Josh Ritter's "Sermon on the Rocks" coming October 16

Every Josh Ritter album is written with a new voice. It’s rare that an artist changes styles with each album while still maintaining exactly the things that make him unique, but Josh often pulls it off. Sure, the voice he used in his debut self-titled album wasn’t his, it was Bob Dylan’s, but basically since then, there’s been new characters singing to us every couple of years.

Hello Starling's main character was simply the most romantic, idealistic man ever. The Animal Years was a real-world prophet full of devastating predictions and grand takedowns. The Historical Conquests was a traveling bard spewing tall tales of adventure, heartbreak, generals, and the world’s end; stories rooted in the real world that grew into a more fabulous fiction every time he told it. So Runs the World Away was a man of logic - a historian with a specific interest in the little oddities of history and science.

Now, Sermon on the Rocks, Josh’s 2015 follow-up to his “divorce” record, The Beast In Its Tracks, brings us Paul Dano’s character from There Will Be Blood. Remember that guy? No? How about Carvinale? Did anybody watch that? That one place in the first season of True Detective with the preacher and his congregation in the middle of that field?

If you don’t know what I’m talking about, imagine this: a huckster preacher, a little wet with sweat and yelling just a little bit too loud to really convince the guy standing in the back (Daniel Day-Lewis or Matthew McConaughey, or in Josh’s case, us) that he actually believes what he’s saying. He’s attempting a fire-and-brimstone-style sermon that he’s probably making up on the spot, and he’s also probably a little bit drunk. 

And it’s amazing. While the voice that he inhabits throughout Sermon is loose and rambling, the production is detail-oriented, tight, and engaging. The heavy bass and percussion songs elaborate on that sense of dread, the impending doom promised when you first entered the tent. “Birds of the Meadow” introduces us to this viewpoint perfectly, repeatedly telling us the prophecy and that “fire is coming.”

“Homecoming” plays out like the professional part of the makeshift mass, as it builds itself up and back down over and over again with Josh performing a somewhat spoken, mostly sung, but still-reminiscent-of-a-spoken-word prophecy over the songs beginning. 

“Henrietta, Indiana” is a wary story of possession, or of inherited evil. After the mill shuts down in Henrietta, Indiana, the narrators father and brother become a drunk and a faux-preacher, and eventually, murderers. 

“Cumberland” has already been compared to Graceland-era Paul Simon multiple times, but it’s an apt comparison, especially about a minute in when Josh proclaims “If you get there before I do, tell everybody I’m coming, too!” complete with handclaps, hand-played drums, and some other instrument that I don’t know what it is but is probably used on every track on Graceland. (Whatever, I don’t know that much about instrument sounds.) I wish I could express as much passion about places that I love as much as Josh’s narrator does here about Cumberland.

“Pretty girl, prettiest that’s every been

Wild as weed, sweeter than a mandolin

I ain’t a handome man but I bet she’ll take me as I am

I haven’t meter her yet but I bet she lives in Cumberland,”

“Before you start talkin’ ‘bout the wonders of the world again

The Taj Mahal, the Great Wall, the places that I never been

Take a little drive, take a little trip to heaven

And wonder for awhile if it’s Paradise or Cumberland.”

All of this is just dressing for this album’s centerpieces - the three best songs that mostly break away from the character-voice: “Getting Ready To Get Down”, “Where the Night Goes”, and “A Big Enough Sky”. The latter two are classic Josh songs full of poetry and romanticisms, but it’s that first one that is the real magnum opus of this album, and probably even the last eight years of Josh’s career.

“Getting Ready To Get Down” is a song about a small religious town that shuns sexuality and freedom, especially in its young girls. The girl in the song gets sent away to a Bible college in Missouri simply based on the way she looks, most likely referring to the way that she’s dressed and/or developed. The song takes a refreshingly nonjudgemental take towards female promiscuity, pointing out religion’s conflation of morality and virginity. 

As a quick aside, I’ve always been annoyed when someone takes offense at words like “slut” or “whore” by pointing out that someone isn’t one of those things. My problem with those words isn’t that they get used on people undeserving of their definitions, but that they get used at all. For example, take the n-word (they aren’t exactly comparable, but bear with me). We don’t take offense when someone uses the word by saying, “no, that guy isn’t a n-word, he’s only half-black” or some dumb shit like that, we take offense because it’s an offensive word that shouldn’t be used at all for anyone. Similarly, women are free to do whatever they want with their bodies regardless of what old men and long-since-dead men say about it.

This song gets that, and it makes me happy. With a few simple lines, Josh points out how absolutely stupid and misogynist the creation myth is: “Eve ate the apple ‘cause the apple was sweet.” Pleasure isn’t something to shy away from unless it hurts someone else. Eating good food, and in turn, having good sex, isn’t hurting anyone, and it feels great. Not a sin. I like to imagine that if Adam ate that apple, he would have been praised for being curious and questioning his environment.

The song is absolutely stuffed with absolutely fantastic lines:

“The doctor thinks the devil must got you by your senses,

But to live the way you please doesn’t sound like possession.”

“The men of the country club, the ladies of the ‘xilliary 

Talk about love like it’s apple pie and liberty

To really be a saint, you gotta really be a virgin

Dry as a page in the King James version.”

I mean, just the amount of meanings for the word “dry” in that last line is astounding enough - dry between the legs, dry because paper is dry, and dry because the King James Bible is fucking boring.

And of course, “If you wanna see a miracle, watch me get down.”

If I could find a criticism here, it’s that I don’t always hear as much anger in Josh’s voice as I wish I did, but of course, that would ruin the illusion that he believes much of what he’s saying. But when I want to shout that last quoted line when I’m listening to this in my car, I wish Josh shouted it louder so I don’t have to hear my own terrible singing voice.

Of course, leave it to Josh, ever the wordsmith and one of the best writers of the past decade, to find the best way to describe this album: "Oracular messianic honkey-tonk," "a feeling of great kinetic energy," and "a Technicolor, red-blooded record." That pretty much sums it up.

As a post-script to this review, I thought I'd add a little personal anecdote. Having just moved in with my girlfriend, we've been looking for something to put our records and our player on/in. She was insisting that she was going to buy something from Ikea, but I hate Ikea. Like really fucking hate it. So I said I'd rather build my own shelf than get something from Ikea. She let me do it, probably because she knew how terrible I am at building things and just being handy in general. But I went for it. And here's what I got:

I will again stress how un-handy I am, so it's not perfect or anything, but I'm happy with the way it turned out. She still hasn't seen it, though, so we'll see how it goes. Here it is in the apartment:

I will just leave you with Josh Ritter's own little bit of personal gospel:

"Be good to everybody

Be a strength to the weak

Be a joy to the joyful

Be the laughter in the grief

And give your love freely to whoever that you please,

Don't let nobody tell you 'bout who you oughtta be

And when you get damned in the popular opinion

It's just another damn of the damns your not giving."