Josh Ritter Discusses Songwriting
Joshua August 14th, 2008
One of the Green Olive Yuks favorite songwriters, Josh Ritter, was interviewed recently. Here is some of what he had to say regarding writing.
“My parents are scientists and they always talk about the idea that science doesn’t come from nowhere, it comes from definite needs in a society; people start studying questions based on what the society needs, and I feel that’s the same way with songs.
Not everything, I mean, ‘Toxic’ by Britney Spears is a great song and maybe it doesn’t answer a biting social need, but I do think if you go back from a song like that and look at what was going on in the world and in America at the time, that you’d find something interesting that you could put in your back pocket.”
“I guess I get bored really easy and I have to switch styles,” he says, “otherwise it doesn’t feel sincere after a while and I know that people are going to be able to hear that, so it keeps me honest in terms of what I’m doing.
The great thing about writing is it allows you to follow your interests wherever they go. Not just in songs, but in all the stuff that you read. I read a lot and take a lot of lessons and ideas from that stuff, and it’s like having an expense account, you can charge all that stuff to your songwriting. That couple of hours a day when you’re sitting out in the park reading – that’s work! I like that.”
When asked about his favorite writers:
“I love Muriel Spark and Flann O’Brien, At Swim-Two-Birds. JP Donleavy, he’s really great. Right now I’m moving very slowly through Don Quixote, which is pretty bad-assed too. But my favourite author is Mark Twain. He’s a guy I can go back to.
Huckleberry Finn is amazing. Sometimes records and books suffer from being so influential. I mean, I don’t care for On The Road, I’m not a big fan of Jack Kerouac, but I think maybe part of the reason for that is it’s become almost a caricature because it had such an affect on a style.
But I never felt that with Mark Twain, I always felt like somehow he’s avoided that kind of thing, where everything that’s come from it has started to detract from the original.”
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