Happy 5th Anniversary to Josh Ritter’s ninth studio album Gathering, originally released September 22, 2017.
Josh Ritter’s greatest strength is The Song. He creates vibrant, intimate scenes, portraits of longing, destiny, and joy. Often, he is at his best when he goes as specific as possible, just a glimmer of a feeling, blown-up full scale, asking you to dwell on something that might have passed you by if you hadn’t been asked to look at it. With each song so expansive, crafting an album seems like an unwieldy thing to do.
But sometimes lightning strikes. Gathering (2017) is a clear career peak for Ritter, a cohesive work with a defined narrative structure, recurring themes of approaching storms, and a battery of songs as good as anything else in his catalogue. He pulls from all of his old tricks: overfull lyrics (“Feels Like Lightning,”) humor, (“Oh Lord, Pt. 3”), and narrative (“Dreams,” “Myrna Loy”). But each of these versions of Ritter-Doing-Ritter has been massaged to fit the specific aesthetic of this album, meaning he is doing what he does best in a way we’ve not quite heard before.
Stillness is the center of Gathering. The songs are not in a rush to get anywhere; while tempos can still be fast, restraint reigns supreme. The most reckless tune, “Oh Lord, Pt. 3,” is laid over a simple country rhythm, rather than the electric brouhaha of earlier-career efforts like “To the Dogs or Whoever.” The album’s closing duo, “Thunderbolt’s Goodnight” and “Strangers,” are tender acoustic numbers about settling down. Everything seems to be at peace.
Not all is as it seems. One of the first signs of trouble is “When Will I Be Changed,” a lovely duet with Bob Weir of the Grateful Dead, which implies that Ritter still has parts of him that he finds unsatisfying, even as his life enters this moment of tranquility. Pairing with Weir, whose voice is beautifully leathered by years on the road, shows that when Ritter is a much older man, he might still be asking these questions.
Then, after a quick song about trains (classic), we plunge into the heart of the record: two narratives, “Dreams” and “Myrna Loy,” that show that tranquility isn’t all that it’s cracked up to be. On “Dreams,” Ritter relies on a frenetic-but-minimal sound buoyed by Zachariah Hickman’s bass playing to construct a journey through his subconsciousness. As he’s confronted by his demons, the solution he comes to at the end of the song is to lean into his relationship—but even as he comes to this realization, the maddening instrumental continues around him. He knows there is not really an escape, just something that helps.
The follow-up, “Myrna Loy,” is one of Ritter’s most beautiful songs. It opens with a piano lick that implies the opening of a storybook, then Ritter gently strums an acoustic guitar as he sings a love song to Myrna Loy. The narrator describes how her movies moved him, and how he carries her performances with him even though now all of the old movie houses are torn down. It’s a tender and sad moment—the thing that he held dear is only a memory now, a place you can’t go back to. What would happen if the same fate befell the narrator of “Dreams?”
Listen to the Album:
After a mournful horn interlude, the record careens into “Cry Softly.” Ritter finds himself stable in his life and unstable in his sense of self. Parts of him are still unfinished, and beautiful things have been left behind. As he gets older, he finds that age is not merely cumulative. It means letting things go, and that it breeds new uncertainties.
There’s this motif of arriving storms throughout Gathering—track titles like “Feels Like Lightning” and “Thunderbolt’s Goodnight” point toward it, as does the Ritter-painted cover art. The album title confirms that the sense of peace that is implied in the opening and closing thirds is not the point of it all. The sense of danger posed by the middle that is the real subject here—the storm that is gathering. The big question is how we can have this sense of peace if we don’t think it’s going to be there forever—and how this very question is the thing that can make it all implode.
But the sound of Gathering is the feeling you get just before that moment of cynicism. It’s when that peril hasn’t fully hit you and you’re willing to see these special moments for exactly what they are. It is a feeling but also a physical spot in space and time. It is a place you cannot always go on your own, and a place that’s difficult to put into words. But each time you put the album on, you are immediately there. It only has one name.
LISTEN: