Culture That Made Me: Josh Ritter on Foucault’s Pendulum, Bob Dylan and Philip Roth
Josh Ritter plays several gigs in Ireland. Picture: Sam Kassirer
Josh Ritter, 46, grew up in a town in Idaho, United States. He is one of America’s finest songwriters.
He has enjoyed a cult following in Ireland since his days touring as a support act for The Frames a couple of decades ago.
Two of his live albums, In the Dark – Live at Vicar Street (2006) and Live at the Iveagh Gardens (2010) were recorded in Dublin. He has published two novels.
Josh Ritter and the Royal City Band will perform at Cork Opera House, 8pm, Monday, 23 October, and also has upcoming gigs in Limerick (Dolan’s, Oct 22) and Dublin (NCH, Oct 24-25).
The first album I remember pricking my ears up was Sgt. Pepper’s by the Beatles. I was 10 years old. ‘A Day in the Life’ and ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’ stuck in my head. I had no concept for psychedelia. The songs seemed like cartoons pasted on the wall like wallpaper – they were so colourful and so full of humour, but also they had a darkness and a sinister vibe to them. They were totally overwhelming.
I discovered Mississippi John Hurt in a record store. On the cover of his album – which was Mississippi John Hurt: Today! – he looked like my grandfather who had died some years before. The expression in his eyes was so full of aged good humour. I knew I had to listen to that record. That – in conjunction with Bob Dylan – changed my view of what music was and who could make it. You didn't have to be a cartoon or something that was clearly not real. You could be a real person and make real music.
Umberto Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum made a big impression when I read it in my youth. Umberto Eco is an amazing writer and cultural critic. Foucault’s Pendulum is about academic obsession, and tracing the path of the Templar Knights down through the ages to the present day, and a man becoming obsessed with the idea that the world is controlled by a Templar plot. It's a beautifully deep, gorgeously written book. It’s also one of those books you read when you're a teenager and you think, well, I have a glimmer of what's going on, but there's so much in the world that I don't know.
The first track on Bob Dylan’s Nashville Skyline is ‘Girl from the North Country’ with Johnny Cash. It blew apart the idea that everything had to be composed and slick. Those were two guys that were clearly at the end of a two-day meeting of the minds. They were singing like they needed to shave. The rest of the stuff on that record – whether it's ‘Peggy Day’ or ‘I Threw It All Away’ – were songs that were also very simple to learn how to play. I was able to learn the chords to those songs, and I started using those chords – along with those from Mississippi John Hurt – to write my own songs.
Joanna Newsome remains one of my favourite lyricists. She’s a person who truly takes badass chances. Her writing is so fanciful and wonderful. It's like falling into a Lewis Carroll story. She has such an original voice.
Another record that inspires me to take chances and go to some wilder places is Fiona Apple’s Fetch the Bolt Cutters. When I first heard it, it was like discovering a whole new universe. This person is coming back from a place and bringing us some stuff that is truly from the edges of the Galaxy.
A movie I’ve returned to a couple of times recently is Arrival. It’s an incredible movie about first contact with non-human intelligence, which is on a lot of people’s minds these days. It’s different to so many of the big alien movies where you have people going out and kicking alien asses. It’s a slow, still movie about the potential inherent in our being human, the value that's there, how special it is to find connection with each other, the potential for finding connection with others out there as well, and how beautiful that can be. It's a gorgeous movie.
Pete Dexter wrote a number of books that were hardboiled like God's Pocket and Paris Trout, which won a National Book Award, and is about a town struggling to deal with the crime that a man has committed. He wrote a fantastic book called Deadwood, too, which was much prior to the HBO series. His writing is so beautiful and bleary, which I tried to bring into my own work when I got the nerve to become a novelist.
When you're starting out as a teenager – and you think you might be a writer, and you might have something to say – you have literary heroes. What would happen if you got the chance to meet them? What would we spend the night talking about? The Ghost Writer by Philip Roth is about a boy who has won an award for fiction, and he gets the chance to meet his hero, this Russian writer who few people even realise is still alive upstate in Massachusetts somewhere. It’s about him spending the night with his hero and his hero’s assistant, who turns out to be not who we think she is. It’s short, sharp and deep. As a songwriter, I’ve grown to appreciate concision. He’s a dazzling writer.
Michael Shannon is an amazing actor. I saw him – it’s over a decade ago – in a play on Broadway called Mistakes Were Made by this guy, Craig White. It’s a one act play about a theatre promoter. His life is crumbling around him, as he's desperately trying to put on a show. It's incredible. It’s so funny and Michael Shannon just burns up all the ground around him. He was so on fire. I went to see that play three times.
Muriel Sparks is best known for The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, but one of my favourites is Memento Mori, which is about a series of mysterious phone calls. It's like sucking on a lemon. I feel the same way about Memento Mori as I feel about Kid A by Radiohead. It's fast, sharp, uncomfortable and unsettling, and perfect. It's a masterpiece.
One of the movies I loved growing up, both in the story of how it was made and the style of the movie was The Apostle with Robert Duvall and Billy Bob Thornton. It’s a movie about a guy who's committed a heinous act, who is on the run. He finds this little town. He’s drawn through a number of circumstances into joining the community in this little town and does work there before he's eventually caught. It's a beautiful movie.
