musings

The songwriter's latest album is a celebration of writing for the thing that inspires you, not about it. "I’m inviting it to be witnessed," he says

Few artists spend more time putting the world around them into words than Josh Ritter. As a musician, he has released 13 studio albums and seven more EPs since 2000. As an author, he has published two novels. As a modern blogger, he is tenacious in regularly updating Josh Ritter’s Book of Jubilations, his dedicated Substack.

It should feel pretty standard, then, that Ritter has a metaphor on hand when he needs to describe the idea of touring after an album release.

“My uncle worked with the forest service,” he says, “and they would drop fish into upper-mountain lakes. They would seed those lakes with all these trout and stuff. They would fly over and just drop ’em in. That’s how it feels when you’re playing shows with new songs for the first time. You’re releasing them out into the world.”

On a late November afternoon at Brooklyn Steel, a manufacturing-plant-turned-concert-venue on the outskirts of the Brooklyn neighborhood, Greenpoint, that Ritter calls home, he took a break from soundcheck ahead of his final show of 2025. Ritter had toured relentlessly for most of the year but especially after the September release of I Believe in You, My Honeydew, his third album in three years. He holed up in his dressing room, grabbed a can of beer from the fridge, and lamented the chaos that his ceaseless need to create imparts on nearly every aspect of his life.

“I have to complete the circle. The circle, for me, starts with writing a ton of songs. I’m always writing songs. When they get to be, like, the ones that seem to hang together, I begin to make a record. At that point, I end up putting so much love and work into it, while not getting to play it live,” Ritter says. “The show is the culmination of it all.”

Once he took the stage at Brooklyn Steel, Ritter incorporated seven of the 10 tracks on I Believe in You, My Honeydew into his 20-song set. About halfway through, he played “Truth Is a Dimension (Both Invisible and Blinding),” which he says is the song that completed the circle for this record.

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“‘Truth Is a Dimension’ is a song where I took note of the fact that I don’t remember writing it,” Ritter tells Rolling Stone. “You know that feeling of totally being enraptured in the moment with the thing you’re doing? In reality, when you’re creating anything, you’re really not there. You’re gone. That’s a beautiful, beautiful feeling, but that also means you’re not witnessing yourself doing something. I started to think, how much of this is me and how much of it is this muse that’s all around and is my constant companion that helps me write these songs? As I began to think of the muse as this separate entity, I started to realize how much I enjoy bringing the muse into every aspect of my life.”