Transcript of Josh Ritter
Josh Ritter: Well, I'd moved from Idaho to New York, which was one thing, it was a painful move in some ways, and difficult. Just the amount of garbage trucks going outside my house at three in the morning. It was like they had parades out there --just that alone. I'm used to hearing nothing out there. And so that was one thing, but then there was also -- after five records, I'd gotten to this point when I thought -- it was almost a crisis of confidence. I thought, "Well, I feel like I've written about most things that -- and where's my new thing to say? Where it is?" And I was getting really worried about it, and I was writing a lot, but none of it felt good. And it wasn't writer's block so much as a crisis of confidence in what I was writing about and was saying, and how was it different and how was it important to me in any way. And then I hit on the idea that while I've been writing a lot of stories, I've never allowed something truly terrible to happen to any of my characters in these songs. Things happened and sometimes they were bad -- but something not terrible. And so I started writing songs like "Folk Bloodbath," where I killed everybody off.
Folk Bloodbath up and hot
Josh Ritter: All these different characters from folk song s-- I brought them all together, and each one of them killed each other. And it was fun to write that stuff, and then -- or a mummy that falls in love with an archeologist and they become cursed. Or a guy that loves his ship and has to burn it down in the Arctic to stay alive. And that was when it kind of clicked in for me -- that's when this novel came out -- was that I realized things have to happen, to go awry, for there to be a real story, and I have to be as happy killing my characters as I am having them alive. And I've had some good days killing off characters. I've been chipper afterwards.
Jo Reed: New York does that to people.
Josh Ritter: Totally. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
