hello starling

Why didn't I get this album before?

While I enjoy a lot of artists, there aren't many whom I trust. I trust these: Nickel Creek, Sufjan Stevens, and Josh Ritter. Everything they do. Hands down. I know that, no matter what's in the album, I'm going to love it, and I don't have to ease myself into the listening; I can throw myself there, and it's all good.

It must have been those reviews on Amazon about Hello Starling saying it was too imitative of Bob Dylan that dissuaded me from making the purchase before, and the fact that Amazon withheld the listening samples, so I couldn't preformulate my own opinion. But that was back before I knew that I trusted Josh Ritter; and, with his newest coming out SOON (omigosh in like two days), I wanted to listen to EVERYTHING he's done -- much like I read my way backwards through all the HP books in preparation for the coming of Book 7. So I bought Starling and popped it in almost "breathless with anticipation" this afternoon.

And all I can say of Starling is that if this is Josh's worst, he can't do a bad album. It's not as masterful as The Animal Years (duh; it's not as mature), but it's still better than good -- really fabulous -- and there are a lot of strains of pure young joy running through it that catch you up, even though the songs themselves aren't always that happy. (I remember a time when a friend came over and asked me to put in some happy music, and I looked at her blankly. "Happy music? I, uh...don't really have any." Meanwhile Josh was spinning through my mind, but I didn't think he'd qualify to her as happy. She snorted at my attempts to produce this thing called "happy music.") I listen to Josh and I want to drive all night, I want to camp out under a cold open sky, I want to stare into a fire and sing along to someone's guitar, I want to smell the nearness of that one man and rasp my fingertips and my cheeks against a day's growth of beard, I want to laugh and cry and spin around with my arms outflung like no one's watching until I'm too dizzy to stand up.

It's hard to be sad with music that makes you feel like that. You feel safe instead. Free.

Highlight tracks of the album: "Kathleen," "Rainslicker," "Snow is Gone."

But really, I love it all. It's folksy, Wurlitzer/Hammondy, jubilant in many places, energetic, just plain old great stuff. And it's neat to see this piece of his journey as an artist.

And I can't wait for The Historical Conquests.