one person and you’re right in there – you’re all just one big blob.”

Though Ritter strives for the rawest audience-performer connection his music can conjure, he refuses to let his songs get too personal. Nothing rubs his ear the wrong way quite like autobiographical lyrics.

“I don’t think that anybody should have to know what I’m thinking all the time, and I also believe that my life is no more interesting than anybody else’s,” said Ritter.

“The last thing I want to do is go to a show and hear some songwriter whine away about his girlfriend,” Ritter said. “It’s like torturing a raccoon with a screwdriver. I just don’t want to listen to that.”

On Conquests, Ritter’s image-laden lyrics often take first focus. “To The Dogs or Whoever” squeezes three historical characters into a claustrophobic Bible setting: “Deep in the belly of a whale I found her / Down with the deep blue jail around her / Running her hands through the ribs of the dark / Florence and Calamity and Joan of Arc.”

“I think, beyond a shadow of a doubt, the lyrics to me are the most important thing,” Ritter said. But that isn’t where his writing ambitions cease.

“I think that writing a novel is something I still want to do,” said Ritter. “Usually my lyrics eat up most of my ideas. The songs come in and take that stuff. I think that’s why I … write the short stories, because I think they could turn into songs eventually.”

Asked what he could picture himself doing outside of writing and performing music, Ritter said he would give the world stories, or possibly, baked goods.

“I’d want to be a novelist or a short story writer,” he said. “A donut salesman, maybe … mostly I like those jobs that let you be on your own.”

What can the audience expect from Ritter’s Diesel Club Lounge performance tonight?

“Just, you know, maximum rock and roll,” Ritter said. “We’re just starting off on this tour, so we’re kind of stomping the ground at the starting line.” Tonight, Ritter and his band plan to draw dogs, people or whoever into one big blob of sonic satisfaction.