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NPR Music Presents: Josh Ritter In Concert

By Stephen Thompson
Published March 6, 2013 at 11:00 PM EST

To stand out as an acoustic-guitar-wielding folk-rock singer-songwriter, you'd better have an awful lot of charisma at your disposal — and it helps if, like Josh Ritter, you're able to infuse your songs with a sense that stakes are high and words ring true. A prolific singer-songwriter who's appropriately delved into a side career as a novelist, Ritter crafts his words carefully, but never loses sight of what makes them relate to the experiences of those who hear him. He can write a fantastical 10-minute narrative about war, as he does in his 2006 song "Thin Blue Flame," but his verses lead him through a journey that's wholly universal: fear, doubt, faith, fury, nostalgia, love, beauty.

Ritter's new album, The Beast in Its Tracks, is by any definition a breakup record; he wrote it following his own divorce, and every song finds him picking through a relationship's wreckage in pursuit of root causes and, ultimately, a way forward. For this performance, Ritter and The Royal City Band performed The Beast in Its Tracks in its entirety live at (Le) Poisson Rouge in New York City, originally webcast live on NPR Music on Mar. 4, 2013, with hosts Rita Houston (WFUV) and Bob Boilen (All Songs Considered).

Set List

  • "Evil Eye"

  • "A Certain Light"

  • "Wolves"

  • "New Lover"

  • "The Right Time"

  • "The Temptation Of Adam"

  • "The Appleblossom Rag"

  • "Folk Bloodbath"

  • "Hopeful"

  • "Harrisburg"

  • "Nightmares"

  • "In Your Arms Again"

  • "Joy To You Baby"

  • "To The Dogs Or Whoever"

  • "Lights" (Encore)

    • Credits

    Producers: Saidah Blount, Mito Habe-Evans, Amy Schriefer; Audio Engineer:Kevin Wait; Videographers: Christopher Farber, Gabriella Garcia-Pardo,A.J. Wilhelm; Hosted by: Bob Boilen, Rita Houston; Special Thanks to: LePoisson Rouge; Executive Producers: Anya Grundmann, Keith Jenkins.

    Copyright 2021 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

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    Music News from NPR
    Stephen Thompson
    Stephen Thompson is a writer, editor and reviewer for NPR Music, where he speaks into any microphone that will have him and appears as a frequent panelist on All Songs Considered. Since 2010, Thompson has been a fixture on the NPR roundtable podcast Pop Culture Happy Hour, which he created and developed with NPR correspondent Linda Holmes. In 2008, he and Bob Boilen created the NPR Music video series Tiny Desk Concerts, in which musicians perform at Boilen's desk. (To be more specific, Thompson had the idea, which took seconds, while Boilen created the series, which took years. Thompson will insist upon equal billing until the day he dies.)
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