Singer, Songwriter, Sensation

Moscow’s Own Josh Ritter Featured on NPR’s Morning Edition

By Joan Opyr, 5-15-06

I've never met Josh Ritter. My friend Washboard Dave, host of The Bull City Cosmic Hoedown in Durham, North Carolina, can't believe this. Moscow has only 21,000 residents. Don't we all know each other? Aren't we all related? Didn't a friend of a friend of a friend go to high school with him?

Well, sort of. I've been staring at a picture of Josh Ritter at the Radio Free Moscow studio for more than a year. Every Sunday, from 2 to 4 PM, I co-host The Auntie Establishment and Brother Carl Show with my friend, Carl Westberg, Jr. We specialize in liberal rants, bad jokes, and great music. As I work the mixing board, I sometimes gaze at the wall in front of me and wonder idly about the musicians' photos that are posted there. But that's as far as it goes. I don't usually think to Google them or buy their CDs.

That all changed when I heard Josh Ritter on NPR's Morning Edition. I went straight home and downloaded The Year of the Animals from Apple's iTunes. If you listen to nothing else this year, you should listen to Ritter's song, "Idaho." This is the sound of my home. This is how it feels to live here, to be bound, willingly, to the Palouse. Ritter has captured the sense of the place.

Josh Ritter is a great musician right now. He's twenty-nine years old. His reputation will grow, and Ritter will join Bruce Springsteen and Bob Dylan and Pete Seeger in that elite pantheon of singers who are universal and timeless precisely because they are so strongly connected to a particular place and a particular time. No hype. No big egos. Just amazing music from an amazing place -- from the soul of Josh Ritter of Moscow, Idaho.

So, does anyone happen to have his phone number? A friend of a friend of a friend?

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