Few artists spend more time putting the world around them into words than Josh Ritter. As a musician, he has released 13 studio albums and seven more EPs since 2000. As an author, he has published two novels. As a modern blogger, he is tenacious in regularly updating Josh Ritter’s Book of Jubilations, his dedicated Substack.
It should feel pretty standard, then, that Ritter has a metaphor on hand when he needs to describe the idea of touring after an album release.
“My uncle worked with the forest service,” he says, “and they would drop fish into upper-mountain lakes. They would seed those lakes with all these trout and stuff. They would fly over and just drop ’em in. That’s how it feels when you’re playing shows with new songs for the first time. You’re releasing them out into the world.”
On a late November afternoon at Brooklyn Steel, a manufacturing-plant-turned-concert-venue on the outskirts of the Brooklyn neighborhood, Greenpoint, that Ritter calls home, he took a break from soundcheck ahead of his final show of 2025. Ritter had toured relentlessly for most of the year but especially after the September release of I Believe in You, My Honeydew, his third album in three years. He holed up in his dressing room, grabbed a can of beer from the fridge, and lamented the chaos that his ceaseless need to create imparts on nearly every aspect of his life.
“I have to complete the circle. The circle, for me, starts with writing a ton of songs. I’m always writing songs. When they get to be, like, the ones that seem to hang together, I begin to make a record. At that point, I end up putting so much love and work into it, while not getting to play it live,” Ritter says. “The show is the culmination of it all.”
Once he took the stage at Brooklyn Steel, Ritter incorporated seven of the 10 tracks on I Believe in You, My Honeydew into his 20-song set. About halfway through, he played “Truth Is a Dimension (Both Invisible and Blinding),” which he says is the song that completed the circle for this record.
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“‘Truth Is a Dimension’ is a song where I took note of the fact that I don’t remember writing it,” Ritter tells Rolling Stone. “You know that feeling of totally being enraptured in the moment with the thing you’re doing? In reality, when you’re creating anything, you’re really not there. You’re gone. That’s a beautiful, beautiful feeling, but that also means you’re not witnessing yourself doing something. I started to think, how much of this is me and how much of it is this muse that’s all around and is my constant companion that helps me write these songs? As I began to think of the muse as this separate entity, I started to realize how much I enjoy bringing the muse into every aspect of my life.”
Ritter has more or less done this dance with the muse since he recorded and released his self-titled debut album while a student at Oberlin College in 1999. Since then, he’s given his muse more material to work with. He’s been covered by Bob Dylan, written songs for Bob Weir, collaborated with Joan Baez, shared the stage with John Prine, and had an album produced by Jason Isbell. But putting himself in the company of creative minds is only part of what drives Ritter.
Well-traveled and curious about the world, Ritter, raised in Moscow, Idaho, has lived in a range of places from Oberlin to Scotland to Providence before eventually settling in Brooklyn. Now 49 and with two young daughters, he sees his own creativity as both a connection to and escape from the life he has created.
When Ritter figured that out, he gave his muse a name — “my honeydew” — and started writing songs for his inspiration, rather than the other way around. That’s also the best way to understand the depth of the characters, storytelling, and battles with internal demons on I Believe In You, My Honeydew. Along with the Royal City Band, he tied those threads together in a studio in Cannon Falls, Minnesota, in summer 2024.
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“I’m going through all the things that all of us are in this country right now,” he says. “All these enormous feelings and uncertainties. In inviting the muse in to experience that, I’m inviting it to be witnessed. It helps me to make sense of my own life and make sense of my own feelings.”
If there’s one hang-up to such a philosophy, however, it’s that it doesn’t leave Ritter much room to consider his own place in music, or the force he has become over three decades on the lives of other artists. He’s quick to reminisce about Baez mentoring him on his first European tour and buying him a suit in Rome, but he’s less apt to see his own style — as much poet as musician — as having the same impact on the generations of folk artists who came after him.
“It’s very fascinating to me that we think of the last 120 years of music as being forever,” he says. “But there was a time, a blink of an eye ago, when music wasn’t in this commercialized form. Songs just went out in the world as songs and broadsheets and were sung around fires when no one really knew the words. While I do feel this great amazement and honor to have learned so much from all these people, I also feel like we’re all basically on the same journey together.”
On the opposite side of his dressing room door, a modern-day cavalcade of family, friends, bandmates, and crew members waited to see Ritter. When he opened the door, he greeted them with a smile and a few hugs and headed down the hall. This is what show days are like for him, particularly in New York, and the Brooklyn Steel date illustrated just how much of those influences Ritter blends together. There were times he evoked Dylan or Prine, in his sparkling three-piece suit, and there were other moments — like reading a series of audience messages while the band played behind him — that nobody could imagine coming from anyone but Ritter.
When he hits the road in 2026, he’ll be doing it solo, on an extended tour of theaters and larger listening rooms that starts in January in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and ends in May at the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville. In the same spirit that turned his latest record into a love letter to the muse, Ritter is viewing this solo run as an appreciation of the actual venues he’ll be playing.
“I want the same thing for everybody that I have,” Ritter says. “I feel that I’ve been protected, for some reason, from having to make bad decisions with my music or make sacrifices, and I just feel so grateful. I don’t know that I will need things to be bigger, I just want to keep on doing things that are really fun. I love having fun, and I’ve heard that the best room you can ever play is 800 seats — standing in the front, bar at the back. I think that is probably the case.
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“You can always have too much, but just enough keeps you working hard and doing what you love. Past that, I don’t know if it’s useful.”
Josh Crutchmer is a journalist and author whose book (Almost) Almost Famous will be released April 1 via Back Lounge Publishing.