Josh here!  I've been taking a bit of a break from my travel notes, but now it's exciting to be coming back to it.  Writing these really helps me to catalogue for myself the great, strange, interesting and mundane things that go on every day on tour.   So I'm back at it again, and what a great time to get started!  I've just gotten back from Sam Kassirer's Great North Sound Society in Maine, where we've finished recording my new (as yet untitled) record.  The band and I have been working on this record for almost a year between my writing and recording, so to have the major phase done is quite a feeling.  It's a pretty huge record - big stories, big sounds, large distances – and we'll be mixing it in the next little while, but in the mean time, I'm sitting here on a plane over the Atlantic on my way (with the great Zack Hickman and the great Mark Erelli) to play some shows with the great Ray Lamontagne.

The idea for doing shows this way came from some recording that I did with Zack and Mark earlier in the year for some ideas I had.  It was a great time and since I'll be out on the road a lot with my incredible band come the new year, for now I wanted to try a different set up and see what would happen just for kicks.

Mark is one of my oldest musical friends, and his talent is shocking to anyone who witnesses it.  Zack Hickman has been scaring audiences with me for a decade now since we met in school.  Right now he's scaring the stewardesses.  Our first gig is in Leeds, where we have a show booked to see how well we’ve done getting ready and to eat at a truly great little breakfast place that I visited last time I was in town there. 

In addition to the record and these shows, I'm working on my big second draft of my novel, which is a short little saucy number, but which is cracking me up in an evil way these days.  The next day we'll meet up with Ray in Edinburgh and away we all go!  I'm looking forward to it.  This is a great time.  I'm so happy to be back on the road, and I'm looking forward to seeing happy folks again.

I'll write more in a few days!

Best,
Josh


*

*****

Hey All!

We are nearing Dead Man's Curve, the junction of 41 and 46 in between Bakersfield and Carmel, CA where James Dean died.  There are almond trees on either side of the highway.  We're passing a sign for the town of Utica.  A large black bird, tattered at the edges and angry at someone, is screaming heavenwards. 

Tim Craven (sound-man, tour-manager, and shoulder cry-on-ager) is at the wheel and we're talking about the last couple of days.  I'm on tour with John Prine and it's incredible.  I've gotten the chance to tour with some amazing musicians, but John Prine is a true hero to me.  Getting the chance to sing with him every night is as terrifying and fulfilling as you might imagine.  Getting the chance to hang out and drink his signature "Handsome Johnny" cocktail after the show is great, and the chance to see a group of guys on the road with him who enjoy themselves as much as my band and I do makes me feel like we're on the right track somehow.

Right now we're passing the "Pleasant Valley State Prison."  Irony grows on trees with the almonds and apricots out here.  Our first show was the Wilshire Theater in Beverly Hills, a giant, art-nouveau beauty with a silver proscenium that reminded me of a cross between a Hohner harmonica and the world's most intricate bear-trap. 



Wilshire Proscenium



The harrowing life of a tour manager


The next day, Mandy, the erstwhile yet strangely dependable British navigating system that came with the car, took us through some new and rigorously exciting stretches of concrete jungle, set-design shops, studio backlots, crime scenes in the making, an In-n-Out Burger, and the bathroom of a Home Depot on the way to San Diego.  I've talked about Mandy before, but I don't think I can really express how interesting she makes each unplanned highway exit, and how craftily she chooses the moment to suggest a sudden U-turn.  I can also vouch for the cathartic effects of screaming yourself hoarse at an inanimate talking object.  San Diego itself might pale in comparison had it not been for the fact that Tim unplugged her around Long Beach and we made the rest of the coastal drive in blissful silence.

Next day I was back in LA and got the chance to meet actor Rainn Wilson, and talk about music and books and hold up a bank for cold, hard cash.  Our plan was dashed when we decided to hold up and knock over the bank next to a TV News crew. 



Heist!


Each night of the tour I was lucky enough to sing with John, which is a harrowing experience for a guy like me.  Although I sing with John Prine several times a week in various venues, and have been singing with him for a long time, I only rarely get to do so while he is physically present.  The rest of the time, as the man says, is a "Spanish Pipedream."  We sang "Mexican Home" and "Paradise."  "Mexican Home," a song that was like a stray dog that came up and looked at me one day a couple years ago, is one of the most powerful songs I've ever heard.  When John asked me to sing it with him I wanted to sing the perfect harmony, or at least get in the ballpark of in tune.  Bakersfield was the first place I felt like I locked in singing with him. I went to bed happy.

Best,
Josh
(Somewhere deep inside California)

*****

Sardines!


Okay.  I’ve got the flu.  It hit me hard and I’m reeling from cold medicine and what feels like Legionnaires Disease.  Carmel, CA was exactly how it sounds, however: golden-of-sunlight, etc. etc.  The waves crashed on the beach, Tim and I visited the aquarium and besides believing that maybe I'd gotten Ebola, everything was copacetic.  Right now I'm sitting in the dressing room in San Francisco, about to meet Darius and get some food.  Next door in the production office there is a wall festooned with the signatures of the people who've played here over the years.  We have about two hours before I go onstage, and the Warfield Theater seems an appropriate place to play with a legend. 

Many thanks to John, Mitch, Fatty, Andy, Eric, Dave, Jason and Tim for an amazing tour.  I hope I didn't get any of you sick.  To everyone I met at these very special shows, thank you for being a part of it and taking a chance and coming for the opening act. I hope to see you all again very soon!

Rock and Roll!

Best,
Josh
(Somewhere deep in the innards of the Warfield Theater)


*

Hey All!

It's been a very busy new year so far, and in the hustle of it all it's been difficult to find the time to write a few notes about my eminently blog-able trip to play in Anchorage, Alaska.  I invited the lovely Dawn Landes to play the show with me and contribute to this blog and since I am just back from my first recording session and Dawn has just finished up her new record, the time to put down a few thoughts has arrived.

Firstly, it is a long trip with a layover in Minneapolis, where to my surprise we were met by Jason Wilber, who I'd met before as the guitarist in John Prine's band.  Jason was heading up for some shows of his own in Alaska as well and it was great to see him again.  

We landed in Anchorage around three in the afternoon, the sun already fast going down behind the mountains.  Alaskan weather has none of the indeterminance of the East coast.  It is either one thing or another, but never both.  If it is snowing, it is snowing hard.  If it is cold, it is bone cold.  Alaskan weather, like its governor, does not play centrist politics.  The only doubtful thing on the horizon as we landed was Mount Redoubt, a volcano currently muttering away to itself about one hundred miles away from us in Anchorage and the suspense as to whether it would erupt during our stay was a source of constant speculation and conversation.

The airport was the first place we encountered wildlife.  Save for a small circle of birds that seemed content to be out of the cold and within the confines of the baggage terminal, most of it was taxidermy. We tried feeding a stuffed moose and I spent some time  communing with an albino beaver, but while nature is easy to commune with when packed with Styrofoam, the purifying effect of that communion seems to wear off much more quickly and we were soon anxious to get outside.

Mike, who was promoting the show, picked us up and regaled us with stories on the way into town.  Over the next couple of days, he and his business partner Bill would take us to see a pack of sled dogs and would advise on where to go to see as much nature as was possible within the confines of a day's drive.  

Sled dogs are not the kind of poofy, white smiling huskies that we see on brochures for Alaska.  To my surprise, sled dogs are a mixture of all kinds of dogs, the only real defining feature being a sinewy, electrified ranginess that is beautiful in its utility for the job of pulling a heavy sled and rider.  Watching the pack as the musher (the sled's driver) unhooked the dogs after a run, I realized how seldom we see a large group of dogs together.  There was definitely a pecking order, and a personality that defined where each dog would be most useful in its placement in harness.  The lead dog was followed by a kind of understudy lead-dog-in-training and from there back each animal was placed, like batters in a batting order or as Dawn pointed out, rowers in a crew boat, in accordance to where their personality and physique would be most useful to the team.  It was pretty fascinating.

I was surprised at the difference between my preconceptions of sled dogs and the reality, but the beards in Alaska were right up to my expectations.  Seriously, there are some hairy people in Alaska.  The hairiest by far were the customers at Alaska Feed and Seed and Title Wave, the great independent bookstore in town. Beards in both places were indistinguishable from one another; each looking as if they would be equally at home reading an Ivan Doig novel or checking a trap line behind a line of greyhound-pelted sled dogs.

Our show was at the University of Alaska Anchorage. The crowd, which was a mixture of all ages, was rowdy and fun.  Straining my eyes I was sure that the venue was a dry one, but by their giddiness one might have thought that pitchers were being passed around.  Dawn played a killer set and I had a great one as well.  Towards the end of the show Jason came out to play a few songs too and the night was a total blast.

Speaking of pitchers, a glass should be raised to Darwin's Theory and Humpy's, two great bars in town that seemed packed at all hours.  As I said before, it gets dark around 3 p.m. in January, and while that gave us about five hours to see mountains, rivers, glaciers and all variety of ungulates, it gave us even longer to see Humpy's, which Jason, Dawn and I repaired to after our concert.  Having recently become a resident of New York, it was also great to feel the familiar friendliness of people all over town.  Anchorage is big –  over 200,000 people – and yet, in the early dark of January nights, one and all seem to treat you as if you will meet each other again if you haven't already, so there is a feeling of familiarity based upon not just the past, but also the future.  "I don’t know you," the philosophy seems to go, "but I will."  In Darwin's Theory we were offered a piece of pizza by a guy sitting at the bar.  In Humpy's we talked for a while with the keyboard player and singer in a local (awesome) funk band.  

The next day, Dawn and I drove to Girdwood, a small town on what is mysteriously and J.R.R Tolkien-y named the Turnagin Arm of the Cook Inlet, about forty miles from Anchorage.  The drive was spectacular and along the way we saw an ice climber clomp across the road in crampons and begin to climb up a wall of solid ice above the narrow highway.  In Girdwood, we took a gondola up to the top of a ski mountain and watched as mortals courted mortality on some of the steepest slopes I've ever seen.  I decided that the better part of valor was hot chocolate.  From there, we got back hot on the trail of more ungulates and found our way to a wildlife preserve where we communed with living, protected animals that had been rescued from all over Alaska.  Despite a fence, we were nearly (very nearly) gored by an elk, who himself seemed to have decided that the better part of valor was goring the guy with the video camera.

It was an amazing, beautiful and too-short trip, and a return is being planned for the summer time for some more gigs in the most beautiful place in America.  I sincerely hope that Mount Redoubt can hold off on its eruption til then.

Thank you to everyone who made this show such a great success!




A VALENTINE TO ALASKA
by dawn Landes

Alaska! with your constant threat of ash
Your snow and your dogs, your playful giftshop ladies
Lets mush Alaska! Gi Haw! Gi!
You have funny radio personalities, coining new words like Bald-Ear and Snash.
You're silly, Alaska, even your gays are silly.
Reciting cruel opera reviews from the New York Times.
Verbatim!
over dinner
Your salmon made me cry, Alaska.
Steeped in purple onions and wasabi, even your menus made me feel something.
All your workers seem to love their work.
Your bookstores confuse and overwhelm me. Gnostics tucked in with politicians. Missing biography sections. Plastic musical spoons and jingle bells for bears.
Alaska, your Lost Boys are everywhere.
Dancing in the aisles of bookstores and gas stations.
In another frame they could be hip hop stars.
Your morning darkness is blue and bright. A beach sky through 3-D glasses.
A valentine for you, Alaska, cut in the shape of a city trail.
Last night I ran on your treadmills and watched your wolves dance on the TV.
They looked a lot like the dancing wolves I'd seen years before, in a crowded movie theater in Indiana. But yours were smaller, your wolves, and your love scenes sweeter.




Alaska winter tour from Fun Machine on Vimeo.

So far 2009 is playing tricks with my temporal equilibrium.  Having flown back East to my new digs in Brooklyn on January 1st, I had just acclimated to the time change when I flew to Japan.

Music has taken me to some places I wouldn’t get to see otherwise and it has allowed me to see some places from a vantage point that is at a slight remove when I travel for other reasons.  Looking out at the audience (Japanese, stock-still) at Tokyo Opera City, I almost had to laugh.  For me, being on stage is a fairly endless set of recalibrations with reality, but this concert with Hilary Hahn was taking the cake for different.  It was also probably the jet lag. 




The Bering Strait: I can see Russia from my plane!


The Japanese live their lives fourteen hours ahead of us and for five days I got the experience of trying to live in Tomorrowland.  It’s an experience I won’t soon forget, but before the smaller details go out of my brain (I’m wide awake at 4 am) here’s a few impressions.

I had trouble getting into the country in the first place.  There are forms to be filled out in advance, but Japan has forms that need filling out in order to request more forms.  This stymied me, and when I attempted to waltz through Japanese immigration with the diplomatic equivalent of a Papa John’s Pizza receipt, it stymied them as well.  Were there in the world actually people as dumb as me?  How had I been allowed to get on a plane without an adult?  I’m sure they were thinking these things, but – and this is the first thing I noticed about Japan – they are unfailingly, agonizingly polite.  As I was taken from backroom to backroom, separated from the run-of-the-mill immigration offenders, asked to fill out form after form in a detail which I’m sure would vet me for a spot in the Obama Administration, and finally signing a final form admitting my guilt and gaining entrance to the country for four days, there was nary a look askance, never an impolitic word, and always a decorum which made me feel as if I was picking out carpet patterns and not causing a small international incident.

When I arrived at the Hotel, the hosts who were overseeing our concert were there to meet me.  Hilary obviously had all of her paperwork straight and had gotten to the hotel hours ago.  Now the look of relief on their five faces was easily read .  I couldn’t believe it, but they had waited at the hotel, sitting in the lobby, for me to arrive so they could welcome me.  They gave me a fruit basket containing some of the most high-powered fruit I had ever seen and then left.




Tokyo in the morning.


In a daze I took the fruit basket up to my room on the twenty-fifth floor and held it underneath my arm like a small dog or a baby as I looked out on Tokyo.  In the far distance I could see the spectacularly bright lights of Shibuya, the Times Square of Tokyo, and in the middle distance were super highways and tiny shops and the high gloss of taxis cueing up on the streets below.  “This is going to be fun,” I told the fruit basket.  The fruit basket played it cool, at least for the present.




One hell of a nice fruit basket.


The next morning I was up at six and had breakfast in the hotel.  I had grilled fish, rice porridge, miso soup, hajiki seaweed and salted apricots.  The hajiki has a soft and smoky flavor which belies its black and spiky appearance, while the salted apricots were hajiki’s analogue, climbing inside my mouth and dominating it with an intense sour briney-ness that was startling as hell and on very gradually delicious.  I added coffee to the whole experience and stepped out on to the street. 




Breakfast.


The city was getting up but the area I was in seemed quiet still, a few small restaurants opening, a few coffeehouses filling with the early arriving business people.  I chose the narrowest streets and wandered for a few hours taking everything in and living in that odd dream-state where no verbal or visual language is understood and your own thoughts become more intense.  Everything was new.  At one point I looked down a long street and saw what appeared to be an escalator ascending a mountain. When I arrived at its base I got on and arriving at the top I found myself at the gates of the Hie Shrine.  I spent the better part of an hour in the courtyard of the shrine as businessmen and women and students moved about taking part in what seemed like a daily set of rituals.  It was all very comfortable sitting in the sun and I was interested in whole groups of people seeming to be interested in the same set of rituals.  Later I found out that these people were probably performing rites in the hopes of good business outcomes or good grades on tests.  By the time I looked up it was eleven and I was hungry.

And here let me say that I somehow followed a restaurant waitress into the kitchen of the restaurant by accident.  It was a tiny noodle house and it was full of men in black suits with white shirts and black ties.  I wandered in and everyone looked up.  The waitress said many things to me and motioned at me to follow.  I did and we ended up in a tiny room with two cooks.  When she turned around and saw me still standing there she hustled me back out to a table with a tremendously large man on one side.  If you want to learn about the good food watch a big guy order.  We sat there, the big guy and I, and I watched what he was getting, the multitudinous small dishes of mysterious plants, animals and powders and the large steaming broths, and mimicked everything he did.  If he was amused or flattered by my blithe copying, he gave no sign and we both sat there, he seasoning and eating his soup and I following his lead with my own.  It was delicious. 




Dinner gets complicated.


I should say again that I was there to play music.  Hilary and I rehearsed quite a bit that day, going over Paganini’s Cantabile and some of the other stuff we were playing together.  Then, as jet lag settled in, I headed up to my room and switched on the T.V. for the first time.  On the screen, some kind of soap opera was playing.  A family sat around a table and the father was obviously not pleased with his sons.  Some hideous muzak swelled behind him in the background and gave the scene an overwrought emotion before the father seemed to settle down and come to a resolution with his sons.  The music duly resolved itself before moving on to another scene where the same conflict/resolution, major/minor struggle was played out again.  I was entranced for almost forty five seconds before dropping off to sleep.  Late in the night, nearly twenty minutes later, I was wide awake again.  Realizing that I was in for a night of  wide-awakedness, and determining that I wouldn’t spend it in front of the window watching the cars below and thinking about life, I got dressed and headed back down to the street. 

It turns out there is some pretty great snack food options late at night in Tokyo.  I had more soup and then wandered some more and then found a convenience store.  I bought some dried fish, some beer and some green tea ice cream.  Taking them back up to the room and breaking finally into the fruit basket, I had a feast.

The next day was show day and the whole crowd from the first day showed up to take us to the Hall.  Tokyo Opera City, like many buildings in Tokyo, is a completely self-contained living environment; a kind of Biosphere with noodles, and as enormous as the Hall itself was, the surrounding superstructure held bookstores, restaurants, offices, museums and, somewhere in the lofty reaches above, no doubt, places for overworked business people to roost for a few hours.  Our sound check went smoothly and I began my wanders again.




The incomparable Tokyo Opera City.


Showtime was set for seven at night (5 a.m., Eastern Time) and there were no stragglers.  Everyone was in and seated, but watching the monitor of the crowd from backstage, I was struck by how quiet they were. Normally classical audiences are a fairly quiet bunch, but these folks were silent.  I felt the first pangs of apprehension.  What if they didn’t get it?  What if they didn’t understand a word?  What if, besides somehow making an ass of myself I made an ass of Hilary or of the presenters? 

As it turned out, none of this happened.  At least I don’t think  it happened.  Really I have no way of knowing, but I think they enjoyed it.  Japanese audiences even clap very quietly.  They showed their appreciation not through loud applause but through continuous applause.  Hilary and I returned to the stage  four times and each time we walked across the stage to bow again, I felt like our feet drowned out the applause of two thousand people.  After, during the most orderly CD signing of my entire life, people were genuinely friendly and happy, and it was a great time getting to meet them.  It was a real honor, and I want to thank my great hosts and Hilary for making the show a reality.

I had decided to stay one more day in Japan before leaving, so the next morning I woke early and jumped aboard the Ginza Line for Akasuka, where the famous Shrine of the Three Gods sits within an entertainment and homewares district. I walked around the area for a while before taking the Ginza line all the way back in the other direction to Shibuya, the new entertainment area of town.  I’ll remember that day as a long peaceful train trip bookended by chaos on either side.  Thoroughly enjoyable.

The time came to leave and I said goodbye to Hilary, her cousin and my Japanese hosts and got back on the plane for New York.  I’ve never had such a completely disorienting, totally exhilarating travel experience as those whirlwind few days in Japan. 

I can’t wait to go back and bring the band.  I know they’ll love it.




We know it.  The Japanese know it.  Tommy Lee Jones knows it.

Hey all!

I wanted to write and say what a great feeling it was for the band and I to be able to end our year in Dublin with an orchestra behind us and great crowd in front of us. Looking out into the faces, I saw many that I recognized from the past several years and from all over the globe. Really, the number of people who traveled from near and far to see our show at Vicar Street was an ever-present yippee-ki-yay for us ramblin' men up on stage.

Like all my favorite shows, I remember very little about what transpired as I was too busy enjoying the moment to catalogue very many memories, however a few come into my mind:

It was great to see Jake and Terry running the door at the venue. You can go to a lot of places where the folks that run the venue treat you less than pleasantly, but these guys have always treated me like a friend.

I recall the great arranger and conductor and long-lost son of Eirean, Sean O'Loughlin, turning around to conduct the audience at one point. And I loved turning around and seeing smiles on the faces of the orchestra. They were totally rock and roll.

Finally, I'm amazed at the capacity of my band to have fun with shows that seem to be high-pressure. When the lights go up and they have the choice between fun and functional, they always, thankfully, take fun.

Thank you for giving me the opportunity to try all of these new things. I hope you're having as much fun as I am.

Happy Holidays!
Josh

*****

It certainly was a magical two nights, made especially possible - and unforgettable - by unsung heroes that Josh and we couldn't thank enough: Dave O'Grady and the folks at Independent Records, Darius Zelkha and Tough Love, Aiken Promotions, Tim Craven, the best stage crew in the business, and to every face Josh looked out upon...

- Doug and the joshritter.com Team



photo by Marcelo Biglia


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Tonight I'm back in my kitchen, listening to the Republican National Convention going on in Minneapolis. There is something truly surreal about the proceedings, not the least of which, John McCain's Vice Presidential candidate was educated in my home town of Moscow, ID. Just when I had started to dream that my state would one day go Democratic...

The band and I had a completely whirlwind trip to Co. Laois and the great Electric Picnic festival. Our flight landed and we jumped into a people mover driven by...


To read the complete post from Josh on the Irish Times, visit here.

Thanks! And be sure to leave a comment!


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I'm just back in the door from a great trip up to Maine for things various. What an incredible state that is. It was fiercely contended for between the British and Americans during the War of 1812, and any trip there will make you happy or sad at the outcome, depending on what side of the English tongue you may favour.

The first reason for going was the Shangri La Festival in Blue Hill, Maine....


To read the complete blog, click here! And be sure to leave a comment there.

Thanks folks!

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The ride down from Telluride must have been beautiful, but by the time we packed up and had a beer at the saloon next door to the opera house, it was 1am and we piled into the bus and settled in for the seven hour trip across the mountains to Denver. This has been, hands down, the most scenic tour I've ever been treated to...


For the complete blog entry (and photos), click here


Thanks!

*

The mountains all around us are as enormous as the mountains surrounding Salt Lake City have a habit of being, and the hotel billboards along the side of the road have grown bigger and more insistent in the last hour, so I'll assume that we're getting fairly close to our destination.

My band and I are beginning a short run of what promises to be some really, really fun shows. We're doing...

...to read Josh's complete blog post - with pics - visit this page for the full entry on The Irish Times website.

Thanks!!

*

My uncle, John Ritter, is a teacher.

For 28 years Uncle John has taught English at Parkland High School in the Lehigh Valley area in which he (and my father), his grandparents, great grandparents, and great great grandparents and ancestors have lived, worked, and raised families since 1732.

I admire Uncle John because he teaches and believes in the potential of individuals to find their passions, take risks, and to do good works in their communities. He felt called to be a teacher, and he is as proud of that role as he is to be a husband and father.

John feels strongly about families, neighborhoods and communities. He has served his teaching profession as an association leader and as president of his 600+ member local association to make sure that teachers could do the job they loved with dignity. Since that time he has decided that he can do even more for the place he loves, and when he decided to run for Pennsylvania State Representative (187th State House Seat) representing Lehigh County several months ago, I played the first ever political event of my life to raise money for his candidacy (see below.) Uncle John wanted to keep it simple so we didn't "send out the word;" I came in three hours before show time and played two shows at the Schnecksville Grange. I have to tell you that I got to meet many of the supporters that enabled John to win his primary by a 2 to 1 margin. I probably could have played chop sticks and John's friends, colleagues, parents, and students would still have clapped; they were just having such a great time being together.

A few days after the event, John was diagnosed with Leukemia.

As determined as any man who teaches English to high-schoolers, he has decided to continue his campaign. Between chemotherapy, the host of ailments that derive from it, and a fragile immune system, John's door to door visits will be limited. But anyone who knows John knows that as soon as he can do it, he will.

Around the area my family called home there are thousands of old stone walls, some dating back to before the Revolutionary War. Some have crumbled into disrepair and some stand tall as if they had been built only yesterday. But the truth is that a stone wall is always being built. When it stops being built, it quickly becomes just another pile of useless rock.

There are a lot of things in our communities that need repair. Some are hard to see on our drive to work or standing in line at the supermarket, but we all know they're there. This is a tough time. The work ahead will be tremendous and will need all of us.

I am, as I believe it is best to be, a hopeful cynic when it comes to politics. Our ship has been drifting for some time now, and sometimes it seems the leaders we need - those people of Herculean effort, great deeds, and greater humanity - seem present only as statues lining our State Houses.

But they are not statues. I know one, and he is my Uncle John.

I'm no politician. No doubt a letter like this can be torn apart fairly easily by those who do that sort of thing for a living. But it is a hopeful time in America and I'm writing hopefully. Not just because we are hopefully seeing the end of a dark era in American history, but because there are individuals among us like my Uncle John Ritter who can show us the kind of light worth the working towards.

John may be sick, but he's out there fixing the walls that need fixing in his community. If he's doing that now, even as he is fighting for his life, just think of what he'll do when he gets better.

This is not a solicitation for funds. If you're interested in John's work, in finding out ways that you can get involved, or in just sending him a note to say hello, please visit www.citizens4ritter.com .

Thank you for taking the time to read about a man who is a hero to me.


My Very Best,

Josh Ritter
Moscow, ID



special concert announcement from this past April