josh ritter

love. Southern Pacifica. feeling displaced, out of sorts... reading his note about his latest album, So Runs the World Away,
"After my last record, Historical Conquests, a feeling came stealing over me that I had a reckoning in store. It was a new feeling, sinister in its emptiness, and it fell across me like a cold shadow. After almost a decade on the road, my life seemed as if it had become the one I always dreamed of; I was playing shows, living the charmed existence of a writer who has worked very hard and been very lucky. Still, the shadow was there, and I knew it had found me for a reason. I knew that I would have to wrestle it eventually. In the meantime though, in the words of Muriel Spark, I went on my way rejoicing. Then one day the shadow fell across me and stayed there. You know what that’s like. Anyone who loves to do something and then, one day, finds no joy in it, knows what that’s like. I suppose I could say I was burned out, but it wasn’t that; I wanted to write and I wanted to play, but nothing, nothing felt right to me anymore. Even more than that, nothing felt original. "


Seriously. I feel like I'm fighting the shadow. I don't know what the next step is. Maybe a sabbatical, but it seems like there is no end to the hustling and the suffering. I want to reach the point that I am NOT hand to mouth. My whole life has been that way. Hand to mouth. 
So much to do, and even now, that my time is my own as much as it will be, its still not enough. The urge to organize and get together is overwhelmed with reports of methane clouds that will suffocate in the middle of the night. Just what this hypochondriac needs, another reason to hide.